Schopenhauer on Race Differences in Intelligence and on Judaism | The Occidental Observer

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…

Read more at: Schopenhauer on Race Differences in Intelligence and on Judaism