Knowledge, Faith, Desire

Source: Basic Ideas of National-Socialist Cultural Policy – by prof. Wolfgang Schulz

Knowledge

One can differentiate: the knowledge about race and folk, and the knowledge that the race, the folk, has acquired over the course of its existence. The first group of knowledge encompasses race science, genetics, folk science in the broadest sense of the word; the second group of an in itself very independent section of it, in which the structure of all available sciences is contained.

This knowledge provides certainty within the boundaries drawn for it. It provides confidence, it obligates. It also solidifies the faith in the German future and in the desire aimed at it. It alone secures for this desire the action promising its success. One often hears said: knowledge divides, faith unites. But that is a false conception and comparison, which aims at a deficient, splintering knowledge alienated from its foundation, while we mean the total, right one. All genuine knowledge has its foundation in faith and a unifying force, which no other one will achieve so soon.

Good will and a heart in the right place must be present, but they alone do not suffice. Even a strong hand can only take a good hold, where clear gaze has first seen what is necessary. Knowledge is the eye, the will, as it were, the hand.

Without insight, even the best will is blind, without will, even the most correct knowledge paralyzed. Just that if the blind man carries the paralyzed man, the paralyzed man shows the blind man the way, both reach the goal.

But like every comparison, this one as well is imperfect; for the will acquires eyes for itself and knowledge gives it legs.

It is correct that the race makes it, that the blood does it; but it does not do it through an imagined, effortless legacy memory, rather through its moral and spiritual force. Even all inspiration rests on it and on the sense for reality and the supra-reality [das Uberwirkliche] that governs in it and within us, and only becomes due, if much serious inner work has prepared it.

It is also correct that knowledge gives power. All technology proves it. But it is just as correct that our knowledge and are power are very limited. There is no cause for arrogance.

We agree with Newton, who recognized that he had merely found a few shells and mussels on the edge of the ocean of the unfathomable, and with Kant, who stated that the observations and calculations of the astronomers, aside from many admirable things that they taught us, have nonetheless shown us as the most important thing that the abyss of our ignorance is so great that human reason cannot imagine it at all without this realization.

Even the laws of genetics, even race science, even the world- historical experiences with the previous cultures, even the whole structure of the sciences overall means very little, if one considers how incomparably more we do not know.

Nonetheless, this our knowledge exists, and much heart’s blood sticks on it. This knowledge is too little, but, by human measure, it suffices for the purposes that now matter. What may still be lacking, must be added by our faith purified by it. We can bum neither this knowledge nor this faith out of our minds and hearts. We can never let ourselves be talked out of the duty to act according to both and our best conscience.

Science

The might of the racial and folkish idea is so great that even science cannot escape it. The more clearly we see that science itself is best race result, the more determined we are to drive science farther in the direction of the previous race thinking and to employ it in a time of the folk’s greatest distress for the securing of its existence and of its future.

Science and research have their “biological function” in the life of the folk. With their knowledge, they broaden its perceived world, arrange it, clarify it and make it possible to take it in at a glance; with the technological practical applications of this knowledge, they enlarge its world of effect, permeate it and make it governable. In order to remember how science broadens the perceived world, one should think about the world of the large, which the telescope, and the world of the small, which the microscope, opened up; and in order to understand how science broadened the world of effect, one should think about mining, ship travel, the airplane and how depths, expanses and heights previously inconceivable to us thereby become accessible and useful in their results. Science, the pure and the applied, as well as history, as well as population policy, thereby performs a service to the folk. In order to perform this, it must be free. That means, it must attentively and conscientiously follow its most own law: truth.

Science that one commands what it must prove, or which one forbids what it has recognized, or one prescribes where it has no business and where it must search, so that it does not become uncomfortable, is not science. For its fundamental service lies precisely where, through thrust into new territory and through new insights, it corrects outdated views and champions them against the prosecution by those who care more for their dogmas than for the truth. The opposition hence exists not between science and faith, rather between science and fossilized piety, such as the bitter struggle of the churches against science, and over it with the goal of bringing it into dependency, has proven again and again.

