Abstract
In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was ever the same in philosophy (as elsewhere). On the latter view, the creation of the so-called analytic-continental ‘divide’ is but one notable philosophical consequence of the Great War. I want here to steer a middle-way between these positions, both having a grain of truth but over-playing their respective hands.
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Notes
- 1.
See Arendt (1971). Heidegger’s historicism is arguably mitigated, but Sartre is more convincing on this point, doing detailed analyses of the life of Gustave Flaubert and Jean Genet, amongst others, but remaining insistent, for example, that “Valery is a petit-bourgeois intellectual … But not every petit-bourgeois intellectual is Paul Valery” (Sartre 1960: 56).
- 2.
This sign has often wrongly been attributed to Quine and Harvard. As Andreas Vrahimis pointed out to me, the Princeton website describes it as follows: http://philosophy.princeton.edu/about/eighties-snapshot
- 3.
Thomas Akehurst (2008) argues that Russell did not make these charges in WW1, along with many other philosophers, and he comes to the critique of continental philosophy and German Idealism for political reasons late in the day.
- 4.
A brief glance at the titles of the Presidential Addresses of the American Philosophical Association suffices to show that naturalism, and associated themes, have dominated the agenda throughout much of the twentieth century: http://www.apaonline.org/?page=presidents
- 5.
Arguably the turn to ethics in this work does not jeopardise my overall argument. While Wittgenstein famously claims in a letter that it is the unsaid in the Tractatus that is the most important, ethics still cannot be directly done on his account.
- 6.
Baldwin says: “the second division of Being and Time includes an attempt at a philosophical response to the experience of the war, and that the military associations of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ are not far below the surface of Heidegger’s conception of authenticity as ‘freedom towards death’” (Baldwin 2008: 371). William H. F. Altman develops related ideas in Martin Heidegger and the First World War (Altman 2012).
- 7.
Recognising that this claim to political neutrality is always susceptible to political and historical analysis too.
- 8.
It seems clear, historically, that Frege was retrospectively co-opted into the analytic tradition rather than being a knowing, founding father in the early twentieth century. “Sense and Reference”, for example, was only translated in English for the first time in 1948. While other parts of Frege’s work influenced Russell and Wittgenstein, the retrospective co-option of Frege is further detailed in Chase and Reynolds (2011).
- 9.
Husserl says: “the human being is called animal rationale not merely because he has the capacity of reason and then only occasionally regulates and justifies his life according to the insights of reason, but because the human being proceeds always and everywhere in his entire active life in this way” (Husserl, as cited in Moran 2005: 36). This remark is difficult to countenance given the destruction of the Great War.
- 10.
Sebastian Luft gives a detailed account of Paul Natorp and Max Scheler’s very different war writings in Luft (2007).
- 11.
It is interesting to note that Britain was one of the only countries not to engage in such a post-mortem after WW1 looking at intellectuals and their roles. At the invitation of George Dawes Hicks, however, Husserl did give four lectures at University College, London, in June 1922, without finding much favour from the audience there, perhaps primarily due to having delivered the lectures in German. Spiegelberg describes the lectures as a “mitigated failure” (Spiegelberg 1981: 157).
- 12.
Merleau-Ponty, the unnamed editor of Les Temps Modernes, seems to concur with this account, even retrospectively criticizing himself and his generation: “one thing that is certain at the outset is that there has been a political mania amongst philosophers which has not produced good politics or good philosophy” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 6).
- 13.
While this book was written in 1951, it synthesized many of the ideas he had been working on in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, in close interaction with the Vienna Circle.
- 14.
At Göttingen Husserl worked with many renowned mathematicians including Felix Klein and David Hilbert, as well as the physicist Max Born.
- 15.
Nb. in “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger argues that science knows nothing of the nothing.
- 16.
Friedman seems right to note of Carnap that “Philosophy had now become a genuinely ‘objective’ discipline capable (like the exact sciences) of cooperative progress… and Carnap had thereby arrived at a conception of philosophy which, in his eyes, best served the socialist, internationalist and anti-individualist aims of that cultural and political movement with which he most closely identified”. Friedman adds that Carnap’s conception “stands in the most extreme contrast with the particularist, existential-historical conception of philosophy we have seen Heidegger develop… and it is clear that the latter conception, in Heidegger’s eyes, best-served the neo-conservative and avowedly German-nationalist cultural and political stance he himself favoured” (Friedman 2000, 158). See Heidegger’s comment on Carnap: “it is also no accident that this kind of philosophy stands in internal and external connection with Russian communism. And it is no accident, moreover, that this kind of think celebrates its triumph in America” (Heidegger, cited in Friedman 2000: 22).
- 17.
As James Chase has pointed out to me, Lewis has a volume of articles in a book entitled Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy, alongside some earlier papers in those fields. Nonetheless, much of this material is focused upon meta-ethics, and the more applied material is not at all what one might call a critical engagement with current issues.
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Reynolds, J. (2017). Philosophy and/or Politics? Two Trajectories of Philosophy After the Great War and Their Contamination. In: Sharpe, M., Jeffs, R., Reynolds, J. (eds) 100 years of European Philosophy Since the Great War. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50361-5_12
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