Rudolf Eucken: Philosophicus Teutonicus (1913 – 1914)

Nicolas de Warren(Husserl Archives – KU Leuven)

“We can thus face the future with courage and confidence.”- Rudolf Eucken (1913)

1913

On the eve of the First World War, German philosophy and German philosophers enjoyed an unprecedented international prestige, the likes of which has never since been regained. In 1908, Rudolf Eucken, professor of philosophy in Jena, was awarded the Nobel Prize—the first philosopher to be awarded such an honor (and the only German philosopher ever thus distinguished). Eucken’s fame, already well established within Germany, immediately acquired an international dimension; his cultural engagement for his Neo-Idealistic thinking received a renewed impetus that rapidly became consolidated through numerous publications, translations, and a popular appeal extending to China.1 Eucken’s intellectual profile was inseparable from his public confrontation with Ernst Haeckel, his zoologist colleague at Jena, and proponent of Darwinism, self-proclaimed atheist, and advocate of a scientific ideal of understanding. The rivalry between these two Jena professors captured the attention of pre-war Germany (Haeckel’s Die Welträtsel sold over 400,000 copies) and mirrored a pervasive cultural unease provoked by rapid urbanization, industrialization and other accelerating forces of modernity.2 Against the steady march of naturalism and materialism, Eucken advocated the “deepening of life”

1 Barbara Besslich speaks of “eines neuen offensiven Gestus” in Eucken’s writings in light of his Nobel award. Wege in den ‘Kulturkrieg. Zivilisationskritik in Deutschland 1890-1914 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), p. 103. As Eucken himself recognized: “Dass ich im Auslande verhältnismässig mehr Anerkennung fand als in Deutschland, das hatte einen guten Grund,” Lebens-Erinnerungen. Ein Stuck Deutschen Lebens (Leipzig: F. K. Koehler, 1922), p. 82.

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(Lebensvertiefung) and the cultivation of “interiority” (Innerlichkeit). In Eucken’s understanding, his Neo-Idealism represented a diagnostic and urgent response to “the confusion and crisis of the present times”—in the concluding words of his 1890 work Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker. At the dawn of the 20th-century, Eucken’s Nobel Prize was taken as an augur for an age to come, at the vanguard of which stood German philosophy and its defining, nearly magical word: Geist.3 In the words of the Nobel Prize Committee, Eucken was honored “in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life.”4 As Eucken himself noted to a friend in a letter with regard to his award: “a major newspaper in Brussels has published a large article of many columns with the heading ‘A major defeat for materialism’.”5

In France, Henri Bergson and Émile Boutroux drew favorable attention to Eucken’s philosophical writings and promoted their French translation. As Boutroux proclaimed in a study of Eucken’s thinking translated into German in 1911: “Euckens Verdienst besteht darin, dass er, wie es scheint, in der Tat den Weg gezeigt hat, der dem Geist gestattet, eine Ursprünglichkeit zu entfalten.”6 The apparent affinities between Bergson and Eucken were noticed by numerous commentators on both sides of the Atlantic; each was seen as advocating a philosophy of life based on a recuperation of the creative spontaneity of spirit (Geistesleben, for Eucken; élan vital, for Bergson).7 Eucken for his part had introduced Bergson’s philosophy to Germany with his positive appreciation of L’évolution créatrice in his Geistige Strömmungen der Gegenwart.8 Isaac Benrubi, Eucken’s student, further underlined their shared commitment to a rejection of materialism and positivism—a fraternity in philosophical spirit that Bergson himself acknowledged directly to Benrubi.9 In Eucken and Bergson. Their Significance for Christian Thought, Emily Hermann portrayed Eucken and

2 Ulrich Sieg, Geist und Gewalt. Deutsche Philosophen zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2013), pp. 68 ff. See also Hermann Lübbe, Politische Philosophie in Deutschland (Munich: DTV, 1974), pp. 177 ff. 3 For Eucken’s vision for the 20th-century, see Uwe Dathe, “Jena, 12 Januar 1900. Rudolf Euckens Festrede zur Jahrhundertfeier,” in: Angst vor der Moderne. Philosophische Antworten auf Krisenerfahrungen, eds. Kodalle, Kritisches Jahrbuch der Philosophie, 5 (2000): 45-61. 4 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates5 Sieg, op. cit., p. 89.6 Émile Boutroux, Rudolf Euckens Kampf um einen neuen Idealismus, trans. Benrubi (Leipzig, Veit & Co: 1911), p. 9. [“La philosophie de M. Rudolph Eucken,” in: Academie des sciences morales et politiques (1910)].7 Edwin Emery Slosson, Six Major Prophets (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1917).8 Originally published in 1904, Eucken discusses Bergson in the fourth edition of 1909. Creative Evolution was published in 1907.9 Isaac Benrubi, “La philosophie de Rudolf Eucken,” in: Revue Philosophie (1908). For Bergson’s acknowledgment to Benrubi, Isaak Benrubi, Souvenirs sur Henri Bergson (Neuchatel: Delachaux & Niestle, 1942) (8 February 1909). For a discussion of Bergson’s reception among Eucken and his students, see Caterina Zanfi, Bergson et la philosophie allemande. 1907-1932 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), chapter 1.

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Bergson as challenging “a materialistic culture in the name of the spiritual life” by means of a world-view based on intuition as the “pathway to reality.” As Hermann argued, “Eucken’s spiritual life could never have been conceived apart from the Christian doctrine of Redemption, which underlines it most surely, even where it is construed in the least Christian sense.”10 This primarily religious significance of Eucken’s thinking, albeit divested of any overt Christian content, was equally reflected in Benrubi’s judgment: “La philosophie de M. Eucken conduit donc directement à la religion.”11

In 1911, Eucken was invited to lecture in London and Oxford (many of his works had been translated into English; Boyce-Gibson, who would translate Husserl’s Ideen I, had written a study of Eucken’s philosophy); in the United States, the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, wrote in congratulation of Eucken’s Nobel Prize: “This splendid and distinguished recognition of your scholarship and your contributions to the literature of philosophy rejoices everyone who has had the pleasure and satisfaction of reading your writings. Be assured that we Americans who value your teaching and your guidance rejoice with you and your friends in Germany at the honor that has fallen to you.”12 Eucken spent the academic year 1912-1913 at Harvard University (and crossed paths with Bergson at Columbia) as a visiting professor through a newly established exchange program between the United States and Germany.13 During his American stay, Eucken received honorary degrees and traveled extensively across the Eastern states: in New York City, an “Eucken Association” was founded; in Gettysburg, an “Eucken Club” was formed.14

