Destroyer and Bearer of Worlds: The Aesthetic Doubleness of War

Abstract

The influence of the Romantic era on modern thinking about war is contradictory. The most important Romantic-era theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, for example, is variously seen as advancing a rational model of war as purposeful, or else as heralding the modern era of total, absolute warfare. What is the relationship between war as purpose and war as a self-regarding act, war as an instrument used to achieve certain specific ends, and war as the fulfilment of humanity’s fundamentally violent nature, practised for its own sake? How could these contradictory views both emerge from the Romantic era, and how could they subsist sometimes in one and the same event, where war is both a tool to achieve certain goals and an expression of superpower will-to-dominance? The argument of this chapter is that the way of reconciling this complex relationship is through aesthetic philosophy. War emerges from the Romantic era as fundamentally aestheticised. By this I do not mean that war is a princely, refined and elegant practice, nor that war is a thing of beauty, but war as the unique and paradoxical relationship between meaning and meaninglessness that Kant understood as the only possible way of reconciling pure and practical reason in subjective judgement. This chapter will trace the connection between Romantic aesthetics through Romantic era thinking about war to modern constructions of war in aesthetic terms.