(Continued from Tuesday, Oct. 2)
From today's online New York Times—
"The Schoenberg proved the highlight of the evening,
sandwiched between polished but otherwise routine
performances of Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1
in D minor and Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 ('Linz'),
which ended the evening."
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From a Wikipedia article—
The Jew of Linz is a controversial 1998 book by Australian writer Kimberley Cornish. It alleges that the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound effect on Adolf Hitler when they were both pupils at the Realschule (lower secondary school) in Linz, Austria, in the early 1900s.
One section of the article—
No-ownership theory of mind
Other sections of the book deal with Cornish's theories about what he claims are the common roots of Wittgenstein's and Hitler's philosophies in mysticism, magic, and the "no-ownership" theory of mind. Cornish sees this as Wittgenstein's generalisation of Schopenhauer's account of the Unity of the Will, in which despite appearances, there is only a single Will acting through the bodies of all creatures. This doctrine, generalized to other mental faculties such as thinking, is presented in Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Essays". The doctrine, writes Cornish, was also held by the Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood who was one of Wittgenstein's electors to his Cambridge chair. Cornish tries to tie this to Wittgenstein's arguments against the idea of "mental privacy" and in conclusion says "I have attempted to locate the source of the Holocaust in a perversion of early Aryan religious doctrines about the ultimate nature of man". Cornish also suggests that Hitler's oratorical powers in addressing the group mind of crowds and Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and denial of mental privacy, are the practical and theoretical consequences of this doctrine.
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See also Dreamcatcher in this journal.