Ştefan Tiron's Reviews > The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics

This book may be an invaluable deep dive into the murky water and meandering currents of late Romantic tradition of German philosophy. A place & time so hard to follow (for me!), when biocentric conceptual clusters tend to coalesce. His study marks the transmogrification of Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life) from its 1900 radical aesthetic roots into Nazi biopolitics as part of a new discipline of Life (Lebenskunde) via the works of Ludwig Klages (1872-1956).

This book made me keenly aware of my own complete ignorance as to the influence of various forgotten authors on the contemporary episteme. All the splits, shifts and debates that followed, and how they shaped future discussions around "primordial images" (Urbilder), "life-force" (Lebenskraft), "Pulse beat" (Pulsschlag) or "Aura" and "intoxication" (Rausch) that became important for Walter Benjamin's own theoretical musings.
At this particular juncture, this accent on the centrality of -Life- (central itself to Lebensphilosophie) was unceasingly popular among the fashionable aesthete, the anarchist, the queer poet, the cultured feminist, the parlor occultist. The Cafe society pagan sympathizers & fashionable polytheists moved into elite intellectual circles. The book traces this move from Bohemia into Academia and full professorship. Klages joins the Cosmic Circle in Munich, a neo-pagan proto-fascist esoteric society espousing a return to a mythological worldview. From what I gather the Cosmic Circle was a mixture of visionaries-charlatans, fringe intellectuals and writers with a heavily initial intellectual investment into fin-de-siecle degenerationist, decadent aesthetics that scandalized the bourgeois Schwabing quarter.
Nitzan Lebovic gives a thorough treatment of all these various ideas, currents, authors and counter-currents of Weimar Germany via archives, Nachlass (in German academia the collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence, and so on left behind when a scholar dies), and personal archives or letters being exchanged at the time. He also makes it easier to wade through some of the most notorious and toxic thinkers of the era (such as Alfred Baeumler), proto-fascist and Nazintellectuals and ideologues that actively vied for political support, ready to back-stab each other intellectually or throw in disrepute each others work in order to secure academic positions or the right to monopolize and influence the official take on Nietzsche or Bachofen in the new (to pick a hated but maybe fitting term): Nazi 'market of ideas'.

I did not know of Ludwig Klages before this study, nor about his antisemitism, nor his courting of the Nazi regime his later fall from grace. Was vaguely aware of his involvement in and championing of several pseudo-sciences: the study of Graphology and his Characteriology (so-called Charakterkunde) because of the Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J Gould, otherwise, his name was a complete blank to me.
He was a contemporary of Heidegger and published his Der Geist Als Widersacher der Seele (The Spirit/Mind as the Adversary of the Soul) in and around 1929 -1932 close to Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927) publication. Being outside the canon contrasts with what Nitzan Lebovic slowly uncovers - the incredible influence Klages had during his lifetime, from his involvement with the Munich Cosmic circle and his individuation in and around Stefan George early on - to the later academic positions, wide press coverage, and full room lectures.
Starting with his rabid antisemitism, there is no wonder nobody wants to do today with L. Klages radioactive inheritance - he is practically shorn by all sides. For the Conservatives he is too sexually fluid, too 'feminine', anti-Christian, for the progressives, his anti-modernism, traditionalism and attack on science make him unpalattable. Anyway if interested in how L Klages treated the Kantian sublime of fusional - Der kosmische Rausch (cosmic Rush) - or theorized his heroic/magic/erotic tripartite division of it, then you have to look further.
If dabbling in 1900 occultism and pagan revivalism does not seem a hassle to you, it is very much worth checking the chapter on Klages or his version of "Entzauberung"(Disenchantment) pessimism in relation with the Frankfurt School and critical theory's 'magical' roots The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason A. Josephson-Storm.
This might also explain his brand of cosmogonic eros promotes a "knowledge of the world-weaving power of all-embracing love... much deeper than all knowledge of science". His neo-paganism is in good company although Lebovic never linked it with similar esoteric- and reactionary ideals proffered by Italian fascist ex- dadaist Julius Evola. They both seem to differently impact the neo-traditionalist and perennial outlook. In fact, they represent maybe two modalities or two opposite tendencies (?) inside XX c anti-modern right-wing thinking.
One (in Evola's case) oriented towards action, tantric violence and the patriarchal warrior-priest caste (closely allied to the war aesthetics & sublime existentialism of Ernst Jünger) while the other (Klages) was more about tuning with the ancestral unconscious, the pulse and ebb of life, inner experience, kenosis passivity, non-action etc. If humanity would be renewed in love (mystical orgy) only then shall "the wound inflicted by the matricidal spirit be healed" (Mensch und Erde/Man and Earth as quoted by Jason A Josephson-Storm).
Apart from representing these different modalities, both of them seem to converge towards a kind of primordial nocturnal (necrophiliac?) spiritualism close to funerary rites, death, and darkness.
For Klages the Untergang (Decline) - is an apocalyptic-tinged mood and that might be a key, since most of his critics mention it. Even aside from his anti-intellectual brooding, this period had seen a steady move from Geist (Life- denying from the perspective of German Lebensphilosophie) to Seele (Life-affirming) and thus from Mind to Soul, and from the millenarian/prophetic to the apocalyptic - eschatological. As Joan Braune traced out in her brilliant book about Erich Fromm(Erich Fromm's Revolutionary Hope: Prophetic Messianism as a Critical Theory of the Future), some rare authors, such as Ernst Bloch made the move inversely from the apocalyptic back to the prophetic. Ernst, a millenarian Marxist if there was one, lampooned Klages by calling his ideas 'Tarzan Philosophy' (which I find very appropriate considering the renewal and rewilding poured into Lord Greystoke). Bloch knew what he was talking about since he was familiar with this apocalypticism and himself an early exponent of contemporary gnostic revivals such as reappraisals of Marcion of Sinope via his Spirit of Utopia (1918).

