BIANCO Philosophies of Life Complete PDF

Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W.
Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
Philosophies of life
The expressions “Philosophie des Lebens” and “Lebensphilosophie” first
appeared during the 1770s in the writings of mutually independent, non-academic
German authors linked to the Romantic movement. Starting from 1912, they
reemerged in two essays written respectively by the Neo-Kantian philosopher
Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) and by the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874-1928).
With these key expressions, the two philosophers designated the doctrines of three
other, older producers of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Henri Bergson
(1859-1941), and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), who, nonetheless, never quoted one
other, never met, nor explicitly defined their own work as a “philosophy of life”; after
the First World War, Rickert added to this small group of authors select others
philosophers such as his colleague Georg Simmel (1858-1918), the phenomenologist
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and the pragmatist William James (1842-1910) despite
the fact they were not connected in any way. They also did not employ these
expressions. Starting from the 1920s, the expressions Philosophie des Lebens and
Lebensphilosophie spread in Germany, being used by both non-academic producers of
philosophy – such as Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and Ludwig Klages (1872-1956)
– and by such academics as Dilthey’s former student Georg Misch (1878-1965). The
writings of Scheler’s students Helmut Plessner (1892-1985) and Arnold Gehelen
(1904-1976) are sometimes defined as such, but they are normally classified under the
label of “philosophische Anthropologie” (“philosophical anthropology”). During the
Third Reich, while volkisch ideology took over Germany, many other minor cultural
producers, promoting the regime’s bio-political agenda, presented themselves or were
treated as Lebenphilosophen; however, starting from the 1940s, their work has been
1
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
quickly forgotten. Between the end of the 1920s and the 1940s, with the translation
and the discussion of some of the aforementioned authors’ works into other languages,
and the production of secondary literature dedicated to their work, the expression
“philosophy of life” entered more common usage, being applied to other authors’
doctrines supposedly characterized by a metaphysical conception of life conceived as
an original transformative force, and by the trust on a method or a faculty irreducible
to the ones used by science. Finally, from the 1970s on, the expression “philosophy of
life” – “philosophe de la vie,” “filosofia della vita,” “Lebensphilosophie” – began to
designate non-empirical doctrines stating the priority of “life” conceived as a
principle irreducible to physicochemical causality or theories concerning “life”
addressed to a broad lectureship. The work of philosophers as different as Georges
Canguilhem (1904-1995), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Gilles Deleuze
(1925-1995), Michel Foucault (1924-1984) or even the one of Modern philosophers
such as Baruch Spinoza started being classed under the banner “philosophy of life,”
again despite the fact that none of these authors once deployed the expression.
As a result, the expression “philosophy of life” is currently employed as a
synonym or as a hyponym of “vitalism,” “philosophy of nature” and “biological
philosophy,” labeling texts produced in completely different historical, geographic
and disciplinary contexts 1 and bearing only certain family resemblances. To
understand this process of growing polysemy of the expression, it is necessary to take
into account this process as the effect of a socio-epistemological transformation,

1
For a retrospective on the books published between 1990 and 2006 around this “theme” or using the
expression “Lebensphilosophie”, cf. Jürgen Groβe “Revitalisierung der Lebensphilosophie?,”
Philosophische Rundschau, 53, 1, 2006, 12-33. Between the recent studies on the topic: Karl Albert,
Lebensphilosophie. Von den Anfängen bei Nietzsche bis zu ihrer Kritik bei Lukács (Alber, Freiburg im
Breisgau 1995), Ferdinand Fellmann, Lebensphilosophie. Elemente einer Theorie der Selbsterfahrung
(Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1993) and “Lebensphilosophie” (in Hans Jörg Sandkühler, ed.
Enzyklopädie Philosophie, v. 2, Meiner: Hamburg 2010), Jürgen Große, Lebensphilosophie (Stuttgart
Reclam 2010); Robert Kozljanic, Lebensphilosophie. Eine Einführung (Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2004);
Volker Schürmann, Die Unergründlichkeit des Lebens. Lebens-Politik zwischen Biomacht und
Kulturkritik (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011).
2
which invested both the terms “philosophy” and “life”; this transformation was the
result of the increasing division and specialization of intellectual labor which
triggered polemics and negotiations between four types of actors 2 : a) academic
philosophers, b) non academic producers of philosophy, c) academic producers of
empirical-based knowledge about life and human phenomena – mainly naturalists,
embryologists, physiologists3 and, later psychologists4 and sociologists5 – and, finally
– starting from 1930s – d) ideologists directly tied to state apparatuses. Only a
nominalist and sociological approach to the history of the expression can cast a light
on it, while an exclusively conceptual and philosophical approach risks increasing the
confusion.
The birth of “life” and the birth of “philosophy”
Since the early modernity the word “life” (vita, vie, Leben) had been used to
designate both human existence, and what characterizes a peculiar class of
phenomena, the living beings. To differentiate the first meaning from the second,
were used theological expressions, such as “vie spirituelle” and “geistige Leben” or
vie intérieure” and, starting from the 1870s, “Erlebnis.” According to Giorgio
Agamben’s controversial thesis, 6 this ambiguity was already present in ancient
philosophy, in the distinction between bios (βίος) – or “qualified life,” life proper to

2
Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890-1920
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998).
3
Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behaviour
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
4
Martin Kusch, Psychologism. A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge. London,
Routledge, 1998.
5
Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013); Marc Joly, La révolution
sociologique. De la naissance d’un régime de pensée scientifique à la crise de la philosophie (Paris: La
Découverte, 2017)
6
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
3
man, a political animal (zōon logikon) – and zoê (ζωή) – “bare life,” biological life,
the life proper to individuals deprived of rights inside the Greek polis.
If we follow the more unanimously recognized periodization proposed by
Michael Foucault in The Order of Things, it is only at the end of the 18th century that
a consistent notion of biological life appears. Before, as Foucault famously wrote,
“life did not exist.”7 Aristotle certainly was the first philosopher to provide a general
definition of life as a soul (ψυχή, psuche), animating certain bodies, but he did not
separate neatly these bodies from the inanimate, nor he conceived a special science
studying them. By getting rid of the Aristotelian souls and their final cause, by
reducing everything, included organisms, to extension and matter, the 17th and 18th
century mechanist philosophers and scientists left no room for life8.
Two key phenomena had been essential for the emergence of the modern
notion of life: the first is the appearance of “vitalism” a type of endeavor proper to
medical theories and practices, which isolated a distinct class of phenomena; the
second, is the work of naturalists who contributed in unifying and specifying this
class. In his Theoria medica vera (1708) the physician Georges-Ernest Stahl (1660-
1734) sketched a new theory of life aiming at constituting the ground for the medical
practice. According to Stahl, organisms distinguish themselves from the inanimate
matter because of a soul (anima), insuring their auto-conservation and their fight
against corruption and dissolution. Théophile de Bordeu (1722-1776) et Paul Joseph
de Barthez (1734-1806), members of the medical school of Montpellier, took from
Stahl the idea of a vital principle, a power or a force, fighting against corruptibility,
while they simultaneously abandoned the idea of a soul and Stahl’s theological
framework inherited from Aristotle and Galen. Twenty years after the publication of

7
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge, 1970, p. 139).
8
For the history of this notion: André Pichot, Histoire de la notion de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
4
Barthez’ Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme (New Elements of the Science
of Man, 1778), in the Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Physiological
Researches upon Life and Death, 1800), the Parisian doctor Marie François Xavier
Bichat (1771-1802), spoke of a “vital force” and defined life as “the set of functions
resisting to death.” It is at this moment that the term “vitaliste” was used for the first
time by Charles-Louis Dumas (1765-1813) to refer to him and the school of
Montpellier9.
In Germany, where the usage of the term “vitalismus” was extremely rare until
the beginning of the 20th century, a group of physiologists and naturalists at the turn
of the 18th century – such as Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), Karl Friedrich
Kielmeyer (1765-1844), Heinrich Friedrich Link (1769-1851), Christoph Girtanner
(1760-1800) and Georg Reinhold Treviranus (1776-1837) – united around Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) and adopted the idea of a biological drive
responsible for self-development, procreation, nourishment and reproduction. This
drive, which had been originally called by Blumenbach’s mentor Caspar Friedrich
Wolff (1734-1794) as essentliche Kraft and by Friedrich Kasimir Medikus (1736-
1808) as Lebenskraft, came under different names such as the ones of
Erzeugungskraft, nisus formativus and Bildungstrieb.
By the year of Bichat’s death in 1802, the term “biology” had been used in by
Treviranus in his Biologie, oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur (Biology, or
Philosophy of Living Nature), and by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) in his
Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (Research on the Organization of
Living Bodies). They both affirmed the existence of a science having a peculiar object,

