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BIANCO Philosophies of Life Complete PDF PDF
BIANCO Philosophies of Life Complete PDF PDF
Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
Philosophies of life
German authors linked to the Romantic movement. Starting from 1912, they
With these key expressions, the two philosophers designated the doctrines of three
(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
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
– and by such academics as Dilthey’s former student Georg Misch (1878-1965). The
(1904-1976) are sometimes defined as such, but they are normally classified under the
Third Reich, while volkisch ideology took over Germany, many other minor cultural
treated as Lebenphilosophen; however, starting from the 1940s, their work has been
1
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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’
to the ones used by science. Finally, from the 1970s on, the expression “philosophy of
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.
2
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
which invested both the terms “philosophy” and “life”; this transformation was the
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.
Since the early modernity the word “life” (vita, vie, Leben) had been used to
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
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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.
Michael Foucault in The Order of Things, it is only at the end of the 18th century that
“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
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
matter because of a soul (anima), insuring their auto-conservation and their fight
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
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
drive, which had been originally called by Blumenbach’s mentor Caspar Friedrich
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
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
namely life. At the same moment, the naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)
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
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
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.
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
6
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
substitutes the one of “natural philosophy” – the task of explaining phenomena, and to
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
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
to the human mind, object of psychology or philosophy, from organic matter, object
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
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.
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
life and to discoveries such as electromagnetism. These authors, who were describing
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
perfection and freedom. Ravaisson also inherited from Schelling the idea that,
Wöhler (1800-1882) – which aimed at proving the continuity between animate and
inanimate matter – and the discovery of the conservation of energy and the
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)
both constituted an attack to the notion of a “vital force” and, more generally, to all
8
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
(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
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
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
positions deemed peripheral or exterior inside the academic space. They had were
to the Neo-Kantian schools of Marburg and Bade – figures such as Kuno Fischer
Meyer (1829-1897) and Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875) and, later on, Wilhelm
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
with the life sciences. The Neo-Kantians discussed the moral and epistemological
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
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),
Ravaisson, left the door open for a different approach to nature, once conceived as an
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
freedom and spirituality. The orientation proper to these philosophers is often called
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
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
Evolution, 1907) – by far the most renewed between these “spiritualists,” was a
During the long 19th century, because of the polysemy of the words “life” and
“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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
in his Cours de philosophie positive to designate the life sciences, what Lamarck
least until the mid-1920s: it is in this sense that we have to understand the titles of
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
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
Worldwise, 1772) by the physician Ernst Platner (1744-1818), who formed the most
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
As a result, from the 1780s onward, in connection with a new interest for the French
Movement – namely its eclecticism, its anti-scholasticism and, sometimes, its anti-
who would later become Kant’s successor as the chair of logic and metaphysics at the
published by Krug in 182817 and, the same year, in a book by Friedrich Von Schlegel
Vienna. By defining the object of philosophy as the “inner spiritual life” (Geistege
institutions. In fact, at the same moment, in his lectures on the history of philosophy,
17
Cf. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften nebst
ihrer Literatur und Geschichte (Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1828).
13
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
“Philosophia pratica.”
After the decline of German idealism, the heritage of this popular and extra-
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
the Wisdom of Life, 1841) and Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (Gay science,
the university.
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
appeared between 1895 and 1910 in a conflicting space created by the interaction
knowledge and c) biologists who started meddling into questions that the academic
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
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,
knowledge practiced in the academic spaces – was providing, along with religion, a
started coming under the attack of the empirical psychology proposed by authors such
students, who had the ambition of naturalizing man’s behavior and cognition. To
15
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
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
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
opposition to the metaphysical idea of vital teleology; but they demanded as well the
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
after the success of Darwinism and the emergence of scientific psychology. Wilhelm
three different conceptual aspects already present in the Romantic movement: a) the
immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit) of the relation between man and world, preceding any
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
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).
entitled “The sciences of mind form a whole independent form natural sciences,” with
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
1890), in which he located seven different limits. Haeckel named this talk
“Ignorabimus,” after the Latin aphorism “Ignoramus and ignorabimus” (“we ignore
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
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
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,
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
contrary both of them made biological life depend from a “spiritual” life, reserved to
of concepts derived from the root Leben is the clear sign of a growing concern felt by
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,
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
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
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
Driesch abandoned his master’s rigid mechanism, separated himself from Darwinism
and formulated a new teleological approach to the living organisms he named “neo-
headquarters. Because of its content, Driesch’s work had attracted the attention of
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
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
face some problems that, until then, had been considered as exclusively philosophical.
