The role of intellectualism in times of war has become increasingly urgent as the conflict in the Middle East enters its second year and the war in Ukraine is heading straight into its third. Writers, thinkers, and cultural producers of all types have weighed in on the political and historical implications of these conflicts and their influence on societies. Viral blacklists have been circulated, open letters have been signed, published articles have been retracted, events have been cancelled, and editors have resigned. But in this flurry of activity that attempts to respond intellectually to events that are unprecedented in our era, little stock is taken of the deeper strata of these arguments and declarations beyond the immediate effect of polarizing public discourse.
A century ago, as the world still reeled from the end of one world war and quickly hurtled into another, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), an advisory organization set up by the League of Nations, tried to take stock of the cultural climate by addressing the crisis that everyone saw coming and no one knew how to avoid. The IIIC arranged exchanges of letters among prominent intellectuals on urgent topics, and, in 1932, they sent a letter from Albert Einstein to Sigmund Freud in which the physicist asked the psychoanalyst to explain humanity’s attraction to war. The exchange was published the next year as “Why War?”
The question wasn’t merely rhetorical. It was asked by Einstein as a German Jew reacting to the rise of Nazi anti-Jewish violence. It wasn’t answered rhetorically either. Freud, who lived in Vienna at the time and remained there until the Nazi annexation of Austria six years later, existed under the same threat. Freud, who had recently published Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), responded with an explanation of his theory of instincts in the human psyche—and particularly the role of the destructive instinct in organizing societies, and the need to bring Eros, or the life instinct, into play in its stead. But, at the end of the letter, Freud’s argument took an unexpected turn.
“Why do you and I and so many other people rebel so violently against war?” he asked. “After all, it seems to be quite a natural thing, to have a good biological basis, and in practice to be scarcely avoidable?” He speculated on this query with a circular argument: “We are pacifists because we are obliged to be for organic reasons. And we then find no difficulty in producing arguments to justify our attitude.” With this short gesture, Freud put the legacy of both antiwar and pro-war intellectualism into doubt. Freud acknowledged that just because he could put together arguments against war did not mean that his position on war was more justified than those who put together arguments supporting war. His speculation posed a clear challenge to intellectual righteousness. But he didn’t reach this conclusion in a vacuum. It was itself the result of a series of transformations he experienced decades earlier—after the outbreak of World War I.
Critics and historians have sometimes seized on Freud’s initial limited expression of support for the Habsburg Monarchy as evidence of his weak commitment to liberalism, missing the sense of irony present when he stated in a letter that the war might give “this not very hopeful Empire another chance.” First, he was not supportive of the war effort itself; he merely hoped it would remain limited and engender a spirit of freedom and reform in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was critical without being dismissive. But he also had good reason to doubt the other parties to the war. His suspicion was fueled by concerns over England’s alliance with Russia. Max Schur, Freud’s personal physician and the author of Freud: Living and Dying (1972), recalls that Russia had been considered a brutal autocratic power and the epicenter of anti-Jewish pogroms for decades by 1914. By allying with Russia, England had, in Freud’s eyes, chosen “the wrong side.”
By November 1914, Freud’s view had changed, influenced by both political cynicism and the ubiquity of death. As he wrote in one letter, “I and my contemporaries will never again see a joyous world. It is too hideous. And the saddest thing of all is that it is precisely what psychoanalysis has led us to expect of man and his behavior.” A month later, he clarified this last sentiment in another letter, noting that “under the impact of war” he wanted to point to “two theses which have been put forward by psychoanalysis and which had undoubtedly contributed to its unpopularity.” One of these, he wrote, was that “the primitive, savage, and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any of its individual members, but persist, although in a repressed state, in the unconscious.” Another was that “our intellect is…a plaything and a tool of our instincts and affects.” He concluded:
If you will now observe this war—the cruelties and injustices for which the most civilized nations are responsible, the different ways in which they judge their own lies and wrongdoings and those of their enemies, and the general lack of insight which prevails—you will have to admit that psychoanalysis has been right in both cases.
By late 1914, the kernel of Freud’s challenge to the role of intellectualism in war was already apparent. The feeling of horror and sadness at the death and destruction around him did not fill him with a sense of righteousness. He harnessed the fact of war to understand something about the human psyche. And he concluded that, as a “plaything” of our drives and instincts, our intellect cannot be trusted when it comes to war. Our words become mouthpieces for our emotions and drives. They no longer express the complexity of the world around us. What appears as intellectualism is actually a mix of what we might call affectualism and instinctualism. Our ideas lose their actual intellectual integrity.