9
For the history of “vitalism,” see François Duchesneau (ed.), Vitalisms from Haller to the cell theory
(Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1997); Roselyne Rey, Naissance et développement du vitalisme en France:
de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIème siècle à la fin du Premier Empire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
2000) and Charles T. Wolfe and Sébastien Normandin (ed.), Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-
Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010 (London: Springer, 2013).
5
namely life. At the same moment, the naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)
introduced a mutation into compared anatomy: he stopped classifying living beings
according to their similitudes and differences – as Carl Von Linné (1707-1778) or
Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788) had done, following Aristotle and
Galen – instead basing this classification on the general functions of life. The work of
the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) reinforced the idea – proposed by Lamarck
in his Philosophie zoologique (1809) – of an historical continuity between the
different living beings. The “birth” of life, completed by the theory of evolution,
implied a mutation of the image of nature – which stopped being something static, as
it was the case during the 18th century – and started to be conceived as a unitary
process of continuous transformation. Biology changed as well the image of “man”:
by inscribing the history of humanity inside the history of life and by reducing man to
one living being between the others, the newborn science represented an impressive
strike delivered to both anthropocentrism and to the religious beliefs supporting it.
At the same moment, the word “philosophy” started being involved in a
transformation related to the one involving the life sciences: while during the 17th and
18th centuries, the term had been semantically unstable, designating texts produced
both inside and outside the academic spaces, a part of which would be labeled today
as “science”. At the beginning of the 20th century, the word was used to indicate a
peculiar cognitive practice, practiced almost exclusively inside the university, aimed
at providing a logical and synthetic ground for the totality of human knowledge and
values. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the protagonists of this change, which
lead to institutional consequences in all Europe because of the Humboldtian reform of
6
the medieval university:10 he granted the “scientists” – a word that progressively
substitutes the one of “natural philosophy” – the task of explaining phenomena, and to
the “philosophers” he gave the responsibility of studying their conditions of
possibility. On the one hand, the natural world would be studied experimentally
following the a priori categories of causality, space and time, thus it would perforce
be deprived from all purposiveness. On the other hand, the idea of will and agency
would henceforth be limited to human subjectivity. In France, it was Maine de Biran
(1766-1824) – whose philosophy inspired Victor Cousin (1792-1867), one of the
main reformer of French universities – who most contributed to the neat separation
between the task of the sciences of life and the one of philosophy, conceived as a
special activity. In his Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée (On the
Decomposition of Thought, 1802), Biran separated an “hyper-organic” force, peculiar
to the human mind, object of psychology or philosophy, from organic matter, object
of physiology and medicine.
Even if Kant had placed life in continuity within the inanimate matter, in his
Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790), he left a breach open for a
possible dynamic and teleological description of it. By admitting the hypothesis of the
existence of purposiveness in nature had a heuristic utility, he suggested to naturalists
like Blumenbach notions such as the ones of Bildungstrieb and Lebenskraft.11 After
Kant, thinkers such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1852) and Friedrich Schelling
(1775-1854) opposed to the limitations imposed by the author of the three Critiques.
Their doctrines, which will go under the name of Naturphilosophie, attempted to

10
See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change
(Boston: Belknap, 1998).
11
See Timothy Lenoir, Strategy of Life (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1982); Robert J. Richards,
The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2002); Allison Leigh Dushane, Formative Drives: Living Matter and the
Development of the Modern Subject, 1789-1834 (PhD, Duke University, 2008).
7
provide a metaphysical framework capable of giving a meaning to the new science of
life and to discoveries such as electromagnetism. These authors, who were describing
a non-deterministic universe animated by spiritual forces, were influenced by
Romanticism’s reaction against a narrow Enlightenment rationalism and the Industrial
Revolution, namely by its emphasis on feeling and immediacy, by its insistence on the
affective and intuited experience opposed to the narrowness of rationality and, finally,
by its research for a unifying principle prior to the “abstractions” of scientific reason.
Naturphilosophie mobilized a set of oppositions – between the living and the dead,
the concrete and the abstract, the organic and the mechanical, the dynamic and the
static, individuality and generality, art and technics – which in turn irrigated European
thought for more than a century. In France, Schelling influenced the work of the
philosopher Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900): in his De l’habitude (1842), he
reintroduced agency and freedom in the mechanistic natural world of Cartesianism,
describing a universe organized according to a hierarchy of growing degrees of
perfection and freedom. Ravaisson also inherited from Schelling the idea that,
because of nature’s purposiveness and creativity, the only way to understand it to
complete intellect with an esthetic intuition.
In the meanwhile, in Germany by 1828, the synthesis of urea by Friedrich
Wöhler (1800-1882) – which aimed at proving the continuity between animate and
inanimate matter – and the discovery of the conservation of energy and the
formulation of the laws of thermodynamics by Julius von Mayer (1814-1878) caused
the decline of Naturphilosophie and tipped the scales in favor of the mechanistic
theory of life. In 1842, the physiologist and philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817-1881)
published an article, “Leben, Lebenskraft” and a book, Allgemeine Pathologie, which
both constituted an attack to the notion of a “vital force” and, more generally, to all
8
speculative theories of life such as the ones proposed by the Naturphilosophen. Lotze
was not a lone pioneer in embracing the scientific an anti-vitalist orientation; on the
contrary, he followed his teacher and friend, the experimental psychologist Gustav
Fechner (1801-1887) as well as Hegel’s contemporaries and rivals Friedrich Fries
(1773-1843) and Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). As a result, between the end
of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s, several German physiologists – Ernst
Brucke (1818-1892), Carl Ludwig (1816-1895), Hermannn von Helmholtz (1821-
1894), Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896) and Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902),
students of the naturalist and physiologist Johannes Muller (1801-1858) – found
themselves in agreement while rejecting vitalism and teleology and supporting a
mechanism. Du Bois-Reymond’s Über die Lebenskraft (1848) and Virchow’s equally
polemical, “Alter und neuer Vitalismus” (1856) landed the last blow to all vitalist or
teleological conception of life. In France, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and, after him,
positivism played the same role: they opposed to metaphysical notions such as “vital
force” and “soul” and to any analogy between the living beings and the human
mind.12
Starting from the 1860s and until the end of the century, the relation between
philosophy, dominated by the Kantian reference, and the life sciences, progressively
unified by the theory of the evolution, had been regulated by a compromise: to the
biologists, the facts as interpreted according to a mechanic causality; to the
philosophers, their conditions of possibility. In Germany the inheritors of idealism
and Naturphilosophie – such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Eduard Von
Hartmann (1844-1906) and, in certain ways, Friedrich Nietzsche – all occupied

12
John A. McCarthy, Stephanie M. Hilger, Heather I. Sullivan, Nicholas Saul (eds.), The early history
of embodied cognition from 1740-1920: The Lebenskraft-debate and radical reality in German science,
music, and literature (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
9
positions deemed peripheral or exterior inside the academic space. They had were
ignored or criticized by the philosophers commanding academic power and belonging
to the Neo-Kantian schools of Marburg and Bade – figures such as Kuno Fischer
(1824-1907), Eduard Zeller (1814-1908), Otto Liebmann (1840-1912), Jürgen Bona
Meyer (1829-1897) and Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875) and, later on, Wilhelm
Windelband (1848-1915). In France – where Charles Renouvier (1815-1903), Jules
Lachelier (1832-1918), Jules Lagneau (1851-1894) and Emile Boutroux (1845-1921)
played the same role of reformers few years later – the situation proved quite
similar.13 In the two nations, the Neo-Kantian philosophers showed a harsh hostility
towards the empirical approach to human cognition and behavior proposed by
psychology, an emerging new science, which attempted to coordinate its researches
with the life sciences. The Neo-Kantians discussed the moral and epistemological
consequences of the theory of evolution, opposing the supposed dogmatism of the
exclusively empirical study man. Their aim was the one of preserving a peculiar place
for man inside the living, insisting on the importance of concepts such as the ones of
freedom and self-determination.
However, in France, the referential works of Jules Lachelier (Du fondement
de l’induction, or The Fundement of Induction from 1872) and Emile Boutroux (De la
contingence des lois de la nature, or The Contingency of the Natural Laws, 1874),
guided by an original interpretation the third Critique, and influenced by Félix
Ravaisson, left the door open for a different approach to nature, once conceived as an
universe organized hierarchically according to growing degrees of contingence,

13
See Fredrick Beiser, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014); Christian Klaus Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche
Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988); Helmut
Holzhey, Ethischer Sozialismus: Zur politischen Philosophie des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt,
Suhrkamp, 1994); Maurizio Ferrari, Introduzione al Neocriticismo (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1997); Éric
Dufour, Les Néokantiens. valeur et verité (Paris: Vrin 2003).
10
freedom and spirituality. The orientation proper to these philosophers is often called
“realisme spiritualiste”14 (spiritualist realism), following the expression used by Félix
Ravaisson in his La philosophie française au XIX siècle (19th Century French
Philosophy, 1868). On the one hand these thinkers inscribed man inside the process of
evolution and, on the other hand, they insisted that this process was not mechanical,
but it was teleological or, at least, indeterminate. Nonetheless, just as Von Hartmann
and Nietzsche, these “spiritual realists” were occupying peripheral positions in the
academic space: Alfred Fouillé (1838-1918) – author of L’évolutionnisme des idées-
forces (The Evolutionism of the ideas-forces, 1890) – quickly retired from teaching
for health reasons, his stepson Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888) – author of Esquisse
d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction (Sketch of morals without obligation nor
sanction, 1885) which deeply influenced Nietzsche – taught at high-school and died
prematurely, and, finally Henri Bergson – author of L’evolution créatrice (Creative
Evolution, 1907) – by far the most renewed between these “spiritualists,” was a
professor at the Collège de France, a prestigious institution, though less important
than the Sorbonne.
“Philosophy of life” outside and inside the academia
During the long 19th century, because of the polysemy of the words “life” and
“philosophy” and because of the process of disciplinarization, the expression
“philosophy of life” was used according to two meanings. In English, French, Spanish

