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Recovering Stefan George’s Poetry of the Spirit from the Reductio ad Hitler R William Petropulos While literature and philosophy have sometimes been used for propaganda purposes and authors in many countries have come under pressure to write propaganda under the guise of “literature,” especially during a war,1 it is also true that occasionally the entire course of a nation’s literature has been made responsible for its belligerency. In the twentieth century this fate befell German literature.2 During the First World War, German poets and philosophers were held responsible for the Kaiser’s politics.3 During the Second World War, many of the same individuals were said to be precursors of Nazism. Some notion of the scale of this onslaught and the blurred focus that goes with it can be imagined by considering the title of one such work published in 1942, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy.4 Although the wars are long over, the onslaught remains an obstacle to understanding German literature. Robert Norton’s recent prizewinning biography of Stefan George illustrates the problem: “I am convinced that George and his circle significantly contributed to the creation of a psychological , cultural, and even political climate that made the events in Germany leading up to and following 1933 not just imaginable, but also feasible.”5 I will return to Mr. Norton’s book to examine the “method” of the reductio ad Hitler, that is, the taking of terms and symbols out of their literary context and promiscuously associating them with slogans drawn from the rhetoric of political struggle: homonyms are said to be synonyms. However my main interest is not Robert Norton. 94 95 Spirit from the Reductio ad Hitler My goal, instead, is to demonstrate that at the heart of George’s work we find the Platonic periagoge. The locus classicus for this spiritual experience is found in Plato’s parable of the cave in the Republic, told as part of the discussion concerning the right order of society. Plato argues that this is dependent on the individuals who make up a society having the right order in their souls. When the rulers of a society have fixed their sight on the good itself, they shall use it as a paradigm to bring order into their own lives, and therewith, into the polis. The Idea of the Good itself has no world-immanent content: “The vision of the Agathon does not render a material rule of conduct, but forms the soul through an experience of transcendence.”6 The ascent to the Idea of the Good that transcends being is expressed in terms of passing from the realm of darkness and illusion to that of light and truth. In this Plato draws upon a mystical symbolism present in Greek myth and poetry.7 The parable describes prisoners chained in a cave with their faces to the cave’s back wall. The opening of the cave is behind them, and there is a fire in the distance. The figures that pass between the fire and the cave entrance appear on the cave’s back wall as shadows. To the prisoners however , who cannot turn around, these shadows seem to depict reality. When one of the prisoners is unchained, forced to stand, and turns around, he lifts his eyes to the light. He advances toward the mouth of the cave and his eyes slowly get used to the glare. When he leaves the cave, he recognizes the sun as the source of light and life and is naturally reluctant to return to the cave with its shadows. But he is returned and experiences the greatest difficulty readjusting. He now knows the shadows for the illusions that they are; on the other hand, his fellow prisoners now find his new notion of reality ridiculous. Among other things the parable expresses the connection between education (paideia) and the turn away from the realm of becoming and illusion to the realm of being and truth (periagoge), and the connection of both of these to the vision of the transcendent good (Agathon)—the experience that orders the soul. It is the spiritual experience of the periagoge—the turn of the soul away from the world—that distinguishes Stefan George’s ethos from any materialistic view of man, that is, any view, not just National Socialism, that interprets the human being as a world-immanent creature, a being embedded in a race, a nation, or any other vital...

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