The Shock to the European Intelligentsia
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Destruction of Reason - Irrationalism as Reaction
The reaction to the war took various forms. One dominant tendency was flight into irrationalism—turning away from reason altogether.
Dadaism and Surrealism gave the destruction artistic expression. The senselessness of the war was mirrored by senseless art. The rational orders—syntax, perspective, harmony—were destroyed. What remained was provocation, shock, subversion. Hugo Ball recited sound poems that had no meaning. Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in a museum and called it art.
This artistic revolt was anti-Hegelian at its core. If, for Hegel, art is the presentation of truth in sensuous form, then Dada was a refusal of this function. No truth, no presentation, no form—only a gesture of rejection. The destruction of aesthetic order mirrored the destruction of political order.
Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) developed an explicitly anti-rational philosophy in The Mind as Adversary of the Soul (1929-1932). “Mind” (Geist)—analytical, separating thought—destroys “life” (Leben)—organic, holistic experience. Hegel appeared as the culmination of “mind”—and thus as the enemy of life.
Ernst Jünger: The Aestheticization of War
Another reaction was the aestheticization of catastrophe. Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) stylized war as an existential borderline experience in Storm of Steel (1920). The soldier under a hail of shells experiences an intensity that bourgeois life cannot offer. The nearness of death heightens the sense of being alive. War becomes an “inner experience” (the title of a later book).
This stance was philosophically problematic but psychologically understandable. Whoever had survived four years in the trenches had to give meaning to what he had experienced—or be broken by it. Jünger’s aestheticization was a coping strategy that transfigured reality. The dead became heroes, suffering became purification, catastrophe became metaphysical experience.
The proximity to Nietzsche was obvious—the affirmation of the terrible, the overcoming of petty-bourgeois morality, the intensification of life through nearness to death. But Nietzsche had philosophized theoretically—Jünger described concrete reality. The aestheticization of violence led into dangerous political terrain. Jünger’s later writings—especially The Worker (1932)—helped ideologically prepare the ground for fascism, even though Jünger himself never took an unambiguous position.
Sigmund Freud: The Death Drive as an Answer to the Catastrophe
The First World War shook not only political orders but also theoretical certainties. Sigmund Freud, whose basic theory of the unconscious we have already presented (see Chapter 4.5), underwent through the experience of the war a theoretical radicalization that remains controversial to this day.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): in this work, Freud introduced the “death drive”—alongside Eros, the drive toward life, now also Thanatos, the drive toward dissolution, toward return to the inorganic. What drove millions of young men into the trenches? What explains the readiness for self-annihilation? The pleasure principle alone could no longer explain it.
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930): in this late work, Freud drew the consequences for the theory of culture. Culture is not only sublimation of the sexual drive, but also the taming of the death drive. The aggressiveness unleashed in the war is not a mere reaction to frustration—it is a primary drive. Culture must turn this aggressiveness inward (guilt, the superego) or direct it outward (war, persecution).
The consequence for the reception of Hegel: if Freud was right, then Hegel’s optimism about reason was shaken. Dialectic presupposed that contradictions can be rationally resolved. But what if destructiveness cannot be rationally resolved? What if the death drive escapes dialectical integration?
This question became pressing in the postwar period. The Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse—attempted to combine Freud and Marx, psychoanalysis and social critique. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) diagnosed the turn of reason into mythology, of civilization into barbarism. The Second World War would tragically confirm this diagnosis.
On Freud’s basic theory, see Chapter 4.5.