Arts: Genius: New theory of Adolf Hitler's personality and self-image as genius

Spiegel Online International, carries an interview with art historian Birgit Schwarz regarding her research on "why Adolf Hitler saw himself as a genius and how his obsession with art affected his political views."

Arts
& Romantic Theories of Genius,
by Artichokes

The renown Protestant philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, also followed the 'genius' notion of European philosophy and letters that rose to become a cultural force thru-out the Romantic Era (cf. Vollenhoven on the concept of "zeitgeist" in the historiography of philosophy). Dooyeweerd's concept however is explicitly rooted in the idea of God's direct activity in giving the gift of creative genius to a mortal, whether he or she be Christian, Atheist, or adherent of another religion.

It seems that with D both a good genius and an evil genius, and much in between, are possible. Genius entails responsiblity. See: Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, II, last 10 pages.

Of course, Dooyeweerd opposed the National Socialist system of ideas (I believe D covers this zone also in volume II, NCTT, 1953-1957. When his job became officially defunct, the Free University (VU Amsterdam) where he was professor of law, being eventually closed down by the Nazi Occupation forces. Dooyeweerd lay low until the war was over, teaching secretly during the remaining war years a few graduate students weekly in his home.

Vollenhoven's zeitgeist parameter attempts to account for the macro-shifts in a culture whereby one "spirit of the age" gives way to the ascendancy and supersession of the oncoming spirit of the new age, however sour and dour, however exuberant and cheery. That so disparate a set of opposing views of life coud share a problem, its problematics, and come to vastly different trends of distinctive formulations, is structural but remaining distinctive in the process of Western philosophy. It's important to detail the pinpoint of similarity (in this case of comparison, the same zeitgeist carries along and renews/degenerates "creative genius" notions inherited from the Romantics) and the vast range of differences that pit the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea vs Hitler's National Socialism.