14
For “spiritualism”, and its heritage, see Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Une
généalogie du spiritualisme français. Paris: J. Vrin, 1997; Mark Sinclair, “Is habit the ‘fossilised
residue of a spiritual activity’? Ravaisson, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty” (Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, 42, 1, 2011 p. 33-52); Larry S. McGrath, “Alfred Fouillée between science and
spiritualism” (Journal for the History of Ideas, 12, 2, 2015, p. 295-323); François Azouvi, La Gloire de
Bergson. Essai sur le magistère philosophique, Paris: Puf, 2007; Giuseppe Bianco, Après Bergson.
Portrait de groupe avec philosophe. (Paris: Puf, 2015(.
11
and Italian, the expression was used, though very seldom, as a synonym of biology. In
English, it appeared, for instance, in the title of a medical manual by the physician
Thomas Charles Morgan (1783-1843) Sketches of the Philosophy of Life (1819). In
France, in 1838, Auguste Comte introduced the expression “philosophie biologique”
in his Cours de philosophie positive to designate the life sciences, what Lamarck
called “philosophie zoologique.” “Philosophie biologique” conserved this meaning at
least until the mid-1920s: it is in this sense that we have to understand the titles of
books such as Éléments de philosophie biologique (Elements of Biological Philosophy,
1907), by the lamarckian and anti-bergsonian biologist Félix Le Dantec (1867-1917),
La Philosophie biologique d’Auguste Comte (Auguste Comte’s Biological Philosophy,
1909) by the doctor Raoul Mourgue (1886-1950) and La genèse de l’énergie
psychique. Essai de philosophie biologique (The Genesis of Energy. Essay on
Biological Philosophy, 1921), by the Polish pathologist Jan Danysz (1868-1928).
Contrasting with France, in Germany from 1770s onwards, the terms
Philosophie des Lebens and Lebenspilosophie designated a peculiar literary genre
consisting in edifying tales, aphorisms and “psychological” analysis indicating a wise
way of conducting one’s existence.15 The emergence of this popular philosophy had
been made possible by the expansion of the book market, by the existence, since
Christian Wolff (1679-1754), of a “Philosophia practica”, and, finally, by the
existence of a field called “anthropology.”16 This latter was popularized by books
such as Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweis (Anthropology for Physicians and the

15
See Georg Pflug, “Lebensphilosophie”, in Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer and Gottfried Gabriel,
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, t. 5 (Darmstadt: Schwabe Verlag 1980, p. 135-140) and
Gertrude Kühne-Bertram, Aus dem Leben, zum Leben: Entstehung, Wesen und Bedeutung populärer
Lebensphilosophien in der Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Bern: Peter Lang, 1989).
16
See Odo Marquard, “Anthropologie,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Darmstadt:
Schwabe Verlag, 1971, t. 1, p. 362-374); John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of
Anthropology (Chicago, University of Chicago, 2002); Chad Wellmon, Becoming Human: Romantic
Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007).
12
Worldwise, 1772) by the physician Ernst Platner (1744-1818), who formed the most
important between these “Lebensphilosophen,” namely Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-
1793). Moritz had been the author of a Beiträge zur Philosophie des Lebens (A
Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, 1780), but had been as well the editor of one of
the first journals of psychology, the Magazin zue Erhahrungsselenkunde (1783-1793).
As a result, from the 1780s onward, in connection with a new interest for the French
moralists, terms such as Lebenskunst (art of living), Lebenslehere et Lebensweisheit
(wisdom in life) began to appear.
This kind of “Lebensphilosophie” shared many features with the Romantic
Movement – namely its eclecticism, its anti-scholasticism and, sometimes, its anti-
academicism. Since 1800, the philosopher Wilhelm Traugott Krug (1770-1842) –
who would later become Kant’s successor as the chair of logic and metaphysics at the
University of Konigsberg – gave a first formal definition of “Lebensphilosophie.” He
defined it as a “Philosophie für die Welt” – a philosophy for everyone, constructed
fragmentally – opposing it to the “Schulphilosophie” – the systematic philosophy
practiced in the academic spaces. This definition appears again in a dictionary
published by Krug in 182817 and, the same year, in a book by Friedrich Von Schlegel
(1772-1829), Philosophie des Lebens, a collected volume of lectures he gave in
Vienna. By defining the object of philosophy as the “inner spiritual life” (Geistege
Leben), Schlegel counterpoised the “philosophy of life” to the “philosophy of school,”
implicitly designating, with this expression, the idealism dominating German
institutions. In fact, at the same moment, in his lectures on the history of philosophy,
published posthumously (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 1836),

17
Cf. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften nebst
ihrer Literatur und Geschichte (Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1828).
13
Hegel discredited the genre, considering it as a mere continuation of Wolff’s
“Philosophia pratica.”
After the decline of German idealism, the heritage of this popular and extra-
academic “philosophy of life” – combined with the one of Romanticism – influenced
cultural producers peripheral to the academic institutions, such as Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, who knew Philipp Moritz; both of them harshly criticized Kantianism and
Idealism, the German academic system and the supposed dogmatism of empirical
sciences; both of them were influenced by the French moralists and signed books
whose titles were evoking the approach and the aims of Lebensphilosophie. These
include, for instance, Schopenhauer’s Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (Aphorisms on
the Wisdom of Life, 1841) and Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (Gay science,
1882). Nonetheless, neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche used the expressions
“Lebensphilosophie” or “Philosophie des Lebens,” which circulated widely outside of
the university.
These expressions appeared again under the pen of an academic in 1913, in an
essay entitled “Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens,”18 signed by Max Scheler, a
disciple of the Fichtean philosopher Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926). With this manifesto
Scheler tried to intervene strategically in a context marked by a “Steit”, a quarrel
appeared between 1895 and 1910 in a conflicting space created by the interaction
between three type of actors: a) academic philosophers, b) non-academic producers of
knowledge and c) biologists who started meddling into questions that the academic
philosophers considered as of their own exclusive competence. This quarrel could be
renamed as “Biologismus-Streit” and can be considered as the origin of the
“philosophy of life” of the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1940s.

18
Max Scheler, “Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens” (1913-1915), Gesammelte Werke, t. 3 : Vom
Umsturz der Werte. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze (Bern, Franke Verlag, 1955).
14
At the center of the Biologismus-Streit there was one problem, which can be
summarized by the title of the most famous of Scheler’s books, namely the one of The
Position of Man inside the Cosmos (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, 1928).
This problem was not exclusively theoretical, but practical, as well: once the place of
man was established, one could also establish what knowledge was. Knowledge, in
turn, ultimately had the last word on man’s “human” essence. To put it bluntly, a
theory of man, an “anthropology,” was the essential instrument to trace disciplinary
distinctions and hierarchies.
Kant and Darwin
Since Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) and since Haeckel’s
l’Anthropogenie (1874), the theory of the evolution explained man by locating him
inside the history of life: hominization? was nothing other but the result of the
combination between the process of adaptation and the genetic variations. This
apparently simple explanation was the result of the convergence of different regional
sciences emerged during the 19th century, such as comparative anatomy, paleontology,
embryology and genetics. Since 1860, “philosophy” – intended as a specialized
knowledge practiced in the academic spaces – was providing, along with religion, a
moral and epistemological “spiritual supplement” aimed at organizing empirical
knowledge and reflecting on its grounds and consequences; nonetheless philosophy
started coming under the attack of the empirical psychology proposed by authors such
as Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and their
students, who had the ambition of naturalizing man’s behavior and cognition. To
15
survive as a discipline, philosophy had to be able to counter the attacks of both
biology and psychology and to locate an object that it could claim as its own. Given
that the empirical sciences were little by little confiscated all possible objects,
philosophy was left with the only object who was as well the subject of science: man.
This is the reason why, during the 1910-1920s, a part of philosophy had to turn itself
into a “philosophy of life,” able to resist to biology’s “mechanism” and, then, it had to
turn into a “philosophical anthropology,” able to counter psychology’s and
sociology’s supposed “reductionisms.”
Starting in the 1870s, after the decline of German idealism and of
Naturphilosophie, two intellectual forces were dominant in the Second Reich19: the
Neo-Kantians, divided between the two schools of Bade and Marburg, and the
Darwinians, represented by Ernst Haeckel.20 Haeckel was both the main introducer of
Darwinism, and a scholar whose authority and originality had been internationally
recognized. The alliance that the Neo-Kantians signed with the Darwinians was
similar to the one they signed with positivists such as Richard Avenarius (1843-1896),
Ernst Mach (1838-1916), Ernst Laas (1837-1885) and Eugene Dühring (1833-1921).
Both the alliances, proper to the Kulturkampf, were strategic: they aimed at opposing
the idealism of Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) and Adolf Tredelenburg (1802-1872) and
the religious and reactionary forces of Thron und Altar.21 Furthermore they meant to
counter the pessimist doctrine of unconscious – both anti-Kantian, anti-scientific and
anti-academic – promoted by Von Hartmann and by other authors inspired by
Schopenhauer, who were gaining a lot of success during the 1870s. The Neo-Kantians
were satisfied with evolution theory’s methodological mechanism, and with its

