Talk:Eugen Herrigel

Not sure
Not sure where the dispute section of this article should go - here? or in the article of the book Zen in the Art of Archery. Julia Rossi 02:11, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Eugen Herrigel became a member of the Nazi Party upon his return to Germany from Japan, after he had obtained from Zen all the enlightment he could get from it. This fact has been carefully hidden by his circle of admirers after the second world war and that is why very little people has known the truth about him. Herrigel joined the Nazi Party after the declaration of the war and some of his old friends from Francfort has severed all relationship with him on this point of disaccord and have said that in l946 his career has been one of a convinced nazi. He was known to have persisted in his belief until the final catastrophe. All of that has not been revealed in his biographic notes published by his widow whom left an image of Herrigel of a man only interested by higher spiritual spheres... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.48.96.157 (talk) 03:21, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and thus far you have presented naught in terms of sources.58.169.13.178 (talk) 08:05, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Source: Shots in the Dark, Shoji Yamada, The University of Chicago Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-226-94764-8.  Herrigel joined the Nazi party on May 1, 1937.  His party membership number was 5499332.  After the war he mounted a defense of his party membership, indicating that ‘I was therefore indeed an “activist,” however, not for but against Hitlerism.’  The denazification court concluded that he had not been a committed Nazi, however, he was found to be a Mitläufer whose resistance to the Nazis had been insufficient to clear him of guilt.  Jay Wiser (talk) 02:14, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

The entire dispute section is taken verbatim from Zen and the Art of Divebombing. It isn't even reworded slightly. Helpsome (talk) 22:41, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

The claim that Herrigel was a Nazi came (at least) from Gershom Scholem
I added the quote from Scholem's letter. Scholem was a distinguished historian and philosopher, and perhaps his word can serve as an evidence. At leat it is worth mentioning in wiki.Bbeehvh 18:17, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Verbiage used discussing Arthur Koestler's article
In both this page and the page for Zen In The Art Of Archery, the phrase "Zen can be used to justify the politics of the Nazi party" is used when discussing the conclusion of Koestler's article, but looking at the source of both the article itself and the letter to the magazine that references it by Gershom Scholem, this doesn't seem to hold up. Here's the relevant text of the article:

"At the start of this discussion of Zen, I quoted a few lines attributed to Seng-ts’an, who lived in the 6th century A.D., and was the Third Patriarch--that is, second in succession to the Bodhidharma. They are from his work Hsin-hsin Ming, which is regarded as the oldest Zen poem and one of its basic texts:

'Be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong Is the sickness of the mind.'

Fourteen centuries later, the last Patriarch reaffirms the unbroken continuity of Zen’s ethical relativism: 'Zen is...extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophy and moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with. It may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism ....'

The difference between the two statements is in their historical setting, and in their degrees of concreteness. The first comes from a BuddhistTaoist mystic, who looks with a smiling shrug at the sententious pedantries of Confucian society. The second could come from a philosophically-minded Nazi journalist, or from one of the Zen monks who became suicide pilots."

And the relevant quote from Gershom Scholem's letter

"Kocstler goes in for a lengthy criticism of Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the art of archery and some other texts by Zen adherents. About one he says that what he quoted could 'come from a philosophically-minded Nazi journalist.' It has obviously escaped Koestler’s attention that Eugen Herrigel, who wrote this widely-discussed treatise, had in fact become a member of the Nazi Party..."

The neither of these really indicate that Koestler believed that Zen Buddhism could be used to justify the beliefs of the Nazi Party, just that a person could hold both Zen Buddhist beliefs and the beliefs of the Nazi Party. I'd suggest rewording the text to something better supported by its sources. TheWisestOfFools (talk) 23:11, 7 May 2023 (UTC)