ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with two examples of the war writings of philosophers during the First World War. The first is Max Scheler's Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg, written at the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, first published early the following year and again, unchanged, in 1916. The second is a series of lectures given by Edmund Husserl under the title 'Fichtes Menschheitsideal' on two occasions in 1917 and 1918. The Great War, for both Scheler and Husserl, and despite sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary, entailed a liberation, the projection beyond what one is, the release of potential, the freeing of bonds, the call towards something higher, the very pull of transcendence taking hold of what is deepest in peoples. Both thinkers thus push blindly towards the affirmation of an inextricable relation between violence and freedom.