In Eucken’s synthesis of academic thinker and public intellectual, philosophy became in his deft hands prophetic as well as practical. Indeed, no other philosophical figure at the turn of the 20th-century understood his philosophical calling as equally prophetic in vision and conscience as it was practical in mission and intent. In the words of Alban Widgery, who provided a laudatory preface to the English translation of Eucken’s Nobel Prize speech: “Eucken treats the great central problems of knowing and being with a vivid sense of their immeasurable importance and urgency, and with an evident conviction of the vital significance of what he has to say regarding them. In other words, he speaks with the temper and tone of a prophet burdened with a divine message of arousal and inspiration and help for the present perplexity. Even in his most soaring speculations Eucken has

10 Emily Hermann, Eucken and Bergson. Their Significance for Christian Thought (London: James Clarke & Co., 1912), p. 128; p. 214.11 Isaac Benrubi, “Le mouvement philosophique contemporain en Allemagne,” in: Revue de métaphysique et morale, XVI, 5 (1908): 547-582; p. 580.12 Quoted in Sieg, op. cit., p. 97.13 Eucken and Bergson met at a dinner hosted by Nicholas Murray Butler in 1912. 14 An Eucken Bund was also established in Germany. As Eucken reflects in his memoirs: “Das Bedürfnis nach mehr geistiger Einheit des menschlichen Lebens und die Bestrebungen nach mehr moralischer Stärkung des deutschen Lebens haben zur Begründung eines Eucken-Bundes geführt.” Lebenserinnerungen. Ein Stück deutschen Lebens (Leipzig: F. K. Koehler, 1921). In Lübbe’s judgment: “Es war nicht Schule—eher Sekte,” op. cit., p. 177.

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an eye to the problems of the man on the street.”15 This combination of the prophetic and the practical was reflected in Eucken’s popular writings and lectures as well as with his advocacy of educational reform in Germany; not only through his support of philosophy within the curricula of German universities and technical schools, but equally through his defense of a humanistic education in the Gymnasium-system and establishment of various intellectual societies. This form of activism advanced his brand of Neo-Idealism and self-promoted role as the spiritual educator of Germany and, indeed, of humanity.16

The prophetic style of Eucken’s thought is exemplified in his 1913 Deem Lectures at New York University. As with other publications and lectures, Eucken’s thinking here addresses “the present time” in view of its transformation amidst the disintegration of spirit in modern life. As he argues, morality no longer retains any genuine significance for human existence; life no longer retains any assuredness in a higher sense of meaning and purpose. As Eucken observes: “It [morality] used to be invested with supreme significance, and placed high above other manifestations of the inner life.” The effacement of “inner life” characterizes the tragedy of modern culture: advances in technology, dominance of material values, and increased social fragmentation are argued to be “outward” movements that have extinguished the “inner” movement of creative spiritual life. Modern culture represents in Eucken’s thinking an amplification and acceleration of time in its natural power of dispersal (Zerstreuung) against which individual existence energetically struggles for a substantial humanity. This struggle for Innerlichkeit is identified with a struggle for eternity, for an elevation above time, understood, however, not as a movement beyond time, but as the achievement of “trust” or “assuredness” in eternal truth (Vertrauen auf ewige Wahrheit) in terms of which temporal existence can be spiritually anchored. The veritable struggle of life is not merely to survive, but to struggle for an eternity here on earth. As Eucken writes in an earlier (1901) work: “dieser Kampf bildet nicht eine blosse Episode des Lebens, sondern er durchdringt alle Kultur und Geistesarbeit.”17

In his 1913 Deem Lectures, Eucken suggests that the supreme importance of moral life finds “its strongest expression at times of great historical import.” By implication, the “present time” is bereft of such historical import due its loss of spiritual life and moral orientation; the import of present is on the contrary marked by the absence of genuine morality. As an example of a time of great historical import and spiritual life, Eucken evokes the origins of Christianity and, more pointedly, Jesus’ 15 Rudolf Eucken, Naturalism or Idealism? The Nobel Lecture delivered at Stockholm on March 27th, 1909, trans. A. Widgery (Cambridge: W. Heffer, 1912). His lecture can be read at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laurates/1908/eucken_lecture.html. 16 For Eucken’s educational reforms and cultural engagement, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Die Positivität des Geistigen. Rudolf Euckens Programm neoidealistischer Universalintegration,” in: Idealismus und Postivismus, eds. Hübinger, Bruch, and Graf (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997): 53-85.17 Rudolf Eucken, Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion (Leipzig: Von Veit & Comp., 1905), p. 195.

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challenge: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” In Eucken’s ears, Jesus’s admonishment rings as an unambiguous indictment of the present: in 1913, the world has been conquered, yet at the expense of Innerlichkeit. As Eucken concludes his lectures, the “most effective morality” is a “religious morality” that promises earthly redemption through trust in eternal truth to which life becomes “absorbed.” Essential to Eucken’s conception of truth is the rejection of any attainment of “completed truth.” Rather, truth is not a “representation of absolute being,” but an “elevation to absolute life.”18 The path towards what Eucken calls “characteristic religion” and “absolute life” demands a spiritual conquest of the world through the courageous reinvigoration of Innerlichkeit.19 Whether it is possible “to gain the whole world” while “not losing one’s soul” forms the driving question of Eucken’s thinking in its effort to reconcile the modernism of naturalism and materialism with a genuine morality of “spiritual life” (Geistesleben). It is a challenge that puts into play the possibility that one can only “gain the world” in a genuine sense by first gaining the heart of the world, yet this possibility has the recognizable form of a longing for a possibility to come. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Eucken ends his acceptance speech with a quotation from Schiller’s poem Sehnsucht as a literary expression and validation for his aspirational reconciliation of modern naturalism and spiritual-life:

Du musst glauben, du musst wagen,Denn die Götter leihn kein Pfand,Nur ein Wunder kann dich tragen,In das Schönewunderland.