19
See Fredrick Beiser, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796-1880.
20
See Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
21
See The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism and Ethischer Sozialismus: Zur politischen Philosophie des
Neukantianismus.
16
opposition to the metaphysical idea of vital teleology; but they demanded as well the
respect of the disciplinary frontiers established by Kant, which were structuring
German academia. Hence, this alliance represented a true “epistemological Yalta
aiming at serving everyone’s purpose.”22
Nonetheless, both the biologists and the philosophers were progressively
unsatisfied by the limits that this pact imposed on their activity. These limits were
traced over on the totality of the object they were supposed to study from two
completely different points of view: life or Leben. It is not by chance that the term
Erleben (and the one of Erlebnis) – that had already been used as simple synonyms of
Erfahrung (experience) – acquired a technical meaning during the 1870s, especially
after the success of Darwinism and the emergence of scientific psychology. Wilhelm
Dilthey was among those most influential in this direction.
Dilthey had systematically used the two terms in his biography of
Schleiermacher (Leben Schleiermachers, The Life of Schleiermacher, 1870) and
conceptually defined them in his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften
(Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883). In the concept of Erleben converged
three different conceptual aspects already present in the Romantic movement: a) the
immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit) of the relation between man and world, preceding any
rational construction, b) the meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) of life, tied to its
interconnected historical totality, and c) the incommensurability
(Inkommensurabilität) of the life’s content itself, which gave to the concept an
aesthetic dimension. 23 Starting from this concept, Dilthey created a series of

22
Jean-Louis Fabiani coined this expression to qualify the division, established by Robert K. Merton,
between sociology and philosophy of science (Jean-Louis Fabiani, “Controverses scientifiques,
controverses philosophiques,” Enquête, 5, 1997, p. 12).
23
Konrad Cramer, “Erleben, Erlebnis,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophi, vol. 2
(Basel/Stuttgart, Schwabe & Co. Verlag, 1972); Georg Gadamer, Truth and method (translated by Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
17
categories such as Lebensbezüge (manifold of vital relations), Lebensgefuehl (vital
feeling), Lebenshorizont (vital horizon), Lebenszusammenhang (vital context),
Lebensausserung (vital expression), Lebenskreis (sphere of life), Lebenswirklichkeit
(vital reality), Lebensverhalten (vital behavior), Lebenserfahrung (vital experience).
Lebensförderung (vital acceleration), Lebenssteigerung (vital intensification).
Even if Dilthey “manifested no special interest in biology and did not use the
term ‘life’ in a biological sense,”24 he was witnessing (word choice?) both the success
of Darwinism, and the one of empirical psychology. One of Dilthey’s objectives in
the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften was explicit: to subtract a part of human
psychology, that he called “descriptive,” so as to the grasp of the sciences of nature
(Naturwissenschaften) and therefore annex it to the sciences of the spirit
(Geisteswissenschaften). According to Dilthey, descriptive psychology’s object was
historical, and therefore, this science had to use a peculiar hermeneutical method
irreducible to the one used by the natural sciences, the one of “understanding”
(Verständnis).
Dilthey opened the second chapter of his Introduction, paradigmatically
entitled “The sciences of mind form a whole independent form natural sciences,” with
a brief discussion of a quarrel called of the “Ignorabimus,” started by Emil du Bois-
Reymond in his Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens (On the limits of Human
Knowledge, 1872). In this book, the physiologist assigned two insuperable limits to
human knowledge: the nature of the relation between matter and force, and that of the
relation between the body and the mind. Eight years later, Du Bois-Reymond gave
another talk entitled “Die sieben Welträthsel” (“The seven enigmas of the Universe,”

24
Thodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto, Toronto
University Press, 1980, 74). See as well Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human
Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
18
1890), in which he located seven different limits. Haeckel named this talk
“Ignorabimus,” after the Latin aphorism “Ignoramus and ignorabimus” (“we ignore
and we will ignore”),25 used by Du Bois-Reymond. He remained fiercely opposed to
the thesis of his colleague, advocating for the possibility of solving these “enigmas”
through the theory of evolution. It is not by chance that Haeckel’s bestseller and most
polemical book would be called Die Welträthsel (1899). Finally, it goes without
saying that in his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey clearly sided with
Du Bois-Reymond against Haeckel.
The case of Rudolf Eucken, Scheler’s mentor, a catholic philosopher and
Haeckel’s colleague at the university of Jena, is similar to the one of Dilthey. Eucken
criticized materialism for being the cause of the loss of the real values in modern
society, instead proposing an idealistic philosophy, based on the concept of
Geistesleben, or “spiritual life.” According to Eucken, only idealism would be able to
save civilization, by promoting the “spiritual” dimension proper to human life.
Starting from his first works form the late 1870s, until Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens
(The Sense and Value of Life, 1908), a book that had him awarded with a Nobel prize,
Eucken’s production had been characterized by a progressive multiplication of
concepts and terms derived from the root Leben.26

25
For the dispute of “Ignorabimus”, cf. Fredrick Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840-1900
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
26
To mention only few of them: Innenlebens, Geistesleben, Lebenskräft, Lebensinhaltes, Einzelleben,
Zusammenleben, Lebensprinzip, Seelenleben, Lebensformen, Lebensrichtungen, Lebensaufgabe,
Menschenleben, Lebensinteressen, Lebenskreis, Lebensbestimmung, Lebenswille, Durchleben,
Lebensplan, Lebensvollste, Lebensprozess, Lebensaufgaben, Lebenstätigkeit, Lebensbedingungen,
Lebensverhältnisse, Lebensgestaltung, Lebensdrang, Lebensmächte, organischen Lebens,
Lebenssystem, Lebensform, Lebensgestalt, lebendige Kraft, Naturlebens, Soziallebens, Lebensregung,
Lebensgüter, Lebensordnung, Lebenskunst, Lebensideal, Lebensbilder, Tageslebens, Alltagsleben,
Lebenswerk, Lebensbedingungen, Lebensweisheit, Empfindungsleben, Staatsleben, Lebensstande,
Lebensarbeit, Lebensführung, lebendigem Kontakt, Lebenstypus, Nachkommen fortzuleben,
Lebenskunst, Lebenslagen, Gemütslebens, Familienlebens, lebensvollen Ganzen, lebendigen
Gegenwart, lebendige Kolorit, Lebensideal, Lebensmut, Lebensstand, Lebensproblem,
Lebensäußerung, Lebenstiefen, Lebensführung, Lebensbefunde, Gefühlsleben, Lebensfülle,
Lebensgefühle, Affektlebens, Erdenlebens, Lebenskomplex, Lebenswandels, Lebensmittelpunkt,
19
Just as Dilthey, Eucken did not conceive “Leben” in a biological way; on
contrary both of them made biological life depend from a “spiritual” life, reserved to
philosophy, the queen of the Geisteswissenschaften. Even if both of them were
completely disinterested by the advancements of the Naturwissenschaften, their usage
of concepts derived from the root Leben is the clear sign of a growing concern felt by
the academic philosophers.
At the end of the century Ernst Haeckel broke the non-aggression pact
between the biologists and the philosophers. With the publication of his bestseller,
Die Welträthsel. Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie (The
Riddle of the Universe: At the Close of the Nineteenth Century, 1899), Haeckel
became the herald of Monism, a totalizing and supposedly scientific vision of the
world, which claimed to liberate man from both religion and philosophy. The one
philosopher he wanted to get rid of was the one dominating the German University:
Immanuel Kant. Haeckel not only criticized him – along with his colleagues Du Bois-
Reymond, Virchow and von Baer – but explicitly mocked him for failing to fulfill his
rational epistemological promises because he had been affected by a “gradual
decadence of the brain”. Die Welträthsel, which was also a plea for empirical
psychology against all the philosophical and theological descriptions of man, raised a
general outcry from the entire philosophical community. From that moment on, all
Neo-Kantians became hostile towards most of the Darwinians. 27
A few years later, a new outrage emerged from the field of the life sciences, in
the person of Hans Driesch (1867-1941), one of Haeckel’s pupils. During the 1890s

Traumleben, Alltagsleben, Lebensdurst, Lebenstriebe, Lebensdrange, Lebenswogen, Weltlebens,
Lebensfähigeren, Lebensäußerungen, Lebensglück, Lebensenergie.
27
The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism.
20
Driesch abandoned his master’s rigid mechanism, separated himself from Darwinism
and formulated a new teleological approach to the living organisms he named “neo-
vitalism.” In an essay of 1893, Die Biologie als selbständige Grundwissenschaft
(Biology as an Independent Fundamental Science) Driesch defended biology as an
“independent basic science,” and in the following years, imitating Haeckel, he
progressively abandoned the laboratory to produce writings targeting a broader
lectureship. This evolution led him to an Habilitationsschrift – directed by the Neo-
Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1841-1915) and by the experimental
psychologist Oswald Kulpe (1862-1915) – and, in 1911, to an appointment to the
chair of “natural philosophy” at the University of Heidelberg, one of the Neo-Kantian
headquarters. Because of its content, Driesch’s work had attracted the attention of
some philosophers: Heinrich Rickert mentioned Die Biologie als selbständige
Grundwissenschaft in in his Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung
(The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences, 1897), where he
established the difference between the sciences of man or of culture
(Kulturwissenschaften) and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and Eduard
von Hartmann discussed Driesch’s Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre
(1905) in his Das Problem des Lebens (The Problem of Life, 1906). 28 Driesch’s
research initially could have looked like a possible step in the direction of a less
imperialistic conception of biology, a conception more friendly to philosophy. But in
1907, two years after the publication of his book on vitalism, in a series of lectures
given at the University of Aberdeen published in English at the end of 1908 under the
title of The Science and Philosophy of Organism, Driesch decided to aggressively
face some problems that, until then, had been considered as exclusively philosophical.