At the time he wrote these letters, Freud was also working on an essay, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), published six months after the outbreak of World War I. In it, he outlined what he called a “disturbance…in the attitude which we have hitherto adopted towards death.” In times of peace, he argued, our minds recognize the reality of death while making an effort to reduce it “from a necessity to a chance event.” In times of war, “the accumulation of death puts an end to the impression of chance.” Our mental defenses, he says, experience a regression from civilized society to barbarism, which “compels us once more to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death” and which “stamps strangers as enemies, whose death is to be brought about or desired.” Our relation to death in wartime, he insists, is fundamentally different from what it is in peacetime. And this changes the very structure of our psyches. As the prevalence of death increases, our relationship to its meaning changes, and our instincts play a greater role. In some people, the “fight” takes precedence, and in others the instinct of “flight,” each of which is susceptible to intellectual justification.
Freud ended his essay on war and death with an uncomfortable thought. Admitting that “war cannot be abolished,” he asked, "Is it not we…who should adapt ourselves to war? Should we not confess that in our civilized attitude toward death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means?” He admitted that his thinking was “in some respects a backward step,” but added that “it has the advantage of taking truth more into account, and of making life more tolerable.” Again, he did not prioritize the logic of pacifism but rather tried to understand the relationship between his thinking and the reality unfolding around him—believing that, in any case, everyone was essentially doing the same thing whether they argued for war or for peace. War may be terrible, he argued, but that didn’t make it any less true.
Schur suggests that the six months between the outbreak of World War I and the publication of “Thoughts for the Time on War and Death” (1915) were essential to the congealing of Freud’s thinking as a psychoanalyst. “Freud,” Schur writes, “was the analyst again. He realized that his own objectivity might have been influenced by propaganda. The time had come for him to do away will all illusions.” Giving up illusions does not mean taking up one side or another. It meant analyzing and questioning all sides equally. War and death made it impossible for intellectuals to be right about something. The most they could do was to try to describe what was happening and to analyze why. Perhaps this is why his letter to Einstein was given the title, “Why War?” And perhaps this is why it ends with an unarticulated question: Why Not?
War is painful. It multiplies suffering in ways that are rarely justifiable. But when intellectuals argue for or against war, we often sideline our analytical abilities because our affects and instincts play a greater role in our thinking. Building arguments on partial information, we produce more de facto propaganda that aims to manipulate others rather than elucidate them. The intellect cannot truly grasp destruction—just as it cannot grasp death. This, too, was a sentiment that provoked considerable backlash against Freud: “Nothing resembling death can ever have been experienced,” he wrote, so “the fear of death should be regarded as analogous to the fear of castration.” Critics railed against Freud’s “eroticization” of the fear of death. But they weren’t reading it, like Freud, from a symbolic perspective. Since Freud conceived of Eros as a symbol for life itself, his argument merely claimed that having never personally experienced death, or spoken to anyone who has, the most we could fear—in concrete terms—was a truncation of life. Beyond that, he argued, there was no way for us truly to understand the meaning of death.
In both war and death, Freud suggests, the intellect is limited, and as intellectuals we have to be able to acknowledge the limits of our intellectualism. It is unfortunate both for global societies and for the legacy of this period that so many intellectuals have chosen denunciation and righteousness. Driven by understandable instincts of fear and self-preservation, intellectuals condemn whole groups, nations, and demographics, while justifying the vilest of acts when committed by those they support. In reality, the business of violence and destruction—like death—cannot be stopped by arguments alone. This does not mean we should advocate for amoralism with regard to war. It just means that the most the intellect can contribute in times of violence is, first, description, and, second, analysis. We can make political statements. But they are no longer in the realm of intellectualism. They aim to effect policies that are different from those already in place. They seek to end a specific case of destruction. This activity doesn’t require intellect. It requires power.
Under the guise of thought-leadership, intellectuals are increasingly making a case for why they are right and others are wrong. As soon as we make general arguments for or against war, we turn into activists or politicians vying for public influence. These may be commendable efforts for individuals to undertake during periods of armed conflict. But they no longer belong to our era’s intellectual legacy. Intellectualism’s core activity is analysis—investigating how and why certain occurrences take place around us. We can gain greater insight into human nature as well as the human spirit by looking at the forces that drive our destructive and creative impulses than by trying to stop those forces. Intellectualism cannot argue for or against war because the stakes are not abstract—they are not located in the life of the spirit alone. Where war is concerned, the issues at stake are a matter of life and death. Faced with destruction, the most that intellectualism can do is to better understand how death and aggression play out in this tragic chapter of the drama we call life.