Revealingly, much as with Eucken’s own thinking, the final stanza of Schiller’s poem evokes the imperative of a miracle (ein Wunder) that would “carry” (tragen) the soul into a “beautiful world of wonder” while leaving unspecified and unstated this possibility for such a redemptive accomplishment.20

Eucken’s American lecture tour in 1913 marks the height of the long 19th-century’s cultural uptake of German philosophy. Especially within Germany, philosophy and academic philosophers benefitted from an unprecedented cultural prestige that was inseparable from the appeal of nationalism.21 The spectacular transformation of German universities during the 19th-century into model institutions of scientific learning placed philosophy at the center of the consolidation of German national identity,

18 Eucken, op. cit., p. 345 ff.19 Rudolf Eucken, Ethics and Modern Thought. A Theory of their Relations. The Deem Lectures, delivered in 1913 at New York University (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), p. 8.20 As perceptively remarked by Thomas Oliver Beebee, “From Nobel to Nothingness: The Negative Monumentality of Rudolf C. Eucken and Paul Heyse,” in: German Literature as World Literature, ed. T. Beebee (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 137 – 156; p. 146. 21 As Hermann Lübbe observes, “the educated chauvinism” (gelehrte Chauvinismus) of philosophical discourse was prevalent at the turn of the 20th-century in France, Germany, and England, op. cit., p. 171.

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and from this philosophical center, the spiritual presence of Germany emanated outwards internationally. Yet, even as Bergson could express to Jacques Chevalier, “j’ai connu Eucken en Amerique, et nous avions beaucoup sympathise,” a precarious tension between the Germanness of his philosophy and the philosophy of this German pervaded Eucken’s prophetic mission for humanity.22

Indeed, in the same year of his American triumph, in his work Zur Sammlung der Geister, Eucken trumped Innerlichkeit as the exceptional trait of the German spirit and German experience of freedom, the genealogy of which Eucken freely extended back to German mysticism and Luther.23 The German Idea of freedom was synonymous with the redemptive promise of the German Nation for humanity at large and inseparable from a narrative of national liberation at the center of which stood not only an idea, but the iconic figure of Fichte, whose cultural capital had been on the ascent ever since failed assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878. These attempts on the Kaiser’s life provoked intense debate on issues of public education and national values, and revealed a growing uneasiness with the cultural consolidation of national identity in the years after Germany’s political unification in 1871.24 Against the widely perceived creeping “realism” of Wilhelmine Germany and the broader European legacy of 18th-century cosmopolitanism, Fichte increasingly represented an image of the German Nation in its special quest for spiritual fulfillment.25 Ever the public voice of Germany’s philosophical identity, and with his recently acquired Nobel prestige, Eucken published in 1908 a Jubiläumsausgabe of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation. In his introduction, Eucken promoted the contemporary relevance of Fichte’s addresses for fostering a “strengthening of faith in our people and its future.” Fichte’s iconic standing for the German Nation is stressed once again in Zur Sammlung der Geister, where Eucken lauds Fichte’s originality as the premier philosopher of Innerlichkeit.

1913 also marked the one-hundred year anniversary of the Battle of Nations at Leipzig that ejected Napoleon from Prussia and signaled the victorious culmination of Germany’s Befreiungskrieg. At the University of Berlin, the artist Arthur Kampf was commissioned to paint a mural

22 Quoted in Zanfi, op. cit., p. 73. 23 For this genealogy, see Rudolf Eucken, Deutsche Freiheit. Ein Weckruf (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1919). 24 See Sieg, op. cit., p. 19 ff. 25 See Sieg, op. cit., p. 39 ff. As the French Germanist Charles Andler observed in Le Pangermanisme philosophique, Fichte served as the primary source for the formation of “pan-German” national chauvinism during the decades leading up to 1914. As he writes: “Il [Fichte] a, le premier, donne un catechisme clair et complet de la religion de la predestination allemande.” Charles Andler, Le Pangermanisme philosophique (1800 à 1914) (Paris: Louis Conard, 1917), p. ix. A view followed by Lübbe, who considers German Kriegsphilosophie as an essentially Fichtebewegung. This image of Fichte would remain after the war during the Weimar Republic, see Christian Tilitzki, Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), p. 136 ff. For the image of Fichte among Nazi ideologues, se Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis. Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), chapter 2.

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(destroyed during the Second World War) in commemoration of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation. Kampf’s depiction of Fichte’s celebrated speeches in the wake of Prussia’s defeat in 1806 at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt exhibits the spiritual covenant between German philosophy and the German Nation. In 1807-1808, the Nation of the German Spirit existed only as “a wraith that stands over its own corpse and laments, having only just been driven out by a host of diseases.” Poised between mourning and revelation, Fichte geared his lectures “to bring courage and hope to the downtrodden [the Germans], to proclaim joy in the midst of deep sorrow, to lead lightly and gently through the hour of great affliction.”26

Fichte’s Reden are conceived as an address to a future that does not yet exist. As a call to the German Nation, it is a call for the German Nation; it speaks to an imaginary Nation to come, called upon to form itself through Fichte’s own self-instituting speech-act. In this sense, Fichte’s Reden enacts its own proleptic pedagogy: it envisions a German Nation, the conditions for which do not yet presently exist (the fragmentation of German states, the defeat of Prussia), but which can be established in responding to this call for a German Nation.27 Philosophical speech has the essential form of education, or Bildung, and the philosopher is quintessentially the “shaping imagination” of the Nation, charged with the task of die Erziehung der Nation. Fichte’s speech-act capitalizes on his transcendental theory of the imagination (Einbildungskraft) as the spontaneous power of creating images. These images are not reproductive images (Nachbilder), but pre-figurations (Vorbilder) in a dual sense of “pre-” and “original” for a reality yet to be produced. As he informs his audience: “These images are independent of reality; they are in no respect replicas of reality, but rather archetypes (Ur-Bilder).” Bildung (as both “cultivation” and “education”) is identified with the creative forming of such images, and in so doing, to become in turn shaped through such archetypical images. In the aftermath of 1806, Germany is a power of imagination and speech—the power of philosophy as Bildung—to call itself into being as a triumph over defeat.28

The complex construction of Fichte’s Reden as a performative speech-act, as a mirror shaping an image, and as a prophetic vision is represented in Kampf’s painting of this founding event of the German Nation. Fichte stands in an open field at the focal center for the gathering of the people. A Greek temple is set at a distance, thus suggesting a spiritual affinity between Ionia and Jena.29 Fichte’s discourse is portrayed as a performative act that assembles the people into a People, formed as a community and

26 J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Nakhimovsky, Kapossy, and Tribe (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2013), p. 18.27 Fichte’s argument is a paradigmatic instance of Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined community. For Fichte’s aesthetic pedagogy, see Marc Redfield, “Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning,” in: Grounds of Comparison. Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, eds. J. Culler and P. Cheah (London: Routledge, 2003): 75 – 106.28 For the historical context and political significance of Fichte’s Reden, see Xavier Leon, Fichte et son temps, (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927), Vol. II, pp. 119 – 133. 29 Fichte’s speeches were delivered in Berlin.