28
Maurizio Esposito, Romantic Biology, 1890–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003).
21
That was evident from the book’s title, which announced itself as both scientific and
philosophical. By doing that, Driesch followed the path taken by Haeckel in his two
bestsellers, Die Welträthsel Gemeinverständliche Studien über Monistische
Philosophie (1899) and Die Lebenswunder Gemeinverständliche. Studien über
Biologische Philosophie (1904). Here, he dared to treat his work as a biologist (? A
biologist’s philosophy? A biological philosophy?) “philosophy”.
In the last chapter of The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, “The
History of Humanity,” Driesch directly criticized Rickert: against the division he had
established between Kulturwissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, Driesch was
advocating the possibility of understanding the history of human culture on the basis
of the positive knowledge proper to the sciences of life. He was also advocating a
reform of German universities going against the distinction between the two types of
knowledge. Finally, in 1908, Driesch published in the Zeitschrift für den Ausbau der
Entwicklungslehre a positive review of L’Evolution créatrice, a book which already
caused the outrage of the French Neo-Kantians. The title of the review was
paradigmatic: “Bergson, der Biologische Philosoph,” an expression that, until then,
was absent from the German literature.
Rickert’s reaction came some years later, and it was indirect. In 1912,
Windelband’s protégé published in Logos. Zeitschrift für systematische Philosophie –
the journal of the Neo-Kantian school of Baden, to which he belonged – an article
entitled “Lebenswerte und Kulturwerte” (“Life-values and cultural values”). As the
title clearly stated, Rickert’s point of view was that of Wertphilosophie (“philosophy
of value”), a specialty proper to the school of his master Windelband. The essay was
directed against what he called “Lebensphilosophie” or “biologistische
Modephilosophie,” (“fashionable biological philosophy”), and its arguments were
22
very similar to the ones presented nine years later in Philosophie des Lebens.
Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit (The
Philosophy of Life. Analysis and Critique of Today’ Fashionable Philosophy, 1920).
Under the category of Lebensphilosophie Rickert placed all the discourses pretending
to explain human values, norms and culture from a purely biological standpoint. This
explanation consisted in what Rickert called a reduction of everything to “bloßen
Leben,” namely to “mere” or “naked life,” an expression that was to be used by many
theorists after him, and was popularized by Agamben. Lebensphilosophie, inspired by
modern biology, and especially by evolutionism, gave priority to a notion of life,
which was, nonetheless, metaphysical and potentially irrational (acc to who? Rickert
or Bianco?). Life was conceived as a force, accessible through a peculiar method or
faculty, irreducible to the scientific ones.
Epistemological borders
The Science and Philosophy of the Organism represented only the last of a series
of writings that the German Neo-Kantian mandarins perceived as attacks on the
legitimacy of academic philosophy. 29 Rickert’s first polemical target was neither
Driesch, nor Haeckel – to whom he was alluding, without mentioning them – but
Friedrich Nietzsche, who was receiving a belated, though impressive success both
inside and outside the academic space.
Until the mid-1890s, the author of the Genealogy of morals was almost unknown:
he was just one of the several writers who tried to respond to the problem of the
collapse of transcendent certainties and values caused by the growing success of the

29
See the essential book by Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German
Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969).
23
life sciences, by the failure of the revolution of 1848 and, finally, by the economical
crash of 1873. As Fredrick Beiser has demonstrated, the “death of God,” far from
being Nietzsche’s trademark, was a recurrent theme, which had been circulating in
Germany at least since Philipp Mainländer’s Die Philosophie der Erlösung (1876).
The axiological crisis into which German culture plunged starting from the 1960s
provoked the belated success of Schopenhauer, who had been ignored until then. In
his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation 1818,
expanded in 1844), influenced by readings in the newly emerged life sciences –
physiology, pathology and zoology (Cabanis, Bichat and Lamarck) – Schopenhauer
described the phenomenal world as the product of an unconscious, blind and
insatiable will to live, academic philosophy as useless, and renouncement to the world
as the only solution to the suffering caused by life. The belated success of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy starting from the mid-1960s, increased by that of von
Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869),
caused an intellectual dispute around the value of “life”, understood as human
existence: the Pessimismus-Streit.30 This dispute mobilized several academic and non-
academic actors: the first to respond was the positivist philosopher and economist
Karl Eugen Dühring (1833-1921), in a book paradigmatically entitled Der Wert des
Lebens (1865, The Value of Life), but the following years were especially marked by
the reaction of the Neo-Kantian community. Both the Neo-Kantians and the
positivists could not accept anything of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. His misanthropy,
his pessimistic ascetic ethics, his jointly anti-Kantian and anti-scientific endeavor and,
finally, his contempt for academia, were all going against everything that both
academic philosophers and scientists were defending.

30
Fredrick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2016).
24
During the Pessimusmus-Streit, Nietzsche was nothing but one of the several
actors stating his own position, but he surely wasn’t under the spotlights: until the
mid-1890s he was almost unknown, therefore both the positivists and the Neo-
Kantians ignored him, while they were focused on their two bugbears: von Hartmann
and Schopenhauer. This situation changed at the turn of the century: on the one hand,
Nietzsche’s books began to have a great success both in popular culture and the
avant-gardes and in the academic world, especially after the publications of works
such as those by Alois Riehl (Friedrich Nietzsche: der Künstler und der Denker,
1899) and Hans Vaihinger (Nietzsche Als Philosoph, 1902).31
Outside of academia, using some references taken from Nietzsche, many non-
academic producers had been able to articulate the role their “life” as artists played
inside society with the broader horizon of biological “life”; using notions arbitrarily
taken from biology, and especially evolutionary theory, they had equally been able to
claim the superiority of art over science and philosophy. A few years before the
publication of Rickert’s essay, literary journals like Die Tat,32 were contributing to the
constitution of new ideologies promoting life, energy and youth, and were mixing
Nietzsche’s vitalism, Haeckel’s monism and Bergson’s spiritualism.
In 1907, the sociologist Georg Simmel, one of Rickert’s colleagues and friends,
published a monograph, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, which was the result of a series
of lectures he had been giving at the University of Berlin. Like many other
contemporaries, Simmel had been, since the beginning of the 1800s, an unpaid
academic lecturer who was struggling to conquer a permanent professorship. During
the 1870s and the 1880s, the expansion of the German Universities gave many young

31
Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University
of California Press, 1992).
32
Marino Pulliero, Une modernité explosive: la revue Die Tat dans les renouveaux religieux, culturels
et politiques de l’Allemagne de 1914-1918 (Lausanne: Labor et Fides, 2008).
25
scholars the hope that an academic career was going to be the logical follow-up of
their studies. On the opposite, during the 1890s and the 1900s, the stagnation of the
academic market surprised a great number of them, whose career progression slowed
down considerably. Simmel was one of these scholars, and his position was more
complicated insofar as no “mandarin” – such as Wundt, Dilthey or Windelband – was
protecting him, and since he did not possess a classic academic profile. After the
refusal of his first PhD in the ethnology of music, Simmel wrote another dissertation
on Kant under the direction of Edmund Zeller and Hermann von Helmholtz, but, at
the same time, he became interested in Wundt’s Volkspsychologie and in Spencer’s
sociology.
At the turn of the century, because of the development of German universities,
lecturers like Simmel abandoned academia, or struggled to prove their talent to the
institutions by attracting to their courses as many students as possible. In his letters to
Heinrich Rickert – with whom he had been corresponding since the preparation of the
Philosophie des Geldes (1900, Philosophy of Money) 33 – Simmel was precisely
sharing with him his increasing popularity amongst the students in Berlin. A way to
attract more students consisted in introducing new questions and new authors: this is
what Simmel did with Nietzsche, who he started reading while he was finishing his
book on money, at the precise moment in which the author of Also Spracht
Zarathustra was having success. Philosophie des Geldes treated, through the question
of money, a topic, which was a trademark of the School of Bade (??): that of values.
In the book on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Simmel followed his colleagues Riehl
and Vaihinger, and treated the two authors as serious philosophers able to respond to
serious philosophical questions such as those of values and historicity, and he used

