Living experience, expression, and immediacy between 1895 and 1915

pp. 53-78

in: Nitzan Lebovic, The philosophy of life and death, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The wave of intellectual pessimism that swept through Europe at the start of the twentieth century does not explain the power of Klages's aesthetic system, so heavily entrenched in romanticism's natural symbolism. Here one can certainly concur with George Mosse's depiction: "For the romantics, nature was not cold and mechanical, but alive and spontaneous. It was indeed filled with a life force which corresponded to the emotions of man."² Yet this passage fails to capture the weight and magnitude of romanticism and the fervor Klages and his fellow Lebensphilosophers brought to it. The political theorist Hans Freyer viewed the nineteenth century as a long process of transformation that led from Hölderlin to Kierkegaard and, finally, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, to Nietzsche. Instead of a romantic life force unfolding and realizing its own plan, Freyer saw it as a true revolution, in which philosophy unified "the earth and its world history [Weltgeschichte], … freeing men from their old life world [Lebenswelt] and grounding them in a new, more abstract sense, by empowering them on the basis of the organic mass."³ At the center of this revolution stands the inherent relation among the aesthetics of living forms, the body, and the politicization of this link in early modernism.