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in 1914, the destruction of Leuven library

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German intellectuals took defense of the German cause

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Husserl's support of the world implicated him in the support of German actions during the war including the destruction of the Leuven library

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it is an irony that Husserl's own manuscripts were saved on the eve of the Second World War

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one hundred years after the war to end all wars, we look back with a kind of dumbfounded amazement at how an entire generation of sophisticated intellectuals like Husserl seemingly lost all sense of reason and philosophical orientation in supporting the war

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Gustave Landauer: "Nothing failed so much in the war as the intellectuals"

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this has a bitter truth to it

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but this bitter truth belies a certain complexity

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this complexity is expressed in Husserl's ambiguous attitude toward the war, what one might call the Jekyll and Hyde relationship he has to the war

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on the one hand, Husserl is a university professor, a public intellectual

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on the other hand, Husserl is also a father, whose two sons fought in the war, one who was killed at the Battle of Verdun in 1916

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in 1917, the war had taken its toll on students and academics who had been sent to the front

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1916 failed offensive at Verdun

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increasingly deteriorating home front due to economic sanctions

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Husserl gave three lectures on Fichte's ideal of humanity

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University of Freiburg

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organized at the behest of the Ministry of War

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Kriegsnot seminars

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mostly for soldiers who were wounded or who had seen service who were now returning to the university

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many of these soldiers would be sent back after a brief university experience

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repeated these lectures twice in 1918

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the first a few months before the Ludendorff spring offensive

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the second one week before the end of the war

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functioning as a university professor

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an educator who is delivering not only a philosophical message but a political message

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1918 daughter's letter to a friend

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mentions Husserl's enthusiasm for the war, that it was not lost

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saw a complete victory

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staging of the content of these lectures

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what Husserl understands the significance is of Fichte in the context of the war in 1917-1918

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makes a connection between the First World War and the Befreiungskrieg of 1813

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"the depths of the soul"

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Innerlichkeit

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"the saving power"

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of the war

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the redemptive power

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the spiritual relationship of Germany to itself

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articulates a certain philosophical and political vision of death

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"Need and death are today's teachers. For many years now, death is not an exceptional event which permits itself to hide and to have its majesty debased through splendid congregations under piles of bouquets and wreaths. Death has again won back its wholly primal rite. It is again the great reminder of eternity in time."

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death is an educator

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by implication, the philosopher as educator is the educator of death, who teaches how to know to die

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1. death is tied to a notion of remembrance

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to anamnesis in a Platonic sense

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in that sacrifice that soldiers are called to, eternal values are re-actualized, recalled, made present once again

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2. death is a vision

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for the truth of German Idealism

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the German idealism which had been forged in teh context of the Napoleonic Wars, can be finally realized again

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so what is at stake in the First World War is German idealism

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soldiers/students perception of Husserl's speeches

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the war will be victorious

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the German catastrophe is something which no amount of philosophical speaking can avoid

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Husserl's letters

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a voice not as the public intellectual and professor

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but more intimately, in the private setting of correspondence

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in reaction to the death of his son in 1916

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to his wife:

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after Wolfgang had been wounded in 1915

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on a postcard from Brussels

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"Wolfgang is extraordinarily beautiful and well accommodated here, and has a voracious appetite."

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1916 sent back to front

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to his colleague Hugo Münsterberg at Harvard University

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"The feelings that every death means is that it is a voluntary sacrifice and this gives a lofty dignity and raises the individual suffering into a sphere above all individuality. We hardly live any longer as private persons."

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individual sacrifice raises the individual

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elevating the German nation to a sense of solidarity

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something Husserl felt with regard to his own son

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Wolfgang was killed in the Battle of Verdun in 1916 trying to storm a trench

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a note by Husserl where he tries to imagine and visualize the precise location of his son's death

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talks about who is buried where in relation to him, both German and French

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builds an arc which encompasses not only the passage from the individual to the anonymous, but from German death to French death

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death becomes all-encompassing

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reflects the reality of being killed in the First World War

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the majority of causalities did not leave physical remains

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no identifiable graves

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the word "Opfer" is used frequently, which means both victim and sacrifice

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the ambiguity of sacrifice between the personal and the public, the anonymous and the individual, is something that would forever haunt Husserl's thinking in his own reflections on the nature of patriotism and sacrifice

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letter to Arnold Metzger in September 1919

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a few months of the one year anniversary of the war

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"I am not called to become the leader of a struggling humanity for blessed life. In the passionate drive of the war years, I had to recognize this. My daimonion had warned me."

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the daimonion was the voice that Socrates referred to told him not what he should do but what he should not do