33
Michael Landmann, Kurt Gassen (ed.), Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel (Berlin: Gassen and
Landmann, 1958).
26
them to discuss the “vital” origin of values, reconnecting to a discussion which
originally started during the 1870s, during the Pessimismus-Streit. With this book,
Simmel reflected on his sociological inquiries and started locating them in a
metaphysical framework inspired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Bergson.34 This
development, which led to the publication of his last book, Lebensanschauung: vier
metaphysische Kapitel (The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal
Aphorisms, 1918), progressively irritated Rickert, who had kept corresponding with
him through the years.
The second of Rickert’s targets was Henri Bergson. After the publication of the
Evolution créatrice, Bergson’s texts started having a certain success in Germany,35
especially in cultural milieus that the Neo-Kantians disliked: academic, idealistic and
religious – such as Eucken’s circle – or non-academic and sometimes reactionary –
such as the groups gathering around Stefan George (1867-1933), that Simmel
participated in, or the one gathering around the publisher Eugen Diederichs (1867-
1930), who bought Die Tat in 1911. The naturalization of man that Bergson seemed
to be proposing in the Evolution créatrice,36 his pragmatist conception of scientific
knowledge, his anti-intellectualistic idea of an intuition able to grasp the flux of life
without mediations, and last but not least his manifest detestation of Kant made him,
both in France and in Germany, a true bête noire of the Kantians.
Rickert also criticized the American pragmatists – that the Neo-Kantians opposed
during the fourth international congress of philosophy, held in Heidelberg in 1908 –,
and, without naming them, he implicitly criticized Haeckel and Driesch. Hence,
Rickert’s essay constituted an attempt to put at their place all those who, from

34
Georg Fitzi, Soziale Erfahrung und Lebensphilosophie. Goerg Simmels Beziehung zu Henri Bergson
(Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2002).
35
Caterina Zanfi, Bergson et la philosophie allemande (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013).
36
It is only in the Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932) that Bergson made clear that
his aim was not to completely naturalize culture.
27
different perspectives, were trying to contest the disciplinary divisions existing in
German academia since the Nachmärz. The targets were non-academic and anti-
academic philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (that he considered as the
forefathers of Lebensphilosophie), academic philosophers inviting to a non-academic
practice of philosophy such as Bergson and the pragmatists, biologists with
hegemonic ambitions, such as Driesch and Haeckel.
The “plenitude of Life”: phenomenology and Lebensphilosophie
Scheler’s manifesto for the philosophy of life has to be interpreted as a strategic
intervention in a field polarized by the tensions between, on the one hand, mechanist
biologists – such as Haeckel – and vitalists or holists – such as Hans Driesch or Jakob
Johann von Uexküll (1864-1944) – and, on the other hand, between philosophers and
biologists. Scheler smartly picked up the expression used by Rickert, “philosophy of
life,” turning the fashion stigmatized by an established academic, into a brand useful
for his own promotion as a challenger. Because of the particular academic
conjuncture of 1895-1910, the younger producers of philosophy’s writings, which
were not likely to be published in scientific publications, were hosted in non-
academic journals, and, therefore, they had to conform to a different lectureship.
Scheler published his essay in a literary journal, Die weißen Blätter, he promoted an
expression, “Philosophie des Lebens,” which had been used at the end of the 18th
century by nonacademic authors, and finally used a literary and prophetic style.
Finally Scheler wasn’t presenting the philosophy of life as a stable set of theories, but
as a program inspired by three philosophers: Nietzsche, Bergson and Dilthey, whose
works had to be appropriated by the “new generation.” These three authors, who had
28
never been in contact with each other, had nonetheless something in common: their
reaction to positivism, to the mechanistic interpretation of the life sciences and finally
their hostility or, at least, their indifference, to Kantianism.
According to Scheler the “philosophy of life” was a philosophy springing “out of
the plenitude of the experience of Life” (“aus der Fülle des Erlebens des Lebens
heraus”). The genitive “des” (“of”), implied precisely that “life” had to be both the
object, and the subject of philosophy. But this “life” wasn’t the life studied by
biologists, but the pre-objective felt or “lived life” (Erlebnis des Lebens). On the
opposite, Scheler considered that the biologists – even Driesch and Uexküll, both
appreciated for their holistic of vitalist approaches – were only studying an objectified
life or a mechanized one – in the case of Haeckel. Therefore science needed a
philosophy – and especially a moral philosophy, the privileged field of research of
both Eucken and Scheler – rooted on life “itself,” namely “lived life.” Hence, even if
Scheler’s means were different than the ones adopted by Eucken and Dilthey, his aim
was the same: criticizing both biology and psychology from the point of view of a
knowledge sui generis, philosophy, studying an object sui generis, “spiritual” life. By
the same token, Scheler was criticizing the well-established Neo-Kantians and
contesting the division they established between science and philosophy.
Now, the problem of life was not solvable without an anthropological framework
likely to provide a stable a ground to justify philosophy’s epistemological claims. As
stated before, philosophy of life could not survive in an academic environment
without turning itself into what will be later called a “philosophical anthropology.”
That’s the reason why, simultaneously to the “Versuche,” Scheler published an essay,
“Zur Idee des Menschen” (“On the idea of man,” 1913), which provided the basis for
his last and most famous book, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. The
29
theoretical framework making possible the formulation of this anthropology was
Husserl’s phenomenology, conceived, as well, as part of Lebensphilosophie.
This apparently unusual usage of phenomenology was certainly motivated by
Scheler’s position, academically orphan of his mentor Eucken when he approached
Husserl’s Göttingen circle in the early 1910s, but it was also made possible by the
Austrian philosopher’s own development. Husserl had been formed in the Austro-
Hungarian academic system, where Kantian philosophy was considered as a pet
peeve, and where the dispute over psychologism – and over the distinction between
philosophy and psychology – almost did not take place. Husserl, whose Ph.D.
dissertation had been directed by the Austrian psychologist Franz Brentano (1838-
1917), continued to study in Halle under the supervision of his pupil Carl Stumpf
(1848-1936). As a result, Husserl’s writings published at the beginning of the 20th
century did not treat psychology as a threat nor use the concepts of Erleben or
Erlebnis. These two terms appear timidly in 1901, when Husserl arrived in Göttingen,
in an environment very different from the Austrian, marked by a fight between
philosophers and psychologists over some university chairs. It is during this period
that Husserl began reading his German colleagues and started responding to their
critiques: the Neo-Kantians – who hosted his manifesto “Phenomenology as a
rigorous science” in their journal Logos but also Eucken and Dilthey, from whom he
picked up the “vital” language and the concept of Lebenswelt.37 This concept apprears
only from 1917 onwards, when Husserl took over Rickert’s chair in Freiburg, after his
departure for Heidelberg.
It is phenomenology conceived as a “philosophy of life” that, according to

37
For the philosophical appropriation of the concept of Lebenswelt, which appeared initially in the
work of Haeckel, cf. Carl Bermes, “Welt” als Thema der Philosophie. Vom metaphysischen zum
natürlichen Weltbegriff (Hamburg: Meiner, 2004).
30
Scheler, constituted the best candidate for giving a explanation of human knowledge
and action and, by doing that, for giving a new meaning to the concept of “value”, the
trademark of the School of Baden. Phenomenology was the best candidate for
replacing Neo-Kantianism. The philosophers of the schools of Baden and Marburg
had been able, until then, to maintain the exceptionality of man amidst the natural
world, and the exceptionality of philosophy amidst the disciplines.
Despite the sympathies that some philosophers had towards some biologists in
different moments of the period 1870-1914, and beyond the quarrels between
different biologists – especially between neo-vitalists, represented by Driesch, and the
mechanists, represented by Haeckel – there was a clear conflict between the
biologists, often close to the psychologists, and the philosophers. The dispute around
psychologism, the Psychologismus-Streit was therefore accompanied by a
Biologismus-Streit, which gave birth to the “philosophies of life”. These two
“Streiten”, these two disputes, will be solved after World War I, with the almost
complete disappearance of Neo-Kantianism, and with the growing importance of the
“philosophy of life,” intended in its broadest sense.
Lebensphilosophie and bio-politics
At the end of World War I, in the new Republic of Weimar, one of the dominant
debates concerned the causes of the past four years of killings and destruction. The
disastrous situation of post-war Germany provided the perfect sounding board for
spiritualist and even religious claims of certain philosophers, such as Eucken or
Scheler, who, since the end of the 19th century, had been criticizing the supposed
abstraction and inhumanity of scientific rationality promoted by positivism and Neo-
31
Kantianism, incarnated by industrialization and technical development and considered
to be unable to foster moral progress.38 The philosophers who had showed their
fidelity to the nationalist cause during the war – when they opposed, in propagandist
publications, the German “spiritual” Kultur to the French “materialistic” Zivilization –
were often able to gain a central spot on the intellectual scene. It had been the case of
Scheler who – after having actively been engaged in the propaganda like his mentor
Eucken39 – had finally been hired by the University of Cologne.
At that moment, another “philosopher of life” was having an impressive success:
Oswald Spengler. Even if Spengler did not present himself as a Lebensphilosophe, he
clearly appeared as such. On the one hand, in his two-volumes bestseller Der
Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1919-1923) he classified
societies as the naturalists were doing with organisms and, in the follow-up, Der
Mensch und die Technik, explicitly subtitled Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens
(Man and technics. A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, 1931), he described
technology as humanity’s external organs. On the one hand, just as Nietzsche – who
was Spengler’s main inspiration along with Goethe – Spengler naturalized technics,
science, morality and, in general, humanity. On the other hand, Spengler used a non-
scientific and “spiritual” notion of life, appealing to an extra-rational solution to the
supposed crisis of civilization. Der Untergang des Abendlandes had a massive
success, selling more than 100.000 copies during less than 6 years, but Spengler’s
position as an “independent scholar,” and his despise for academia blocked his
Lebensphilosophie’s breakthrough inside the university. Both the phenomenologists
and the Neo-Kantians did not waste an opportunity to crucify Lebensphilosophie: in