Lebensphilosophy should not be equated with proto-fascism (Bergson is perhaps the most famous Lebensphilosoph) and as such the migration of "Life" from left to right was not a smooth process, although in the end it became a series of tautologies and slogans close to Laibach's Life is Life. Life as Lifeforce - was used all around, either as a critical attack against the Prussian bureaucracy by the Green movement or against the necrophilia of the Nazis.
Neither should be considered Lebensphilosophie a school of thought, like Phenomenology or neo-Kantianism, but rather an inclination (as G Lukasz), that intersects and influenced all intellectual currents of the time.

Anyway, Nitzan Lebovic does not touch on other non- Lebenphilosophie infused thinkers such as Evola or anti-modernist traditionalists as Guenon (The Crisis of the Modern World/La crise du monde moderne published in 1927), and rightly so since the German case already offers a lot of fruitful conclusions and dynamics of its own.
I am grateful to Nitzan Lebovic for even considering the importance of a correspondence and letter exchange that Walter Benjamin had after he met with Klages in Munich. There is a very peculiar, even for some - quirky and bizarre interest Benjamin had in ideas that could be easily be dismissed as disastrously neo-Romantic, or unrepentantly anti-rationalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti- Freudian, etc
Klages's antisemitism is complicated by the fact that he found a lot of admirers amongst Jewish authors such as Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Hesse or W Benjamin +others that Nitzan brings to the fore. Even Adorno and Horkheimer mention Klages in the footnotes of their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), although they do not retain his utopian hopes of renewal. For them, the back-to-nature Lebensreform (life reform) had already been subsumed under capitalism, anticipating our current healing & wellness industry. Still, they retained his criticism of unlimited progress.
This corrective, anti-Kantian stance goes back earlier, as noted by others (Nicholas Jardine) when the local phenomenon of Naturphilosophen which may be seen as a specific 1800 German response to a wider programme for the pursuit of natural history as established by Blumenbach (in Göttingen) and theorized by Kant starting with 1790. Initially, a way to get to grips with a 'teleomechanical' view, it focused on vital forces (Lebenskraft), ultimate origins of life and their organization. All that was declared (by Kant) illegitimate, 'unscientific' and beyond the pale of common sense.
Klages animosity against neo-Kantians thus reworked and developed a full-blown (anti-intellectualist) critique of Enlightenment, Kantian Geist & systematicity.
Some of the sharpest and decidedly progressive thinkers of this time, such as Benjamin and Georg Lukács (especially his early pre-Marxist and neo-Romantic Die Seele und Form from 1908) took on and grappled with what initially was a core aesthetic radicalism not yet differentiated into political thought.

