How to write about the war? Franz Rosenzweig and Fritz Mauthner about the philosophy of war

The article analyzes the texts written by Franz Rosenzweig and Fritz Mauthner and devoted to the war. The authors demonstrate how the worldview of the philosophers was changed under the influence of the World War I and how a new historical situation affected their philosophical projects. Rosenzweig and Mauthner responded to the challenges of wartime differently and found various strategies for further philosophizing about the war. They talked about war on the basis of their own experience, the experience of thinking on the causes and results of the war. Rosenzweig went to war as a volunteer, but, in 1917, he admitted that his vision and understanding of the war had fundamentally changed. Mautner in 1914 reflected on the war rethinking his patriotism with which he had faced “brotherly” Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and in which he would later see the consequences of political ideology. As a “German” philosopher, Rosenzweig spoke of war on the basis of Hegel’s theory of the state. On the one hand, Rosenzweig's texts can be considered a complement to Hegel's theory, but, on the other hand, they are anti-Hegel in all senses. Mauthner, in turn, as an Austrian addressed his irony to Kant’s essay “Perpetual peace”. He revealed the specifics of the Austrian worldview, answering the question on the possibility of the philosophy of war. The analysis of the texts and of the cultural and historical circumstances of their appearance makes it possible to substantiate both the difference and the mental commonality of the philosophers.