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communion of speech. Gathered around Fichte, whose gesture upwards to the Ideal echoes Plato’s signature gesture in Raphael’s The School of Athens, is the entire spectrum of German society: workers, the middle-class, clergy, farmers, men, and women (true to Fichte’s Jacobin inspiration, representatives of the aristocracy appear to be absent). All are assembled to receive the philosopher’s sermon; all are assembled as a visionary image of Germany to come. As Fichte himself declares in his Reden: “I have had in view the whole German nation, and my intention has been to gather around me, in the room in which you are bodily present, everyone in the domain of the German language who can understand me.”30 In 1813, it was Fichte, Philosophicus Teutonicus, who stood at the center of an envisioned unity of the German Nation in its struggle for liberation against French domination. In 1913, it was Eucken, whom a contemporary, Gerhard Budde, dubbed der zweiter Fichte, whose Zur Sammlung der Geister he likewise called “die neue Reden an die deutsche Nation,” and whose philosophical thinking he compared to Fichte’s as Prophetenart, who stood at the precipice of an even greater affliction to come.31

30 Fichte, op. cit., p. 9.31 Gerhard Budde, “Rudolf Eucken als Herold des Deutschtums,” in: Deutsches Volkstum 20/1 (1918): 1-5. Eucken often received the title of the “new Fichte.” As Otto Braun writes, Eucken is the “Vorkämpfer und Prophet deutscher Geistesart.” “Der Idealismus bei Hartmann und Eucken,” in: Festschrift für Rudolf Eucken zum 70. Geburtstag p. 6 – 15. Hermann Schwarz calls Eucken “der Führer des neuen Fichteanismus.” For the movement of Fichteanism during the war, see Hoeres, op. cit., pp. 293-305. For the importance of Fichte’s in Eucken’s thinking prior to his Kriegsphilosophie, see Hans Friedrich Fulda, “Neufichteanismus in Rudolf Euckens Philosophie des Geisteslebens?,” in: Fichte-Studien 35 (2010): 107 – 150.

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1914

The outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 would set into motion an intellectual and cultural catastrophe that would fundamentally alter German philosophy and German philosophers.32 With the destruction of the University Library of Leuven and the severe damaging of the Cathedral in Reims, the standing of German philosophy and German Geistesleben became irrevocably transformed. Bergson, President of l’Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, in a rousing discourse published in the Bulletin des Armées de la Republique in November 1914, loudly decried Germany’s “barbarism reinforced by the capture of civilization” and sharply contrasted the creative vitality of French civilization—representing life, humanity, and cosmopolitanism—with the mechanistic and lifeless Kultur of a Germany militarized through Prussian parochialism. German Geistesleben was unceremoniously cast-off as an “energy that wastes” tending towards and embracing death.33 Émile Boutroux joined this chorus in declaring: “Hier 32 The impact of the war on philosophy extended of course beyond German thought, see Nicolas de Warren, “The First World War, Philosophy, and Europe,” in: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, Vol. 76, 4 (2014): 715-737.33 Henri Bergson, “La force qui s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas,” in: Oeuvres, Vol. II (Paris: Hachette, 2015). For a presentation of Bergson’s discourse, Jean-Philippe Cazier, “Henri

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encore, l’Allemagne etait, dans le monde, redoutee, certes, pour sa puissance, mais estimee pour sa science et pour son patrimonie d’idealisme. Aujourd’hui, c’est, contre elle, d’un bout à l’autre de la terre, un même cri de reprobation et d’horreur [...] La civilisation humaine cherche à humaniser la guerre elle-même. La culture allemand tend logiquement à en accroître à l’infini, par la science, la brutalite primitive.”34

And not without cause. From the first weeks of August 1914, German philosophers “weaponized,” as it were, their concepts for wartime service. At the vanguard of this “spiritual mobilization” of German philosophy (to adopt Kurt Flasch’s felicitous expression) stood Eucken, who delivered no less than 36 public speeches in 1914. His appearances attracted crowds of thousands. At a speech delivered in Nürnberg, the enthusiasm for his lecture was so great that he was immediately pressed to repeat his lecture a second time, speaking thus until midnight. Widely distributed on the home front and published in special Feldpostausgaben, his speeches Die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges and Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes vigorously defended the German war-effort in articulating its deeper metaphysical meaning.35 Eucken’s philosophical engagement during the first months of the war effectively created the template for what has since been dubbed German Kriegsphilosophie.36

Die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges reads like a compressed version of Eucken’s thinking in his 1913 Deem lectures and Zur Sammlung der Geister under the atmospheric pressure of a newly sprung war replete with spiritual promise. The force of this outbreak of hostilities can be gauged from the displacement of Eucken’s thinking with regard to “present time of confusion and crisis.” Whereas in 1913, Eucken’s prophetic thinking addressed itself to the confusion and crisis of a present bereft of historical import and higher morality, August 1914 thrusts a momentous event of historical import directly onto Eucken’s longing. With clear echoes of Zur Sammlung der Geister, Eucken speaks of the war as an awakening of “sleeping forces” and elevation of spiritual life towards a “more effective morality.” The religious morality he could only envision in 1913 (das schöne Wunderland of Schiller’s poem), now becomes perceived in 1914 within the dynamic contours of a war in the making. This displacement of Eucken’s thinking from a perspective outside the event it envisions to a perspective inside an event

Bergson” in: Les philosophes et la guerre de 1914-1918, ed. S. Leclerq (Mons: Les Éditions Sils Maria, 2015): 7-26. For a detailed account of Bergson’s war-time writings and political engagement, Philippe Soulez, Bergson politique (Paris: PUF, 1989). Eucken did not leave Bergson’s accusation unanswer, see Rudolf Eucken, “Unsere gerechte Sache,” in: Illustrirte Zeitung, 3712 (20.8.1914): 314-316.34 Émile Boutroux, L’Allemagne et la guerre (Paris: Librairie Militaire Berger-Levrault, 1914), p. 9; p. 28.35 On the broader cultural horizon for such a “metaphysical meaning” of the war, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), pp. 90- 94; pp. 192-202. Feldpostausgaben were inexpensive editions made available to soldiers at the front, Beebee, op. cit., p. 148.36 Kurt Flasch, Die geistiger Mobilmachung. Die deutschen Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 2000), pp. 15-35, Lübbe, op. cit., p. 176 ff., Sieg op. cit., p. 120.