Lebovic's discussion around the Bachofenic impact is especially interesting. In my diploma I alluded to the role Johann Jakob Bachofen played within the radical reinvention of antiquity and prehistory. He is now mostly remembered as a theoretician of the matriarchal phase of society and Roman right. Bachofen was by any means an outsider antiquity scholar with an interest in mortuary rituals and art. In the 19th c he developed his own theory of human history along a spectrum, starting from early matriarchal to the phallocentric patriarchal rule. Apart from its left or right-wing appropriations, theories of matriarchy define a Conditio Moderna (Manfred Frank) counter-current, critical of both rationalism and patriarchy.
Suffice to say J J Bachofen, like Nietzsche, became a contended name, be it on the right or on the left. Both feminists, anti-feminists and Marxists have been hotly debating Bachofenic ideas. Logozentrismus - is one such term with a long history in poststructuralist theory, initially coined and popularized by Ludwig Klages. It is really hard to assess the influence Klages had on German literature, psychology, psychiatry, deep ecology or on continental philosophy although Paul Bishop (Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit ) made a more recent try at it. In no mean measure does this have to do with Klages's own claim on the Bachofenic intellectual inheritance as well as his own plagiarism paranoia regarding others 'plundering' his ideas.
Bachofen was reclaimed by both Klages and his Nazi competitors, both in-fighting for the 'true' take on him, and Nitzan follows this closely since the 1900 're-discovery' and republication of Bachofen's main texts to their entry into the Nazi mainstream.
Klages took the Nietzschean premises of Lebensphilosophie to their extremes, a bizarre Geistfeindliche (Spirit-opped) metaphysics where Seele (Soul) stood for "alienated intellectuality in favor of a new-found earthly rootedness." Trying to pull down the veil of Klages's degenerationist philosophy of history and more than dubious metaphysics, Jürgen Habermas considers his contributions to the pre-cognitive (non-congnitive?) pre-rational conditions of perception via what he terms "Bewegungswahrnehmbarkeit" (a sort of proprioception - i.e. perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body) ahead of their time (in a Der Spiegel article from 1966).

Most significant is the absolute lack of biological ideas or the role of biology as a science for Klages. Life and Lebenskraft(Lifeforce) are completely phenomenological and existential somehow. His biocentrism (Biozentrismus) is somehow completely abiological and his "Life" is emptied out of Biological science and opposed to any positivist biological theory.
The neo-vitalism and organicist views of Hans Driesch (embryologist and follower of Heckel) or the inner life 'Umwelt' experience of Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll makes an appearance but they are not really important for the development of Lebensphilosophie via Klages. He somehow searched to distance himself from empirical studies and other developments in Life sciences, and he was not as much a vitalist but an animist believing the whole universe to be ensouled. I have to re-read the fragments on Driesch but this is how I understand it.
Klages is now regarded as a forerunner to the conservationist green movement in Germany, so it becomes doubly urgent to discuss his disputed legacy and wider effects.

The book has very few side-notes on the work of other books detailing the conceptual and theoretical byways of Life (brief mentions of Eugene Thacker's or Brian Massumi). Also missing is a possible Klagesian resonance in contemporary non-mechanicist reappraisals of alternative mechanicism (Jessica Riskin) or more recent 'vibrant' materialisms and a vibrational ontology (Jane Benett, Rosi Braidotti, Grosz). That being said, Nitzan brings historical breath & inflection to the Lebensphilosophy discourse. A background that is lacking in even the most important studies dedicated to 1920s or to the major ideologues of the Conservative Revolution (especially Carl Schmitt) and the role they played in contemporary (negative biopolitical) thinking (Agamben).
If one is to compare Klage's own processualism (he was very much a supporter Heraclitus = flux ontology instead of a reality of the substrate) to A N Whitehead's (his Process and Reality was published in 1929) response to the Conditio Moderna, again there is a clear difference. The tone of Klages's proto-deconstruction of logocentrism and Language in general - feels (like Heidegger's) very ponderous, lyrical, doom-laden, apocalyptic, almost stereotypically Germanic in contrast with Whitehead's making his most amazing statments in a matter of fact, no-frills, easy-going way.
There's is a big divergence in attitude towards science also. They are both non-positivists, but Whitehead follows patiently both science's inadequacy and felicitous turns, openly celebrating science's emerging dematerialization and anti-mechanicism.