Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life

A Vitalist Toolkit

Paul Bishop

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367252526
• eBook ISBN: 9781315522470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a unique overview of and introduction to the work of the German psychologist and philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), an astonishing figure in the history of German ideas. Central to intellectual life in turn-of-the-century Munich, he went on to establish a reputation for himself as an original and provocative thinker. Nowadays he is often overlooked, partly because of the absence of an accessible and authoritative introduction to his thought; this volume offers just such a point of entry. With an emphasis on applicability and utility, Paul Bishop reinvigorates the discourse surrounding Klages, providing a neutral and compact account of his intellectual development and his impact on psychology and philosophy.

Part 1 offers an overview of Klages's life, visiting the major stations of his intellectual development. Part 2 examines in turn nine major conceptual 'tools' found in Klages's extensive writings, aiming to clarify Klages's terminology, to demystify his discourse, and to sift through Klages's credentials as a psychological thinker. Part 3 consists of extracts from Klages's writings, thematically oriented; these showcase the aphoristic and lyrical, as well as psychological and philosophical, qualities of Klages's writing, including his interest in aesthetics. Taken together, all three parts constitute a vitalist 'toolkit' — to build a fuller, richer life.

Drawing on previous studies of Klages that have only been available in German, Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life provides a non-polemical account of Klages's life and work, with explanations and commentaries to guide the reader through extracts from his writings. The book accessibly explains the most important ideas and concepts found in Klages's work, including soul, spirit, character, expression, will, and consciousness, and it reveals Klages to be a serious figure whose thought remains relevant to many disciplines today. It will stimulate interest in his work and create a new readership for his remarkable worldview.

1 Life

Childhood and early years

Ludwig Klages was born on 10 December 1872 in Hanover, the son of a business man, Friedrich Ferdinand Louis Klages, and his wife, Marie Helene née Kolster. Although the house in which he was born, Warmbüchenstraße 23, was later pulled down, a plaque on the wall of the house that replaced it commemorates the location as the birthplace of this forgotten philosopher.¹

Then, as now, Hanover is an important yet attractive small city, located at the crossing-point of important transport connections. Today it is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony, but in Klages’s day it was the capital of the Prussian province of Hanover, after it had been annexed by Prussia in 1866 during the Austro-Prussian War. Although the city was a target for bombing in the Second World War, the architecture that survives (or has been rebuilt) gives one a sense of the its nineteenth-century splendour.

Klages’s father had been born in a village called Gladeback, situated in the valley between the towns of Hardegsen and Göttingen. Louis Klages had been a professional soldier, but following the demobilization of the Kingdom of Hanover’s army in the wake of annexation by Prussia, he became a businessman, dealing in cloth. He settled down and established a family, moving with his wife and their four-year-old son to a larger house, Hildesheimer Straße 225.

In 1878, the family grew: a sister, Helene Klages (1878–1947), was born. Throughout his childhood (and in fact throughout his life), it is said that the relationship between these two siblings was always a close one. (Certainly, Helene shared her brother’s interests, and later on she became a graphologist.) Perhaps this close relationship with his sister was intensified by the loss, when Klages was just nine years old, of his mother on 19 March 1882. The cause of death is thought to have been pneumonia, and her unexpected death can only have made a deep impact on her son.

(For those of a psychoanalytic persuasion, the roots of Klages’s later fascination with the figure of the magna mater or ‘Great Mother’ might be traced back to this loss. In a letter, Klages once commented that his mother had been ‘more the object of a raving fantasy than a real experience’.²) Before she passed away, Marie asked her sister, Ida Kolster, to help look after her children, and she soon moved into the family house in the Hildesheimer Straße.

By now Klages was attending school, going to the Ratsgymnasium (or, as it was then called, the Lyceum) on the Georgsplatz in Hanover, where he received an education with a traditional emphasis on the classics and the humanities. He was a keen pupil, and one in whom a strong imaginative flair was beginning to express itself. In notebooks he recorded his first poems and prose sketches, and at the age of fourteen he developed the plan to write a tragedy. Its subject was to be Desiderata, one of the daughters of Desiderius, the King of Lombardy and the ruler of the Germanic tribe who dominated Italy from the sixth to eighth centuries. In order to form a political pact between the two states, she was married in 770 to Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, but the annullment of this marriage a year later led to the war in 774 between the Franks and the Lombards that resulted in the defeat of the Lombards at the Battle of Pavia.

Here we see one of Klages’s two main interests: the history of the Germanic tribes in Europe. The other one was mythology: he developed a system for relating the various ancient Greek gods, and later the deities of Germanic mythology. These interests are likely to have been encouraged by one of his teachers, who used the classes set aside for religious instruction to educate the pupils in his charge in all manner of historical, geographical, and cultural matters. Thanks to this teacher, Klages became introduced to the work of Wilhelm Jordan (1819–1904).