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that engulfs it occasions a transfiguration of Eucken’s idea of philosophy as prophetically practical.37 Eucken’s prophetic mode of thinking becomes newly attuned into a divination of the war’s metaphysical (“spiritual”) meaning. An inversion likewise occurs between the role of the philosopher as educator and the advent of a morality the philosopher seeks to inspire. As an ethical katharsis, war usurps the position of “teacher,” while the philosopher’s position shifts to that of war’s most adept student, who must give witness to a truth that must in turn be revealed to those who are too close (the soldiers at the front) as well as too far (the civilians at the home-front) to perceive its genuine purchase. In the like-minded words of Adolf Faut: “So ist der Krieg für uns ein Lehrmeister des Höchsten und Heiligsten, eine Schule wahrer Menschwerdung.”38 This transfiguration of the philosopher in the school of war, who educates a community at war, is reflected in Eucken’s war-time lectures and books as addressed to both the front-line and the home-front.

Die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges opens with a question that would become essential for the strategic discourse of German Kriegsphilosophie: what is this war about? The urgency of this question reflects not only the suddenness of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 nor the political vacuum concerning the war’s aims and motivations within the broader German public sphere.39 This question is as much about the nature of war here at issue as it is about whose war is here a stake, and against whom. In framing Die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges with these two questions (what kind of war? whose war?), Eucken begins with a plain acknowledgment of the evils of war (death, suffering, moral collapse into enmity and anger, the suspension of the state of law), but is quick to displaces such a conception of war as crystallized in its deleterious consequences. As Eucken announces: “Solche Gefahren sind ohne Zweifel vorhanden, sie würden den Krieg schlechtweg als ein Übel erscheinen lassen, wenn ihnen nichts entgegenwirkte; ob ihnen aber etwas entgegenwirkt und sich ihnen überlegen zeigt, das hängt von dem Charakter des Krieges ab.”40 In this re-framing maneuver, everything depends on the conditional clause of Eucken’s proposed opposition between war as an evil and a counter-acting conception of war, the character of which must be properly discerned. War

37 The war equally provoked a retrospective re-interpretation of Eucken’s own pre-war writings. As Peter Hoeres notes: “Diese Nationalisierung seiner Weltanschauung versuchte Eucken im Weltkrieg fälschlicherweise in die Kontinuität seines Schaffens zu stellen. Im Vorwort zur fünften Auflage [1914] seiner erfolgreichen Vorkriegsschrift Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens hob Eucken hervor, dass seine Grundanschauungen durch die Kriegserfahrung bestätigt worden seien, nur die Gegensätze seien nun schärfer zu scheiden. Diese waren nun wesentlich von dem Krieg zwischen den Nationen bestimmt.” Hoeres, op. cit., p. 215. 38 Adolf Faut, Die Schule des Kriegs. Schulrede bei der Königs-Feier der Friedrich Eugens-Realschule am 25. Februar 1915, quoted in: Peter Hoeres, op. cit. p. 445; for a discussion of the war as catharsis, pp. 445-465. Edmund Husserl in the same vein when he declares in his 1917/1918 lectures on Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity: “Need and death are today’s teachers” (Edmund Husserl, Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity. Three Lectures, in: Husserl Studies, trans. K. Hart, 12 (1995): 111 – 133; p. 112.39 See Herfried Münkler, Der Grosse Krieg. Die Welt 1914 – 1918 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2014), p. 215 ff.40 Rudolf Eucken, Die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges (Leipzig: Emil Gräfe, 1914), p. 1.

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as determined by greed, honor, economic incentives, and political goals represents a worldly or mundane conception of war. Such a war is admittedly an evil were it not for another form of war in which a more internal and invisible drama is played out—not primarily the drama of worldly concerns, but the drama of the soul in pursuit of an higher ethics. This second conception of war—a genuinely moral war or, as Eucken declares, a “holy or sacred war” (heiliger Krieg)—“rises” above war in the naturalistic and material sense.

Based on this categorical distinction, Eucken’s speech produces an elision of a mundane way of framing war in favor of its spiritual re-framing. Such an elision induces a neutralization of war’s grim reality, with the direct consequence that the German destruction of Leuven, the iconic symbol of German “barbarianism” in the eyes of the French and British, can both be accepted and denied. The moral outrage caused by this and other German acts of war in the opening months of August and September can accordingly be re-framed as an “acceptable” consequence of a war whose veritable meaning remains invisible and immeasurable according to the worldly rationality of justice. Eucken’s distinction between mundane and spiritual war underpins conflicting registers of war’s meaning and justification, thus allowing for an implicit argument of collateral damage, where, in the first instance, it is a political conception of war that becomes collateral damage for the purpose of higher, more spiritually efficacious war.41

Eucken’s distinction between mundane and spiritual war carries two further implications, both of which would structure much of German Kriegsphilosophie and the wider cultural perception of the conflict in Germany during the years 1914-1918, and beyond. The first implication is a differentiation within the register of what constitutes victory and defeat. On the first conception of war as the pursuit of politics by other means, where “politics” is understood broadly in Eucken’s terms as “worldly motivations” (economic need, political goals), the nature of war is determined by its objectives and motivations. As Clausewitz argued in On War, “wars vary with the nature of their motives and of the situations which give rise to them,” and thus, “the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.”42 Regardless of the particular objective and motivation, what is at stake with such a conception of war is to gain or lose one’s (political) advantage in the world. In Eucken’s spiritual conception of war, by contrast, what is at stake is to gain or lose the spiritual life (Geistesleben) of the soul and the Nation. This spiritual re-framing of war obfuscates its political objective and 41 This elision of “material” conception of war reflects more broadly Eucken’s elision of society, which Eucken once declared “an unknown terrain” that should therefore not become an object of philosophical investigation. For Eucken’s elision of society in his social thought and critique of socialism, see Christoph Henning, Philosophie nach Marx: 100 Jahre Marxrezeption und die normative Sozialphilosophie der Gegenwart in der Kritik (Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2006), pp. 277 – 285.42 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. M. Howard and P. Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 88.