38
Paul Forman, “Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory: adaptation by German physicists and
mathematicians to a hostile environment” (Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, v. 3, 1971, p. 1-
115).
39
See Psychologism and The Decline of the German mandarins.
32
1920 appeared both Rickert’s Das Philosophie des Lebens and a whole issue of the
journal Logos dedicated to a criticism of the current.
To be academically “presentable” Lebensphilosophie had to turn into something
else, namely in a Philosophische Anthropologie, and the best instrument to make this
transformation be possible was phenomenology. In the climate of general revolt
against “abstraction” proper to the Weimar Republic, Scheler had been smart enough
to present phenomenology as an intuitive and concrete philosophy (or “Sachlichkeit,”
following the husserlian motto: “Zu den Sachen selbst”), quite the opposite of Neo-
40
Kantianism. Thanks to phenomenology, “philosophy of life” survived as
philosophical anthropology in different forms, very biological (in the case of Arnold
Gehlen), tied to psychopathology (in the case of Karl Jaspers and Ludwig
Binswanger), or more historical and interested to the social sciences (in the case of
Helmut Plessner and Georg Misch).
After the death of Dilthey (1913), of Simmel (1918) and, finally, of Scheler
(1928), in the 1930s, the jargon of life – which started circulating since the 1870s and
progressively invaded literature, philosophy and political discourses – became an
essential piece of the volkisch ideology promoted by the Nazi regime in publications
such as Gestalt und Leben (1938) by Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946). Nonetheless, it
would be at least imprecise to speak of National Socialism’s ideology as a
“philosophy of life,” and not only because “philosophy of life” wasn’t a coherent set
of discourses. Modern Lebensphilosophie emerged as a tool to save the classic
practice of philosophy from its possible disappearance under the pressure of the life
and human sciences. On the one hand, the critiques that some Lebenphilosophen
addressed to the abstraction of “intellectualism” served as an appeal to “spiritual”

40
See Psychologism.
33
forces that was easily appropriated by the Nazi propaganda. On the other hand, the
national-socialist discourses on “life” were connected with something, apparently
incompatible from philosophy, namely the racial bio-politics inspired by a particular
eugenic interpretation of social Darwinism.41
In many cases, similar theoretical positions – both philosophical and scientific –
were followed by very different political choices. The cases of Ernst Haeckel, Hans
Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Hans Driesch and Martin Heidegger are interesting. Despite
his rationalism and mechanism, Haeckel supported German nationalism and
imperialism; he was a social Darwinist and a eugenist, therefore his work was seen
with the highest respect by the Nazi ideologists. Gehlen et Plessner were both
Scheler’s pupils and two Philosophische Anthropologen, but in 1933 their paths
separated: while the first, of Jewish origins, had to flew Germany, the second did not
hesitate in taking his mentor Driesch’s chair in Frankfurt, once the latter was forced to
retire by the authorities of the Third Reich. Despite the fact that some aspects of Neo-
vitalism42 had been used by Nazi ideology, Hans Driesch was a strong supporter of
pacifism and universalism, which cost him the loss of his job. Finally Martin
Heidegger who was an active member of the Nazi Party since the lectures of 1929
(and that were later published under the title The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics) opposed both Driesch’s and Uexküll’s doctrines, and criticized his
master Scheler’s Lebensphilosphie for being a disguised form of “biologism.”
During the late 1920s and the early 1930s, before the complete affirmation of the
Nazi Ideology, from different points of view, many intellectuals expressed harsh

41
George Mosse: Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1980); Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (trans.
Salvator Attanasio and others, New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966); The Crisis of German Ideology:
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1998),
42
Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holismin German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).
34
critiques to Lebensphilosophie. They were often inspired by Rickert, who mentored,
or at least influenced, German intellectuals as different as Martin Heidegger, Rudolf
Carnap (1891-1970) and Max Weber (1864-1920). They criticized not only
Lebensphilosophie, but also vitalism and holism in biology. This had been the case for
Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), the last inheritor of the Marburg School in Philosophie
der symbolischen Formen. Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis (The Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms. Phenomenology of Knowledge, 1929). This was also the case for the
members of the neo-positivism circle of Vienna close to Rudolf Carnap – Austrian
philosophers such as Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), Philipp Franck (1884-1966) and
Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) – who followed the path taken by Bertrand Russell (1872-
1970), who he criticized “The philosophy of Henri Bergson” and its “irrationalism” in
the self-titled article he published in the 1912 issue of the journal The Monist. In the
field of social philosophy, especially in the Marxist Frankfurt school,
Lebensphilosophie was almost immediately treated as ideological, irrational and,
therefore, potentially dangerous. Max Horkheimer’s (1895-1973) review of Bergson’s
Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (The Sources of Morals and Religion,
1932), “Zu Bergsons Metaphysik der Zeit,” published in 1934 in the Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung, Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940), “Theorien des deutschen
Faschismus” (“Theories of German Fascism”) published in 1930 in Die
Gesellshaft,and, most of all, György Lukács’ (1885-1971) Die Zerstörung der
Vernunft (1955, The Destruction of Reason), Herbert Marcuse’s (1898-1979) One
Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964) and
Jürgen Habermas’s Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen
(The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, 1985) all belong to this
half a century long Marxist tradition.
35
Post-structuralism: a “philosophy of life?”
In France, where the writings of Fouillé, Guyau and Bergson influenced
authors designated as Lebensphilosophen, the expression “philosophie de la vie”
appeared for the first time only during the 1920s, under the pen of the German-
speaking philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903-1985) to designate Bergson’s,
Simmel’s and Scheler’s writings. In 1947 Georges Canguilhem, who had already used
the expression during the 1920s, remarked that during the 19th century France, the
strong Cartesian heritage did not provide the conditions for the emergence of a
“philosophy of life” and of a “biological philosophy.”43 During the interwar period,
and even more between 1945 and the mid-1960s, the heritage of the Neo-Kantian
critiques of Bergson’s philosophy (such as was addressed by René Berthelot in his
famous book from 1911-1920, Un romantisme utilitaire; étude sur le mouvement
pragmatiste) the association of Lebensphilosophie with Nazi ideology, the critiques
that communist philosophers such as Georges Politzer (1903-1942) advanced against
German authors, the neat academic division between the humanities and the natural
sciences, blocked the breakthrough of Lebensphilosophie, which entered in France
filtered through the prism of existential phenomenology. In most of the cases – such
as the one of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) – French phenomenology did not engage
in a reflection on biological life and its relation with the human, conforming to the
classic French Cartesianism. Only few philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty – in his
La structure du comportement (The Structure of Behaviour, 1942), and, later on, in