Jordan is an extraordinary figure in German political and literary life in the nineteenth century. A theologian-turned-journalist who had been converted away from religion by the writings of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), Jordan served briefly as a member in the Frankfurt Parliament before becoming an advisor to the Reichshandelsministerium, where he was involved with building up Germany’s naval fleet. But he was also active writer of poems and plays, enjoying particular fame for his version of the legend of the Nibelungs. In 1867, he published his epic poem, The Nibelungs (Die Nibelungen), written in a special kind of alliterative verse called Stabreim. In his version, Jordan combined the ancient sources of the Old Norse saga and the Old High German Lay of Hildebrand with a modern psychological interest; Klages was deeply impressed with the work. He was to write many years later:

It can have been no more than a dozen alliterative verses that plunged the fifteen-year-old […] into a turmoil, and I cannot decide whether it was more like a fainting fit or more like the explosive forces of a daimonic feeling of power.³

Klages’s enthusiasm for Wilhelm Jordan was shared by his friend during his years at school, Theodor Lessing (1872–1933). Despite their many years of friendship (and a set of common interests), their amical relationship came to an end in 1899; the complicated nature of their relationship is captured well in a detailed study of it by Elke-Vera Kotowski, who calls them ‘hostile Dioscuri’, a pair of twins at war with each other.⁴ Lessing hated the Gymnasium, and the shared enthusiasm with Klages for mythology, antiquity, and the world of the imagination played an important role in the intellectual development of both. So why did their friendship end? For some, the break in his relation with Lessing, a Jew, is an indication of anti-Semitic tendencies on Klages’s part, but it is likely that the reasons were more complex than that. As Lessing himself once wrote, Klages was his ‘most painful chapter’:

Yes, yes, yes, I admire his work immensely and yet I feel – once that was in the blood and now it’s only a doctrine, and there is also a lot of human vanity mixed in. Two stars from a single sun: he became a fixed star; I remained a wandering comet.⁵

In 1891, when both came to the end of their school education, Lessing and Klages chose paths that took a similar trajectory. Lessing chose to study medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau, then Bonn, then Munich, where he changed his subjects to literature, philosophy, and psychology, completing a dissertation on the Russian-Ukrainian philosopher and logician, Afrikan Spir (1837–1890).

For his part, Klages ended up in Munich, too; but not before he had spent two semesters studying chemistry and physics in Leipzig (1891–1892) before returning to Hanover for a semester at its Technische Hochschule (1892–1893). In Munich (1893–1900), Klages completed his degree as a chemist and he went on to do research, publishing in 1901 his Attempt at a Synthesis of Menthone. This work was carried out in the Chemisches Institut, a laboratory founded at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich in 1875 by Adolf von Baeyer. (In 1905, Baeyer was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work into the synthetic production of organic dyes.) In 1893, the year that Klages joined the Institut, chemistry had moved from being a subject in the Medical Faculty to a subject in the Philosophy Faculty, and he was about to undertake a similar shift himself.

What is menthone? Naturally occurring as an organic compound, and belonging to the group of organic compounds known as ketones, mentone has applications as a cosmetic and as a perfume (but it can also be used as a pesticide). Klages’s research, which was supervised by the chemist Alfred Einhorn (1856–1917), gave him a doctorate as a scientist, but his interests had long since moved away from chemistry towards a different kind of ‘science’ – graphology.

At this point, it is worth reflecting on Klages’s career to date: the exemplary school pupil had become an empirical scientist, working in the lab amid the testtubes and retorts. Yet he had also been a child with an intense imagination, secretly recording the poems that his parents and teachers forbade him to write. Although his career to date pointed in the direction chemistry, living in Munich had broadened his horizons – and introduced him to some rather unusual people.

Schwabing years

In 1895, Klages moved into a new flat, one owned by someone called Frau Bernhard. She had four children, three sons and a daughter, and it was with Frau Bernhard’s daughter, whom Klages called ‘Putti’, that he began an intense sexual relationship. Yet it is not so much the fact that a tenant was sleeping with his landlady’s daughter (and, it seems, with his landlady’s approval) that we would today regard as the problem, but the fact that Putti was, when the relationship began, twelve years old. So can one add to the accusation that Klages was a Nazi, the charge that he was also a paedophile?

Clearly from our current standpoint, Putti was very young. Maybe it is worth noting that, in ancient Rome, it was a legal requirement that a bride be at least twelve years old, and the Catholic Church followed this age limit in the medieval period. And, as Nitzan Lebovic has pointed out, Sophie von Kühn (1782–1797) was twelve years old when the German Romantic poet, Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis (1772–1801), began his relationship with her in 1794, and became engaged to her in 1795, before her death a year later in 1797. In his biography of Novalis, his friend Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) described Sophie von Kühn in the following terms:

Even children give an impression which – because it is so gracious and spiritually lovely – we must call superearthly or heavenly, while through these radiant and almost transparent countenances we are struck with the fear that it is too tender and delicately woven for life, that it is death or immortality which looks at us so penetratingly from those shining eyes, and only too often a rapid withering motion turns our fear into an actual reality.⁶

Could it be that Putti exercised a similarly fascinating attraction on Klages? Or should one simply regard him as a sexual predator? (In which case, was Novalis a sexual predator, too?)

Whatever the case, it would be entirely wrong to think that Klages was only attracted to younger women. For his years in Schwabing, the bohemian quarter in the northern part of Munich where Klages – along with other intellectuals, painters, and writers – lived, stand under the sign of the famous ‘Bohemian Countess’, Fanny Liane Wilhelmine Sophie Auguste Adrienne Gräfin zu Reventlow, better known simply as Franziska zu Reventlow (1871–1918). While the exact nature of the relationship between her and Klages – i.e. how far was it Platonic and how far was it erotic? – remains a matter for conjecture, her conversations with Klages and other members of the so-called Cosmic Circle (see below) informed her famous roman à clef, called Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen: oder, Begebenheiten aus einem merkwürdigen Stadtteil (which can be translated as The Notebooks of Mr Lady, or Occurrences in an Unusual Part of Town), published in 1913. In these pages, her conversations with Klages are transmute...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary of Klagesian terminology
• 1 Life
• 2 Works and key ideas
• 3 For advanced readers – selections from Ludwig Klages
• Further reading
• Index