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motivation; war becomes instead an ethical salvation—das schöne Wunderland. Eucken thus establishes a logic whereby defeat (in the pursuit of worldly gains) could nonetheless amount to victory (to gain the soul spiritually) or whereby victory (in the pursuit of the world) could in fact represent defeat (in pursuit of the soul).43 This moral logic of war’s justification appeals not only to a type of moral intentionalism, but also, and with equally fraught historically consequences, allows for a continuation of war by other, “spiritual means,” beyond its actual political and military cessation—as would in fact be the case with numerous German intellectuals during the tumultuous Weimar Republic, for whom the First World War continued in a spiritual form, despite or because of the 1918 Armistice.44

A second implication to Eucken’s moral logic of war is a rhetorically seductive insistence on war as an antagonism beyond any reciprocal form of encounter and mutual recognition.45 In On War, Clausewitz compared war to a duel, as an antagonism between two parties attempting to compel the political will of their opponent through the instrument of (organized) violence. This conception of war critically depends on the mutual recognition of each party as legitimately pursuing different, albeit, conflicting, goals.46 In the reciprocity of war’s antagonism, each party encounters the other within the same conceptual space, namely, on Clausewitz’s thinking, within the theatre of war as the pursuit of politics by other means, where each party recognizes the other’s goal as a political goal in opposition to one’s own. In Eucken’s spiritual re-framing, this conception of war as the pursuit of politics by other means becomes displaced as well as neutralized with the result that the war in 1914 is not such much a struggle against an enemy (British, French, etc.) for political ends, but a struggle against oneself as a spiritual test and awakening. Not surprisingly, the bellicose atmosphere of Eucken’s speech is characterized by its lack of directedness towards any specific enemy. It is as if the two conceptions of war—mundane and spiritual—are set at cross purposes with each other: whereas the former turns essentially on political and economic rationality, the latter turns on a presumptive “more authentic” moral logic; and whereas the former depends on the mutual recognition of antagonistic parties, the latter depends exclusively on the struggle for self-recognition, i.e., awakening. Rather than war as the pursuit of politics by other means, Eucken’s vision of war makes

43 The German defeat in 1918 would not diminish Eucken’s commitment to German Freedom. As Sieg remarks: “Euckens Philosophie blieb während des Weltkrieges erstaunlich konstant,” op. cit., p. 121. See Rudolf Eucken, Was bleibt unser Halt? Ein Wort an ernste Seelen (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1918) and Deutsche Freiheit (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1919). For Eucken’s reflections on “German Freedom” during the Weimar Republic, see Hans Jörg Schmidt, Die deutsche Freiheit: Geschichte eines kollektiven semantischen Sonderbewusstseins (Frankfurt: Humanities Online, 2010) pp. 110 – 112.44 As I have argued shapes Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s, see Nicolas de Warren, “Heidegger, le judaïsme et la deuxième guerre de Trente Ans,”  in : Heidegger et ‘les juifs’, La Règle du Jeu, 58-59, (September 2015): 235 – 280. For Eucken’s moral intentionalism, see Flasch, op. cit., pp. 21- 23.45 I have also argued from this constitutive distinction between confrontation and encounter in Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte, see de Warren, op. cit.46 See Nicolas de Warren, “A Rumor of Philosophy. On War in Clausewitz,” in: The Russian Sociological Review, Vol. 14, No. 4 (2015): 18 – 32.

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it the pursuit of philosophy by other means, to wit, the pursuit of Innerlichkeit by other means.

With this spiritual conception of war in place, Eucken’s aim in die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges is largely to discern the genuine character of (this) war in its existential/ethical meaning. As he declares: “der Kampf eines ganzen Volkes für seine Selbsterhaltung und für die Wahrung seiner heiligsten Güter, ist er einer Abwehr gewaltsamer Angriffe, so kann er eine Quelle sittlicher Stärkung werden.” In such a form, war provokes an awakening in the specifically (Neo)-Fichtean sense of Tathandlung. This awakening of spirit to its own creative vitality produces a degree of “seriousness” (Ernst) and intensity of “concentration” (Konzentration). Spiritual life is brought back to itself through a dispensation of seriousness that reveals in a luminous light the frivolity and superficiality of everyday concerns. As Eucken proposes, the seriousness of this struggle submits life to a fundamental questioning. The commonplace thus becomes transformed; its logic and values become exposed; everything is submitted to a profound test of meaning (alle Dinge gründlich auf ihren Gehalt zu prüfen).47 The ontological force of this test provokes clarity on what matters most, strengthening of resolve, and solidarity with others. As significantly, it would not be a stretch to hear in Eucken’s war-discourse a contorted echo of Jesus’ words cited in his 1913 Deem Lectures. As an occasion for self-discovery, war provokes an inward turn which throws into sharp relief the fault line in Jesus’ challenge between the vanity and superficiality of the world and the seriousness and depth of the spiritual—moral—life. “War is a force that gives us meaning” could here readily serve as a modern-day translation for Eucken’s title Die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges.

The focal point of war’s katharsis is the individual whose self-attachment and unquestioned “worldly” commitments are thus broken. The over-coming of egoism and the melding of individuals into a greater whole is war’s positive accomplishment, or what Eucken strikingly calls, das Werk des Krieges. The work of war mobilizes life in its depth and reach: the depth of life is plumbed through the binding force of sacred values while the reach of life extends across the entire Nation. War’s work is metaphysical as well as political, the latter in the qualified sense of the Nation, and not the state (i.e., Clausewitz’s implicit meaning of “the political”), in its “divine” meaning and “world-historical” mission for humanity. 48 As Eucken reminds his audience, disunity leading up to the war prevented Germany from achieving its prescribed greatness. Despite the ostensible unification of Germany in 1871, sharp divisions—political and religious—still defined German culture. This tacit reference to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf is telling of the continuity of spiritual struggle established by Eucken between the war in 1914 and the enduring German quest for cultural unification and identity. The outbreak of

47 As Lübbe notes, the ascription of “seriousness” and “health” as positive effects of war on morality (Sittlichkeit) is a common trope that reaches back to Hegel. What is here specifically novel is “die Euckensche These vom Weltkrieg als der Weltbewährungsprobe deutscher Innerlichkeit. Der Feind setzte, in Unverständnis, deutsches Wesen herab,” op. cit., p. 182.48 As Peter Hoeres notes: “Die Nation und nicht der Staat ist das Zentrum seiner [Eucken’s] Kriegsphilosophie,” op. cit., p. 218.

