Schopenhauer on Race Differences in Intelligence and on Judaism
Arthur Schopenhauer is renowned as the philosopher of pessimism. White nationalists certainly have much to be pessimistic about these days, and we might be tempted to seek consolation in the wisdom of a man who undoubtedly possessed one of the most powerful minds in history. Schopenhauer, who was an atheist, saw human existence as essentially meaningless and a mistake. The life of sentient beings, of which man is the highest form, is one of constantly jangling appetites that can never be sated, and the result is that pain and suffering are the inevitable accompaniments of any life. He concluded that the only way to get beyond the suffering of this world is to renounce life and thereby quell the appetites that constantly assail us — a conclusion he later discovered had also been arrived at by the Hindus and the Buddhists.
It is a testament to Schopenhauer’s genius that, writing many years prior to the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, and almost a century before geneticists like Fritz Lenz and then evolutionary psychologists like J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn arrived at the same conclusion, he was already citing differential evolution (though he was unsure of the exact mechanism) to account for the higher civilization of the lighter-skinned races, whom, he correctly intuited, had gained sensitivity and intelligence as a result of surviving in a rigorous Northern climate. Schopenhauer observes that:
The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste, or race, is fairer than the rest, and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Inca, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it came their high civilization.[i]
Before the rise of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, virtually all Western anthropologists and intellectuals posited a direct correlation between external racial traits and internal psychological traits. Skin color was regarded as not just a physical attribute, but an external racial marker tied to a correlated set of intellectual, political, and cultural capabilities. Schopenhauer was, of course, writing in an age when the reality of racial differences was taken for granted, and this is reflected at various points in his work. For instance, in positing that higher intellectual powers are often accompanied by a relatively lesser tendency toward sociability, he asserts that “the most sociable of all human beings are said to be the Negroes who intellectually are decidedly inferior.”[ii]
This approach was largely abandoned after World War II with the rise of Boasian anthropology which was instrumental in totally suppressing evolutionary theory in the social sciences. The Jewish historian Norman Cantor noted that “since 1945 and more intensively since the 1960s all forms of racialist thinking are excluded from rational and enlightened discourse, especially in the United States, where the liberal civil libertarians have made racial doctrine intrinsically wrong, evil, and undiscussable.” The reason for this exclusion is that “modern anthropology, as defined the German-Jewish expatriate Franz Boas, for three decades head of the anthropology department at Columbia University, declared nineteenth-century race theory without foundation.” Cantor admitted that “this behavioral egalitarianism and universality was itself an ideology,” and that the Boasians never actually disproved social-Darwinian race theory, but rather insisted that it be “excluded from civil discourse as a result of what the Nazis and other such hate-mongering groups did with it.”[iii] . . .
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