28
Maurizio Esposito, Romantic Biology, 1890–1945 (London: Routledge, 2003).
21
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
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
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
caused the outrage of the French Neo-Kantians. The title of the review was
Rickert’s reaction came some years later, and it was indirect. In 1912,
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
22
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
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very similar to the ones presented nine years later in Philosophie des Lebens.
Under the category of Lebensphilosophie Rickert placed all the discourses pretending
to explain human values, norms and culture from a purely biological standpoint. This
Leben,” namely to “mere” or “naked life,” an expression that was to be used by many
which was, nonetheless, metaphysical and potentially irrational (acc to who? Rickert
Epistemological borders
The Science and Philosophy of the Organism represented only the last of a series
Driesch, nor Haeckel – to whom he was alluding, without mentioning them – but
Friedrich Nietzsche, who was receiving a belated, though impressive success both
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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,
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
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
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
30
Fredrick C. Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900 (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2016).
24
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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,
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
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
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
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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
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
sociology.
lecturers like Simmel abandoned academia, or struggled to prove their talent to the
Heinrich Rickert – with whom he had been corresponding since the preparation of the
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
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The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
originally started during the 1870s, during the Pessimismus-Streit. With this book,
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
The second of Rickert’s targets was Henri Bergson. After the publication of the
especially in cultural milieus that the Neo-Kantians disliked: academic, idealistic and
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
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,
Rickert also criticized the American pragmatists – that the Neo-Kantians opposed
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
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German academia since the Nachmärz. The targets were non-academic and anti-
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
life,” turning the fashion stigmatized by an established academic, into a brand useful
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
works had to be appropriated by the “new generation.” These three authors, who had
28
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
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
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
Now, the problem of life was not solvable without an anthropological framework
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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-
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
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,
philosophers and psychologists over some university chairs. It is during this period
that Husserl began reading his German colleagues and started responding to their
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
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
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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
had been able, until then, to maintain the exceptionality of man amidst the natural
Despite the sympathies that some philosophers had towards some biologists in
different moments of the period 1870-1914, and beyond the quarrels between
biologists, often close to the psychologists, and the philosophers. The dispute around
“Streiten”, these two disputes, will be solved after World War I, with the almost
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
Scheler, who, since the end of the 19th century, had been criticizing the supposed
31
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought
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
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
clearly appeared as such. On the one hand, in his two-volumes bestseller Der
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
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-
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
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
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1920 appeared both Rickert’s Das Philosophie des Lebens and a whole issue of the
else, namely in a Philosophische Anthropologie, and the best instrument to make this
against “abstraction” proper to the Weimar Republic, Scheler had been smart enough
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
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
essential piece of the volkisch ideology promoted by the Nazi regime in publications
“philosophy of life,” and not only because “philosophy of life” wasn’t a coherent set
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
40
See Psychologism.
33
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forces that was easily appropriated by the Nazi propaganda. On the other hand, the
were followed by very different political choices. The cases of Ernst Haeckel, Hans
Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Hans Driesch and Martin Heidegger are interesting. Despite
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
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
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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
Symbolic Forms. Phenomenology of Knowledge, 1929). This was also the case for the
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
1932), “Zu Bergsons Metaphysik der Zeit,” published in 1934 in the Zeitschrift für
Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964) and
(The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, 1985) all belong to this
35
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
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appeared for the first time only during the 1920s, under the pen of the German-
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
and even more between 1945 and the mid-1960s, the heritage of the Neo-Kantian
German authors, the neat academic division between the humanities and the natural
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
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
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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.
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
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-
and Schizophrenia, 1972). This work was the result of the new importance that the
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
Draft of an article forthcoming in P. Gordon, W. Breckman,
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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
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-
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
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of biological phenomena to the laws governing the inanimate world. They interpreted
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
acceptable orientation in philosophy. It is not by chance that it is during the 1960s that
Starting from the late 1960s, it was the very concept of life itself that could
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
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
In 1966 Michel Foucault published The Order of Things, a book that sketched
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
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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.
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
are the last signs of the two centuries-long confrontations between science and
40