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the war, however, has brought about a “violent transformation” (gewaltige Wandlung) in awakening Germans to a binding national consciousness and collective experience. As Eucken makes patent with his invocation of the 1813 War of Liberation (Befreiungskrieg) and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the historical destiny of the German people is to forge a common work (ein gemeinsames Werk) through sacrifice and solidarity. As Eucken remarks: “So führen die Erfahrungen der Gegenwart uns auch innerlich näher zusammen.”49 Both of these critical notions in Eucken’s war-discourse contribute to the war’s promised cultivation of Innerlichkeit.

In this sense, the war is total, not just as the mobilization of machines and materiality, but as an awakening of “the complete standing of life” (Gesamtstand des Lebens). With this thought, Eucken implicitly forges the idea of das Gesamtkriegswerk.50 As a total work, war promises to realize Eucken’s desired unification of “work” (Arbeit) and Innerlichkeit. Whereas Eucken observed in his 1913 Zur Sammlung der Geister that “der Höhe der Arbeitskultur entspricht heute nicht die der Innenkultur,” the advent of war in 1914 ushers an ethical and spiritual “height” in which the culture of work and the culture of interiority can be united in the spiritual work of war.51 The term Werk further suggests a philosophical reconciliation of Idealism and Naturalism: as with an art-work as a material object (ein Werk) shaped and infused with the activity of spiritual life (wirken), war manifests the activity of spirit in its empirical “works” (sacrifice, death, etc.), while at the same preventing an absorption of spirit into the naturalism of mere causal effects. In this form, Idealism does not remain speculative by the same token that it does not fully collapse into Naturalism.52 This philosophical reconciliation carries a decisive worldly implication. As Eucken proposes in Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes, “das Grosse des deutschen Wesens, dass, indem wir kräftig in die Welt eingriffen, wir uns zugleich als ein Volk des Seelenlebens, ein Volk tiefer Innerlichkeit erwiesen.” War produces a movement of “double rotation” as an “outward” shaping of the world and as an “inward” cultivation of spiritual life.53 As Eucken states: “Wir tragen in unserer Natur die Aufgabe, eine weltumspannende Innerlichkeit zur versöhnen und auszugleichen mit tüchtiger Arbeit an der sichtbaren Welt.”54

49 Eucken, op. cit., p. 7.50 I have coined this expression as a term of art. The only occurrence of this term that I can find is in reference to the Austro-Hungarian defensive ring of forts built around Krakau (https://krakau.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/der-ring-der-osterreicher ) . See also the occurrence of this expression in “Die Operationen des Jahres 1915. Die Ereignisse im Westen im Frühjahr und Sommer, im Osten vom Frühjahr bis zum Jahresschluß” (http://digi.landesbibliothek.at/viewer/resolver?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Aat%3AAT-OOeLB-1349776).51 Eucken, op. cit., p. 14. On this unification of work and interiority, see Hoeres, op. cit., p. 220. This reconciliation between naturalism and idealism was publically and symbolically professed with a joint-letter from Eucken and Haeckel to American universities in August 1914 seeking public support for the German cause, see Hoeres, op. cit., p. 123.52 My thanks to Andrea Cimino for clarifying this point for me. See also Flasch, op. cit., p. 22. 53 Flasch, op. cit., p. 28.

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The moral upsurge of das Gesamtkriegswerk and its weltumspannende Innerlichkeit possesses, however, a “special coloration” that stems from an exceptional German experience of Freedom and idea of duty (Pflichtidee).55 It is not a negative freedom centered on self-interest and egotism, but the freedom of an “inner elevation” (innere Erhebung) by which the individual becomes “fitted-into” (Einfügung) the Nation.56 The transformative force of war imbues individuals with a motivation to shed their “petty egoism” (kleinliche Egoismus) in binding themselves to a whole (das Ganze). Through the idea of duty, values of the Nation become incorporated as one’s ownmost; obeying the call of duty does not follow from social pressure nor even, on Eucken’s account, from respect for the sake of duty itself, but flows instead from a “joyous deed” (freudige Tat) which expresses the spontaneity of Geistesleben, of life lived to the fullest, in the freedom of its self-abandonment for a cause and value greater than itself. As most conspicuously manifest in personal sacrifice, this joy of duty breaks (brechen) the self-attachment of the ego as well as its attachments to material goods and values that are not ethical in the supreme sense. As Eucken proclaims: “Alle Schichten des Volkes sind vom Strom der Bewegung ergriffen, jeder beeilt sich, sein Bestes zum Opfer zu bringen, das schwerste wird dabei selbstverständlich, und Heldentaten, die wir an früheren Zeiten als seltene Ausnahmen bewunderten, erfahren wir jetzt all Tage unter uns.”57

It is not hard to discern in Eucken’s proclamation one of the numerous paradoxes of the First World War in his attempt to promote the normalization (or “mundanization”) of sacrifice while retaining its “spiritual” meaning. As Eucken acknowledges, heroic deeds were in the past singular accomplishments which elicited wonder and admiration: the supreme sacrifice of one’s life—the abandonment of one’s “petty egotism”—was an act of exceptional significance. The specific “coloration” of the war demands that this exceptionality becomes transformed into a commonplace and collective movement in which each individual is carried away in a festival of sacrifice. On the one hand, an incongruity emerges between the soldier as hero—imbued with an heroic meaning of sacrifice—and the soldier as worker, whose sacrifice becomes inscribed in endless rows of names commemorating those gefallen für das Vaterland. On the other hand, as Roger Caillois has argued, war is the paroxysm of existence in modern society. As he writes: “Dans les societes modernes, la guerre represente pour ce motif l’unique moment de concentration et d’absorption intense dans le groupe de tout ce qui tend ordinairement à maintenir à son egard 54 Rudolf Eucken, Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag-Austalt, 1914), p. 14.55 Eucken’s German: “Diesem sittlichen Auffschwung gibt aber das Werk des Krieges eine besondere Färbung.” On the “Ideen von 1914,” its public expressions and social underpinnings, see Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914. Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).56 Rudolf Eucken, “Deutschlands politische ‘Rückständigkeit’,” in: Das Grössere Deutschland, 2 (1915): 576-585. For a history of this special German conception of freedom, see Hans Jörg Schmidt, Die deutsche Freiheit: Geschichte eines kollektiven semantischen Sonderbewusstseins. For Eucken’s own genealogy, see his Deutsche Freiheit.57 Eucken, op. cit., p. 4.

