Nietzsche's Necessary: The First World War

The First World War was a lengthy and brutal affair that claimed the lives of over 17 million individuals. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, its effects were equally as ferocious on the intellectual front, where it marked a turning point in the clash of European intellectual values. Philosophers such as Nietzsche had already challenged established institutions of Positivistic thinking toward knowledge and progress; however, his movement lacked widespread support. Necessary was the disaster of WWI, which accelerated the overall undermining of prior intellectual beliefs by inspiring a culture-wide disagreement: authors such as Erich Remarque and Vera Brittain drew upon newfound doubt underscored by the war to completely reverse prior thinking by
Nonetheless, philosophers such as Nietzsche stiffly opposed Positivism by contesting the blind acceptance of faiths. Nietzsche called for a rejection of the rules of polite society and a questioning of what we regard as truth – in fact, Nietzsche doubts “truth” itself, questioning the validity of truth: “HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error?” He casts doubt on Positivistic notions of intellectual confidence by stringently challenging how one might ascertain truth. A keystone argument of his is that it is impossible to distinguish truth from error because all is subjective – especially from the viewpoint of a philosopher, a man beholden to his ideas until the very end. As support, he added, “the falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it… we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute…” Therefore, since truths are unique to the beholder, he discredits the confident approach of people so blindly believing in “truth” and seeks to shatter this confidence so that people will begin to query their choices objectively and not just abide by the truth of others – a perspective that will
Consequently, it was the tragedy of the war that incited culture-wide notice of the flaws embedded within Positivistic thinking. Indeed, any assay at perceiving anything as it was before the war would be inconceivable. The rising generation in France and England, major European superpowers, was brutally massacred in the war. In fact, by the end of the war in 1918, 75% of the Oxford graduating class had perished in the war. Additionally, 1 in 5 of all young Frenchmen between the ages of 18 and 25 died fighting the war. Unquestionably, the war was a massive disaster that underscored a failure of prior reasoning – else, how did this war even occur – and proved that 19th century thinking no longer provided the answers that it was so confident of. Thus, people began to overwhelmingly contest the thinking that doomed 11 million soldiers to