As important as it is that science preserves its freedom, nonetheless, only a quite general rule lies therein. To fill the framework that is proved by it, that is the actual task.

The value of the objects of research and the knowledge it can yield, however, is not to be determined by materialistically according to use. The leading researcher is not guided by the use, neither his own nor any other, which could perhaps result from the desired scientific knowledge, rather solely the passionate will to find out how “it” is. The selection of this “it”, his object, given pronounced talent, is as little voluntary for him as for the artist. Even the researcher is closely bound to his object, and the significant one to the significant object.

Whether the research leads farther, whether it promises new insights and prospects, or at least completions and clarifications of already existing results, that is what matters. There are countless areas in which one also researches, countless truths which one can also ascertain, and which nonetheless in no way are worthwhile and are neither suited to really enrich our knowledge nor increase our productivity. One just must not judge such questions by appearance, rather with consideration and prudence. Often, an important basic insight has arisen from the examination of apparently secondary things. Often, very theoretical observation has yielded fateful practical applications. Nonetheless, there is much petty, visually deviant, fruitless activity. It is to be turned off.

Even individual questions are to be taken up from the whole of science and solved in the direction of this whole. If the energy of research is not dissipated on the secondary and if it is employed for important objects which promise the fruits of new knowledge, then the practical applications cannot remain lacking; but to base upon them in advance would be the death of any genuine research and also silly. For if the gaze is directed at the use, it does not cling firmly enough to the object which initially matters solely. Also, before one has the knowledge, one can hardly correctly estimate the value that it may bring, and this is the most difficult with knowledge owed to fundamentally new, creative inspiration.

All truth is bound to object, the finding of truth is race-bound, science has been created almost exclusively by the Nordic race.

The Jewish non-spirit [Ungeist], the object-bound, which has diverted from reality-near research into the formal and merely conceptual-constructive, is to be purged.

A new spirit must grip the scholars and researchers from the new thinking and the new orientation of will.

Important research tasks were neglected, because the folk alien cur-rent of the time, hostile to the German nationality, opposed them. In the social sciences, German prehistory is an example, which brings us knowledge about our ancestors and the oldest relationships of the Nordic race, another is the study of Iran, which opens new looks at Jewry, Christianity and knighthood from the side of Aryan essence and must thereby clarify our folkish idea.

The action of science in the service of the folk can take another step in technology. It lies in the nature of technology that either it must set itself tasks or that they are set for it.

The distress of the folk sets such tasks. That means at the same time that one must aim at the important and reject the superficial. An ongoing effect even on research will emanate from that.

Finally, science must more than previously find the path to the folk. If it manages to present its knowledge in understandable language free of foreign words, that will already be a big help. But it must create it, already for itself as well, from inner tie to folkish thought as simple as possible.

It must not please itself with a handed down reputation, rather it must always achieve its reputation anew through the inner value of what it has to offer.

Faith

The National Socialist worldview rests with its basic idea of folk and race not merely on knowledge, rather a strong faith also dwells within it. Both and the newness of this closed spiritual and moral action have as a result that many raise objection after objection precisely out of considerations of their faith, which draws from other preconditions not yet balanced against our own.

One accuses race science of being a crude materialism, drawing only from the appearance of the body and not respecting the energies of the spirit and of the soul.

No misunderstanding can be greater. For body and soul are a union for race science, behind which stands a nature that sets the basis for both. The psychological and mental characteristics are part of race just like the bodily one.

Materialism teaches that the soul, as it were, is a perspiration of the body, spiritualism that the body, as it were, an incrustation of the soul; the doctrine of the body-soul [Leibseele], toward which race science leans, is visibly equally distant from both doctrines.

One further accuses race science of breeding racial arrogance and judging folk comrades according to their racial traits and not according to their moral personality.