43
Georges Canguilhem, “Note sur la situation faite en France a la philosophie biologique “(in
Résistance, philosophie biologique et histoire des sciences (1940-1965). Oeuvres complètes IV, Paris:
Vrin 2015).
36
his posthumously published lectures on Nature (1959-1961) –, Raymond Ruyer
(1902-1987), in his book Éléments de psychobiologie (Elements of psychobiology,
1946) – and Georges Canguilhem – from Le Normal et le pathologique (The Normal
and the Pathological, 1943) and La Connaissance de la vie (The Knowledge of Life,
1952) – took inspiration from Nietzsche and Scheler, and from Germans biologists
and physicians such as Driesch, Uexküll, and Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), with the
aim of promoting an holistic and anti-mechanist view of life able to give meaning to
the peculiarity of human behavior and cognition. Nonetheless these thinkers never
used the expression “philosophie de la vie,” nor the one of “philosophie biologique,”
except Georges Canguilhem, who uses the latter starting from the 1940s, especially in
La Connaissance de la vie.
The works of these authors had a great importance on a new generation of
thinkers who, during the 1960s, promoted a new interpretation of Nietzsche, used as a
tool to read the socio-cultural context of the French Sixth Republic. The most
important of them was, beyond any doubt, Gilles Deleuze (1905-1995), who
published his seminal Nietzsche et la philosophie (Nietzsche and philosophy) in 1961.
Nietzsche’s philosophy, conceived as an anti-subjectivist and anti-dialectical post-
Kantian “philosophy of life,” combined with the influence of Bergson and Spinoza,
influenced the interpretation that Deleuze will later give of Marxism and
psychoanalysis in the highly influential book he published with Félix Guattari (1930-
1992), L’anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (The Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, 1972). This work was the result of the new importance that the
works of Freudo-Marxists – especially Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and Herbert
Marcuse – had on France culture during the 1960s and, even more, in the aftermath of
May 68. L’anti-Œdipe not only tried to provide a critique of both historical
37
materialism and psychoanalysis, but, as well, combined the two in a synthesis
cantered around the concept of “productive desire.” This purely affirmative concept
of desire, was a mean to both criticize consumerist society and the classic notion of
desire as lack which grounded psychoanalysis. In L’anti-Œdipe and in its follow-up
from 1980, Mille Plateaux (A Thousands Plateaus), Deleuze and Guattari constructed
a philosophical system that looked like the ones produced by the Naturphilosophen,
insofar as the considered “sprit” and “matter”, culture and nature, as the static result
of a productive desire prior to the all too human distinctions and dualisms. The effects
of this book both inside and outside of France were impressive – books such as Jean-
François Lyotard’s (1924-1998) Économie libidinale (1974, Libidinal Economy) was
deeply influenced by it – also causing a new interest in authors such as Nietzsche,
Bergson and even Schelling.
During the 1960s, the French Nietzschean legacy did not only have to make
sense of the new social situation of post-War European society, but it also had to deal
with the recent developments in genetic biology. The discovery of the genome by
James Watson (1928-), Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004) and Francis Crick (1916-2004),
who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962, seemed having deprived life of all the
qualities that were separating it from inanimate. In 1970, in La Logique de la vie (The
Logic of Life), the French biologist and historian of the life sciences François Jacob
(1920-2013) declared that life was “no longer interrogated in the laboratories.” The
following year, and more boldly still, his colleague Jacques Monod affirmed, in
L’Hasard et la necessité (Chance and Necessity), that, while the secret of life had
once seemed inaccessible, it was, by then, mostly solved. With such claims, the two
scientists who, together with André Lwoff, had been awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize
for their work on molecular biology, wanted to stress the trend towards the reduction
38
of biological phenomena to the laws governing the inanimate world. They interpreted
life as a “code” or a “message” inscribed in every living being and reproduced
through the self-copying of the DNA fiber. As the “question of life” was
progressively fading away, it was no longer possible to consider the various versions
of “vitalism” as viable orientations in biology nor “philosophy of life” as a an
acceptable orientation in philosophy. It is not by chance that it is during the 1960s that
“philosophy of biology,” as an independent sub-discipline of philosophy of science
emerged, adopting a strictly analytical and anti-metaphysical approach.44
Starting from the late 1960s, it was the very concept of life itself that could
sound useless, or at least as the trace of a false problem. Paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss,
one could state that, in the same way that structural anthropology had “dissolved” the
notion of “man” with the help of structural linguistics, molecular biology was
dissolving the common notion of “life” with the help of advances made in information
theory and chemistry. 45 It is not by chance that Lévi-Strauss mentioned the
discoveries of genetics in The Savage Mind: according to him, they represented the
proof of the effectiveness of information theory applied to both human and biological
phenomena. Throughout the 1960s, and especially 1970s, the paradigm of language –
evident in the use of notions such as “message,” “code,” “system” and “structure” –
dominated the field of the humanities. As a counterpart to this enthusiasm, scarce use
was made of categories such as agency, individuality, subjectivity and purposiveness.
In 1966 Michel Foucault published The Order of Things, a book that sketched
an “archeology of the human sciences”. Inspired by the historical epistemology of
Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) and secretly animated by the Martin Heidegger’s anti-

44
See for instance: David Hull, Philosophy of Biological Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1974) and “Philosophy and Biology” (in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, vol. 2, edited by
Guttorm Fløistad. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982).
45
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Translated by George Wiedenfeld and Nicholson Ltd.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 247
39
humanist ontology, the French philosopher asserted that the notion of life was, like
that of man, a recent conceptual creation, which dated from the beginning of the 19th
century. Where Jacob and Monod claimed that life was a useless concept in biology,
Foucault was more nuanced and suggested that the historical transcendental, or
episteme, which dominated Western culture for 150 years – and in which a specific
conception of life, labor and language played a major role – was about to change.
With “man” it was also “life” that was destined to disappear.
In Foucault’s visionary evocation of a future disappearance of man at the very
end of The Order of Things, one can clearly hear the echo of Nietzsche’s prophecy
about its overcoming. But, just as in Nietzsche, the prophecy concerning the
overcoming of man was essentially ambiguous. The notion of life was not about to
disappear entirely: it was destined to go through mutations, in the life sciences as well
as in the humanities. This is what had already been happening during the last forty
years in philosophy. It was still trying to re-interpret the developments of the life
sciences and, at the same time, securing a safe place for itself. The recent
developments of what we may still call “philosophy of life” – though analogically –
are the last signs of the two centuries-long confrontations between science and
philosophy. These confrontations seem far from being over.
40

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Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W.

The expressions “Philosophie des Lebens” and “Lebensphilosophie” first

appeared during the 1770s in the writings of mutually independent, non-academic

reemerged in two essays written respectively by the Neo-Kantian philosopher

Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) and by the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874-1928).

other, older producers of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Henri Bergson

philosophers such as his colleague Georg Simmel (1858-1918), the phenomenologist

Lebensphilosophie spread in Germany, being used by both non-academic producers of

philosophy – such as Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and Ludwig Klages (1872-1956)

writings of Scheler’s students Helmut Plessner (1892-1985) and Arnold Gehelen

label of “philosophische Anthropologie” (“philosophical anthropology”). During the

producers, promoting the regime’s bio-political agenda, presented themselves or were

doctrines supposedly characterized by a metaphysical conception of life conceived as

an original transformative force, and by the trust on a method or a faculty irreducible

life” – “philosophe de la vie,” “filosofia della vita,” “Lebensphilosophie” – began to

designate non-empirical doctrines stating the priority of “life” conceived as a

principle irreducible to physicochemical causality or theories concerning “life”

addressed to a broad lectureship. The work of philosophers as different as Georges

Canguilhem (1904-1995), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Gilles Deleuze

(1925-1995), Michel Foucault (1924-1984) or even the one of Modern philosophers

As a result, the expression “philosophy of life” is currently employed as a

synonym or as a hyponym of “vitalism,” “philosophy of nature” and “biological

philosophy,” labeling texts produced in completely different historical, geographic

and disciplinary contexts 1 and bearing only certain family resemblances. To

understand this process of growing polysemy of the expression, it is necessary to take

into account this process as the effect of a socio-epistemological transformation,

result of the increasing division and specialization of intellectual labor which

triggered polemics and negotiations between four types of actors 2 : a) academic

philosophers, b) non academic producers of philosophy, c) academic producers of

empirical-based knowledge about life and human phenomena – mainly naturalists,

embryologists, physiologists3 and, later psychologists4 and sociologists5 – and, finally

– starting from 1930s – d) ideologists directly tied to state apparatuses. Only a

The birth of “life” and the birth of “philosophy”

designate both human existence, and what characterizes a peculiar class of

Agamben’s controversial thesis, 6 this ambiguity was already present in ancient

If we follow the more unanimously recognized periodization proposed by

a consistent notion of biological life appears. Before, as Foucault famously wrote,

century mechanist philosophers and scientists left no room for life8.

practice. According to Stahl, organisms distinguish themselves from the inanimate

against corruption and dissolution. Théophile de Bordeu (1722-1776) et Paul Joseph

de Barthez (1734-1806), members of the medical school of Montpellier, took from

Barthez’ Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme (New Elements of the Science

of Man, 1778), in the Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Physiological

time by Charles-Louis Dumas (1765-1813) to refer to him and the school of

Kielmeyer (1765-1844), Heinrich Friedrich Link (1769-1851), Christoph Girtanner

(1760-1800) and Georg Reinhold Treviranus (1776-1837) – united around Johann

Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) and adopted the idea of a biological drive

responsible for self-development, procreation, nourishment and reproduction. This

Wolff (1734-1794) as essentliche Kraft and by Friedrich Kasimir Medikus (1736-

1808) as Lebenskraft, came under different names such as the ones of

Erzeugungskraft, nisus formativus and Bildungstrieb.

Philosophy of Living Nature), and by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) in his

Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (Research on the Organization of

introduced a mutation into compared anatomy: he stopped classifying living beings

according to their similitudes and differences – as Carl Von Linné (1707-1778) or

in his Philosophie zoologique (1809) – of an historical continuity between the

process of continuous transformation. Biology changed as well the image of “man”:

At the same moment, the word “philosophy” started being involved in a

lead to institutional consequences in all Europe because of the Humboldtian reform of

the medieval university:10 he granted the “scientists” – a word that progressively

the “philosophers” he gave the responsibility of studying their conditions of

would henceforth be limited to human subjectivity. In France, it was Maine de Biran