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une certaine zone d’independence.”58 As with Eucken’s Gesamtkriegswerk, collective sacrifice reveals a profound affinity between war and festival. As Caillois observes: “Guerres et fêtes, sommeils des normes, eruptions des forces vraies, apparaissent egalement comme les remèdes uniques d’une inevitable usure [...] la guerre et la fête eliminent scories et dechêts, liquident les valeurs fallacieuses et remontent à la source des energies originelles qu’elles actualisent dans leur pleine et dangereuse, mais salutaire violence.”59 In Eucken’s discourse, the festive character of war—in the sense described by Caillois as the time of excess, the joy of destruction, and the sacredness of immense waste (gaspillage immense)—forms the heart of das Gesamtkriegswerk in its reconciliation of Innerlichkeit and Arbeit. The machine of total war becomes spiritualized into a mobilization of Innerlichkeit in the redemptive realization of the Nation through the agency of utmost sacrifice.

In this manner, sacrifice produces assuredness in the righteousness and spiritual meaning of Germany’s cause. As Eucken declares: “Dies Bewusstsein der Gegenwart einer höheren Macht in unserer Seele gibt uns das feste Vertrauen, dass, was wir in ihrem Dienste tun, nicht verloren sein kann, das Vertrauen, das unsere gerechte Sache allem Ansturm der Feinde überlegen sein wird.”60 This consolidation of assuredness in Eucken’s edificatory Kriegsphilosophie carries a two-fold meaning. As with other war-time intellectuals, Eucken celebrates the wave of patriotic feeling that shatters individual self-attachment and reconciles social fragmentation: “alle harte Kruste des Eigendünkels und der Absonderung ist jetze aufgelöst, in grossen Wogen geht dasselbe Gefühl, dasselbe Leben durch das ganze Volk, alle Unterschiede des Standes, auch alle Gegensätze der Parteien verschwinden.”61 The assuredness produced through sacrifice, however, creates a distance within this oceanic enthusiasm of war’s festival, its violent rupture and transformation, in which those who witness and those survive can regain internal composure. This composure has its psychological index in individual resolve and its philosophical significance with the manner in which “eternal values” and “truth” become “absorbed,” given in flesh and blood. Assuredness in “eternal values” is the form in which those values become manifest along two axes of meaning-bestowal, as the binding of solidarity and as a witnessing of truth.

58 Roger Caillois, L’homme et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 223. As Modris Ekstein argues: “The promotion of this liberation continued to be the most important component of Pflicht. This association of death with life was a re-enactment, writ large, of the sacrificial sequence of Le Sacre du printemps,” op. cit., p. 202; see pp. 192 – 202.59 Roger Caillois, Bellone ou la pente de la guerre (Bruxelles: La Renaissance du Livre, 1963), p. 212.60 Eucken, op. cit., p. 7.61 Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes, op. cit., p. 22. This emphasis on universal collective enthusiasm reflects Eucken’s targeted audience of university students and middle-class professionals. Popular enthusiasm for the war was in fact varied across socio-political classes. For a discussion of the extend and form of popular reactions to the war in Germany, see Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 13- 28 and Benjamin Ziemann, Front und Heimat. Ländliche Kriegserfahrungen im südlichen Bayern 1914-1923 (Essen: Klartext, 1997).

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Along a horizontal axis, the sacrifice of the individual for the whole produces the common work of the Nation in the solidarity of suffering and communization of mourning. The individual who dies for the Nation binds himself to the community of the dead and the living in abandoning himself (his “petty egoism”) to the values and cause of the Nation. As Eucken declares in the closing reflections of Die sittlichen Kräfte des Krieges, “Die Verluste der einzelnen sind unser aller Verluste, und wie unser aller Schmerz, so sind sie auch unser aller Stolz. Wie die Religionen ihre Blutzeugen, die Märtyrer, in hohen Ehren halten, so wollen wir es auch mit den Blutzeugen des Vaterlands tun [...].”62 On the vertical axis, sacrifice is a witnessing of truth whereby its absorption or, conversely, the investment of life in truth, is consolidated in blood. The spiritual movement of sacrifice operates as a double-rotation, whereby, along one angular direction of motion, an individual abandons his life for the sake of the whole (and thus “exits” his own finite existence) while, along another angular motion of return, those eternal values for which the individual has forsaken himself become incorporated into the sphere of the living. This incorporation of truth in sacrifice is not cognitive, but affective, as an assuredness that strengthens from the inside such that violence can be meted out against an outside. In this form, the violence of individual self-sacrifice rebounds into communal violence and worldly assuredness in the cause of the Nation. This double-motion of sacrifice, as abandonment and absorption, reflects a more general pattern of religious experience, anthropologically considered, in its constitution of a “transcendent entity” (in Eucken’s case: the nation and the general spirit of life) at the expense of a sacrificial victim who, in this form, participates in the “immortality” to which he has given his own life. Life is thus given back to the community as a violence that can rebound against an enemy or external aggressor, thus completing a double movement of “exit” and “return.”63 Eucken understands the assuredness achieved through “blood-witnessing” in a profoundly religious vein (ein tiefer religiöser Zug), yet its existential import transcends any particular religious dogma or institution. As a mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” the sacrificial awakening of “the total work of war” “erfüllt uns mit Ehrfurcht vor dem Göttlichen, das in aller Unerforschlichkeit uns doch so nahe ist.” In the resonate words of Rilke’s 1914 poetic evocation:

Zum ersten Mal seh ich dich aufstehnhörengesagter fernster unglaublicher Kriegs-Gott.

[...]

62 Eucken, op. cit. p. 8. The notion of “blood witness” would figure prominently in the Nazis veneration of Frontsoldaten and the Nazis cult of martyrdom. In the preface to Mein Kampf, Hitler evokes 16 fallen NSDAP members who “by virtue their martyrdom become blood-witnesses” (durch ihren Märtyrertod zu Blutzeugen) for the political cause of the Nazi movement. Quoted in: Ludolf Herbst, Hitlers Charisma. Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2010), p. 212. For the cult of fallen solider, see George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chapter 5.63 As has been argued by Maurice Bloch, whose anthropological conception of sacrifice and notion of “rebounded violence” I invoke here. Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter. The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Und wir? Glühen in Eines zusammen,In ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt.

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