Lebensphilosophie

What did the "philosophy of life" arise against?

Late nineteenth-century Europe was seething with industrialisation, technical progress and the triumph of natural science. In philosophy, too, positivism, which sought to explain everything by experiment, measurement and causal law, and neo-Kantianism, which examined the logical conditions of knowledge, were strong. Lebensphilosophie was a reaction against them. The experience of living human beings is full of feelings, intuitions, drives, will and historical experience that cannot be calculated, it argued, and the methods of science chop all this up and treat it like dead things.

As the German Wikipedia puts it, Lebensphilosophie was developed in France by Henri Bergson and in Germany by Wilhelm Dilthey as a counter-project to positivism and neo-Kantianism. Its representatives differed so much that what they shared was little more than putting the phenomenon of life at the centre of inquiry and opposing rationalism, intellectualism, scientism and a materialist world view. It was less a rigorous doctrine than a cultural mood that swept the intelligentsia of the fin de siècle, at home with the youth movement, Jugendstil and Symbolist literature.

Why are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche counted as forerunners?

They did not know the term, but the critique of reason and Enlightenment was already present in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer saw the essence of the world not in reason but in a blind, ceaseless "will to live". Nietzsche continued the idea by turning it round. In "On Self-Overcoming" in the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra he wrote: "Wherever I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master."

Wo ich Lebendiges fand, da fand ich Willen zur Macht; und noch im Willen des Dienenden fand ich den Willen, Herr zu sein.

In the same chapter life tells Zarathustra that it is what must always overcome itself, aiming at Schopenhauer: "Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life, but, so I teach you, will to power!" The impulsive Dionysian that The Birth of Tragedy set against the rational Apollonian, and the attitude of affirming life, became an important stimulus for Lebensphilosophie.

Nur, wo Leben ist, da ist auch Wille: aber nicht Wille zum Leben, sondern – so lehre ich's dich – Wille zur Macht!

What did Dilthey, Bergson, Simmel and Klages say?

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) made life the starting point behind which philosophy cannot go. Mocking the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant, in whose veins flowed not real blood but the thinned juice of reason, he proposed to start from whole experience that includes will and feeling. As a result he distinguished the natural sciences, which "explain" external facts, from the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), which "understand" human experience and its expressions, a distinction still in use today. The method of hermeneutics also developed greatly through him.

In France Henri Bergson, in Creative Evolution (1907), rejected both the theory that explains the evolution of life as mechanical adaptation and the one that explains it as the realisation of a preset purpose, and spoke of an inner force driving life forward. Mechanism, he objected, "absolutely excludes the hypothesis of an original impetus, I mean an inner push that would carry life, through ever more complex forms, to ever higher destinies". This is the famous élan vital. Bergson emphasised living "duration" as distinct from measurable time.

Elle exclut absolument l’hypothèse d’un élan originel, je veux dire d’une poussée intérieure qui porterait la vie, par des formes de plus en plus complexes, à des destinées de plus en plus hautes.

Georg Simmel analysed modern culture through the tension between ever-flowing "life" and the "forms" it produces, which then harden. Ludwig Klages, in The Mind as Adversary of the Soul (1929–1932), attacked the "logocentrism" that had dominated culture since the modern age, the rational mind that splits life apart. Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, which saw cultures as organisms that are born, age and die, was also read as a popular version of Lebensphilosophie.

Where did Lebensphilosophie lead?

Lebensphilosophie influenced the leading figures of the philosophy of existence, and Edmund Husserl made the "life-world" a fundamental category in his late philosophy. Heidegger's analysis of Dasein is also connected with Dilthey's understanding of historical life. The English Wikipedia notes that Max Horkheimer, too, was influenced by Lebensphilosophie. The Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason overlaps with its concerns, but they parted ways in choosing reason's self-criticism instead of abandoning reason.

Lebensphilosophie was very popular in the first half of the twentieth century but lost its following quickly after the Second World War. A major reason was its relation to Nazism. Klages's strong anti-rationalism had influence within Nazi ideology, and a language that put blood, instinct and the "life" of the community above reason mixed easily with Nazi propaganda.

How did Marxism criticise Lebensphilosophie?

The most systematic critique is György Lukács's The Destruction of Reason (1954). Lukács interpreted all German bourgeois philosophy after Hegel as a reactionary and irrational answer to class struggle, tracing a line from the late Schelling through Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Lebensphilosophie to the political practice of fascism. He charged that Lebensphilosophie was an irrationalism hostile to reason, represented the standpoint of the "imperialist bourgeoisie" and so paved the way for Nazism. He singled out Klages as a forerunner of fascism and Spengler as the man who turned Lebensphilosophie into a philosophy of militant reaction.

Lukács's critique has been called too sweeping, branding every thought not based on Marxism as irrationalism. But in showing what politics can follow when words like "life", "lived experience" and "intuition" take the place of analysis of social relations and history, his analysis remains an important reference point for understanding the history of Nietzsche's reception.