In its most general sense Lebensphilosophie denotes a philosophy which asks after the meaning, value and purpose of life, turning away from purely theoretical knowledge towards the undistorted fullness of lived experience. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the concept of 'life' assumed a central role in German philosophy. Lebensphilosophie typically opposes rigid abstractions with a philosophy based on feeling and intuition, and seeks to establish the priority of 'life' as an all-encompassing whole. The central claim underlying its various manifestations is that life can only be understood from within.
The first recorded use of the term Lebensphilosophie is in a 1772 collection of essays by G.B. von Schirach, Über die moralische Schönheit und Philosophie des Lebens (On moral beauty and the philosophy of life). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the expression was employed to characterize a philosophy for practical life and was used synonymously with terms such as Lebensweisheit (wisdom of life) and Lebenskunst (the art of living) in order to provide general ethical and practical maxims for correct living.
While there are obvious points of continuity with this popular usage, the roots of the modern conception of Lebensphilosophie should, more generally, be traced back to the mid-eighteenth-century reaction against Enlightenment rationalism. The emphasis on feeling and immediacy, and the lived experience of truth in the work of figures such as Hamann and Herder, together with the search for a unifying principle prior to the abstractions of reason, leads to a prioritization of 'life' over 'mere understanding'. The Sturm und Drang mobilized a set of fundamental oppositions - between the living and the dead, the concrete and the abstract, the organic and the mechanical, the dynamic and the static - whose influence is carried through to modern Lebensphilosophie in the Idealism of Schelling and the early Hegel, as well as the Romantic attempt to establish the identity of philosophy and life, poetry and thought (see Romanticism, German).
However, the centrality of the concept of 'life' to German philosophy in the decades between 1870 and 1920 cannot be understood without reference to the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's concept of the will as a single, unifying principle is both a precursor and model for subsequent attempts to grasp life as an all-encompassing metaphysical category: here the critique of rationalism first takes on the form of a metaphysics of the irrational. In contrast, Nietzsche's importance resides in his attempt to explicate truth in terms of its function for life, and his insistence on the dynamic, historical and conflictual character of human claims to knowledge. A third and later figure of comparable importance is the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose conception of time as lived experience exercised an enormous influence on German philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bergson's ideas were taken up as part of the vitalist opposition to scientific materialism and the attempt to show that life cannot adequately be explained in mechanical and physical terms: biology rather than physics provides the central categories for understanding life in its own terms (see Vitalism).
Lebensphilosophie must also be seen as part of a broader cultural movement which extended beyond the confines of philosophy. This movement is marked, on the one hand, by a striving to overcome, through a vitalistic affirmation of the fullness of life, the limits placed on the isolated individual, and on the other hand by a mood of pessimism and decadence which received its most powerful expression in the arts. In the work of figures as diverse as Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Oswald Spengler, the concept of life is taken up as a critical category by means of which the conflicts and contradictions of modern society could be identified and diagnosed.
There are two principal reasons for the relative obscurity into which Lebensphilosophie has fallen today, despite the dominance which it exercised prior to and immediately after the First World War. The first is the extent to which some of its principal insights were taken up in a methodologically more rigorous and productive way in Husserlian phenomenology and Heidegger's 'philosophy of existence' (see Heidegger, M.). The second is the extent to which the irrationalism and cultural criticism of Lebensphilosophie fed into the doctrines of National Socialism. Perhaps the most enduring achievement of Lebensphilosophie is to be found in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey. His emphasis on the concrete fullness of lived experience and the diversity of the manifestations of social and cultural life prior to the abstractions of reason results in a new attempt to ground philosophically the human sciences and the important methodological distinction between Erklärung (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding) (see Explanation in history and social science).
See also: Enlightenment, Continental
JASON GAIGER
Kühne-Bertram, G. (1987) Aus dem Leben - zum Leben. Entstehung, Wesen und Bedeutung populärer
Lebensphilosophen in der Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (From life - to life. The origin, nature and significance of popular philosophers of life in the history of ideas in the 19th century), Frankfurt: Peter Lang. (An attempt to trace the influence of popular, pre-scientific writings on later, academic Lebensphilosophie.) Lieber, H.-J. (1974) Kulturkritik und Lebensphilosophie. Studien zur Deutschen Philosophie der
Jahrhundertwende (Cultural criticism and Lebensphilosophie. Studies in German philosophy at the turn of the century), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.(Contains essays on Dilthey and Simmel and on the relationship of Lebensphilosophie to National Socialism.)
Misch, G. (1930) Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der Dilthey'schen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl (Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology. A critical discussion of the relationship between Dilthey's approach and that of Husserl and Heidegger), Bonn: Friedrich Cohen.(Early analysis of the relationship between Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology which seeks to defend the superiority of Dilthey's approach.)
Rickert, H. (1920) Die Philosophie des Lebens. Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (The philosophy of life. A presentation and critique of the current trends in philosophy), Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr.(Contemporary critique of Lebensphilosophie from the standpoint of Neo-Kantianism.) Scheler, M. (1915) 'Versuch einer Philosophie des Lebens' ('An essay on the philosophy of life'), in Vom
Umsturz der Werte. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze (On the overturning of values. Treatises and essays), Bern: Francke, 1955.(Identification of Nietzsche, Dilthey and Bergson as the founding fathers of contemporary Lebensphilosophie.)
Schirach, G.B. von (1772) Über die moralische Schönheit und Philosophie des Lebens. Reden und Versuche (On moral beauty and the philosophy of life. Lectures and essays), Altenberg.(First publication to use the term Lebensphilosophie.)
Schnädelbach, H. (1984) Philosophy in Germany, 1831-1933, trans. E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.(Focused history of German philosophy written for an English-speaking audience. Contains a chapter devoted to the concept of 'life'.)
Sendlinger, A. (1994) Lebenspathos und Décadence um 1900. Studien zur Dialektik der Décadence und der
Lebensphilosophie am Beispiel Eduard von Keyserlings und Georg Simmels (The pathos of life and decadence around 1900. Studies in the dialectic of decadence and Lebensphilosophie through the example of Eduard von Keyserling and Georg Simmel), Frankfurt: Peter Lang.(Investigation into the broader cultural context of Lebensphilosophie.)
Simmel, G. (1921) Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur, trans. K.P. Etzkorn in G. Simmel (ed.) The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, New York: Teachers College Press.(Account of the centrality of the concept of life by one of the key thinkers of the period.)