That, too, is a misunderstanding. Not the racial traits, rather the performance decides. The racial traits enter into the overall assessment of the folk comrade only as a partial consideration, and only with the weight due them in view of the folk whole.

If we posit a new ideal of beauty and value according to inner bearing, then this, for example, in mate selection, but also in all other selection, without which it never has been and never will be possible, has fundamentally no other result than any other ideal as well: namely that those who correspond less to the ideal must be pushed into the background. Only it is without a doubt more moral and more just, if in mate selection the genes are more important than the moneybag; and it has completely different consequences for the folk whole, if the beauty of the leading race is important instead of that of another one. Seen from the folk whole, the new ideal lies in the direction of its preservation and increase.

Furthermore, one accuses racial hygiene of infringing on a person’s right to one’s own body through limiting deformed offspring.

It is strange that this sanctity of the body is championed precisely by people who occasionally value the body very little.

Up until a few decades ago, one had no reservations against castrating the genetically healthy choirboys of the choir in the Sistine Chapel in order to let their voices, artificially kept high, proclaim God’s honor; but now it is supposed to be despicable, if folks threatened by the generic feeblemindedness, criminality and mental diseases, exclude from procreation such misshapen people, insofar as their reason still suffices, for their own comfort and, besides that, for the blessing of the coming generations.

Finally, one says the idea of taking care of the whole folk according to new knowledge would mean that we presume to intervene into creation, to play creator ourselves - a titanic endeavor, which must be followed by divine punishment.

Yes, many already begin to evoke our punishment.

Again, nothing but misunderstanding! If it is rightly a service, if the individual disciplines himself, rations his hereditary factors and balances them against each other as well as possible, and where they are weak, improves them through exercise and schooling, and if it is rightly a reproach, if he neglects that, although he could, then the same must be true for a folk as a whole.

Nobody may oppose the folk and deny it what one demands from the individual human being; nobody may decry the folk as godless, if it does what one decries as godless with the individual human being, if he neglects it.

The knowledge that we apply stems from the blood of our race and the legacy of our folk, and if the term “God given” is supposed to have a meaning at all, then it certainly has it here. It would be sinful, if we were to please ourselves bragging in this gift or to disrespect it as worthless and wanted to refrain from using it over the one or the other. It is a pledge of higher mercy bestowed upon us, and our duty follows from this.

Whoever closes himself to it, or even resists it being fulfilled, has either not yet understood what is at stake and not yet grasped that it is now about thinking, as one previously thought in individual fates, beyond these individual fates, to think in fates of folks and act accordingly - or in his blindness he does not want at all that our fate, upon which his own also depends, after all, turns.

Desire

So the final decision lies in the desire.

Opposing will must be won. We bring so much that admonishes to reflection that we trust the winning force of this property. But we cannot wait all too long for it to succeed against unreasonable obstacles. For the commandment of the hour, which must not pass unused, is at our heels, and decisive, life-essential things tolerate no postponement.

Nonetheless, what we bring is not compulsion, rather freedom.

The question how moral actions are possible occupies us much less than the task to create space for them on the basis of measures that a new morality puts into our hands, in which the old one fulfills itself on a higher plain.

The question as well whether human will is free moves us much less than the task of presenting to German man his inner law and his world historical responsibility as guideline for his will.

The sign under which we fight symbolizes a controlled force that nonetheless expands ever farther from the inside. It is an ancient sacred sign of salvation that has accompanied the fateful path of the folks of the Nordic race. 

Salvation means “whole”, heal means “make whole”. But more is meant by it that the repair of the broken, of the damaged, and also more than the healing of a wound by the mysterious, whole energy of the living. For this force can do much more. It can produce from the seed a very fresh, rejuvenated and, if we start correctly, ennobled life, for which new energies and possibilities grow. This ever-expanding force within us and its controlled employment, that is our path, the path of our blood, of our spirit and of our confirmation [Bewährung] through the healing deed.