Philosophical Reorientations During the War
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Edmund Husserl’s Wartime Lectures (1917)
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the founder of phenomenology, gave lectures during the war that reveal his relationship to the German situation. In his Lectures on Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity (1917), he interpreted Fichte’s nationalism as ethical idealism—not as chauvinistic self-assertion, but as the realization of reason within a people.
Husserl’s position was ambivalent. On the one hand, he shared the war enthusiasm of 1914—like most German intellectuals. On the other hand, his philosophical project—establishing a rigorous science—remained untouched by nationalism. Phenomenology was universalist in design: the structures of consciousness hold for all human beings, not only for Germans.
The tension between national commitment and universalist claims marked Husserl’s war years. He lost two sons in the war—Wolfgang fell in 1916 at Verdun. This personal tragedy deepened his philosophical reflections on the crisis of the European sciences, which came to full fruition only in the 1930s.
Systematic significance: Husserl represents the possibility of a philosophical reorientation that fell into neither irrationalism nor ideology. Phenomenology offered an alternative to Hegelian systematics—without abandoning reason. The confrontation between phenomenology and dialectic became a central theme of the interwar period (treated in detail in Chapter 24).
The Young Heidegger During the War
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was not at the front during the war, but worked at a weather station and as a letter censor. But the war shaped his philosophical development. The experience of finitude, of nearness to death, of “authenticity”—all this was systematically unfolded in Being and Time (1927).
Heidegger’s early lectures (1919-1923) show a turning away from the neo-Kantian academicism of his teachers. “Factical life experience,” “being-ahead-of-oneself,” “care”—these existential structures were not deduced from pure reason, but drawn from the concrete situation. The war had shown that life is not exhausted by systems.
The critique of Hegel was central for the early Heidegger. Hegel’s “absolute mediation” appeared as a concealment of original finitude. The thinking of death—sublated in Hegel into the movement of spirit—had to be rethought as “being-toward-death,” which knows no sublation.
Systematic significance: Heidegger represents the existentialist alternative to Hegelian dialectic. But this alternative too was mediated through Hegel—it reacted to Hegel, engaged with Hegel, defined itself in demarcation from Hegel. The productive tension between existential philosophy and system philosophy shaped the entire interwar period (treated in detail in Chapter 24.4).
Georg Lukács’s Turn to Marxism (1918)
Georg Lukács (1885-1971), before the war an aestheticizing cultural critic (Soul and Form, 1911; The Theory of the Novel, 1916), underwent a radical turn to Marxism in 1918. The war had shaken his cultural-critical position—“art” could not halt the catastrophe.
The turn proceeded through Hegel. Lukács read Marx through Hegel—not the other way around. Dialectic became the method of social analysis, totality the key concept. History and Class Consciousness (1923) was the result—the most significant Marxist book on Hegel of the twentieth century (treated in detail in 13.8).
Systematic significance: Lukács’s turn shows that the war led not only to a turning away from Hegel, but also to his rediscovery. Marxism offered a way to rescue Hegel’s dialectic—as critique of bourgeois society, not as its justification.