Though it is not very widely discussed in the Anglophone world, Lebensphilosophie was a key movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe. The conceptual anchor of Lebensphilosophie, as its name suggests, is that of “life” (5)—in particular, human life (6). It is from this standpoint that the exponents of Lebensphilosophie propose to offer a distinctive philosophical standpoint. First, Lebensphilosophie is a reaction against 19th century pessimism, propounded by Schopenhauer and a number of other figures. The pessimist of Schopenhauer’s stripe famously maintains that it is better never to have been born than to have our lot of ceaseless striving and pervasive suffering. Against this pessimism, Lebensphilosophie holds that life is a positive locus of value, and that life is worth living, even if there is no God and no transcendent order (14). Second, Lebensphilosophie is a reaction against various currents in Kant, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism, which would have philosophy be something systematic, in the manner of a science, in the broad sense captured by the term “Wissenschaft.” Against this conception of philosophy’s agenda, Lebensphilosophie proposes a different conception, without these scientific aspirations, an alternative centered on the worldview [Weltanshauung] of the individual (15).
Such, at least, is the summary characterization we get in Frederick Beiser’s crisp study, Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie 1870–1920. He focuses on three main protagonists, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), and Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Beiser contends that these figures are better treated not in isolation, but as participants in this larger philosophical movement. The text is organized into thematic chapters, juxtaposing the thought of the same three figures, concerning issues of philosophical method (Chap. I), ethics (Chap. II), their response to pessimism (Chap III), their views on historicism (Chap. IV), on relativism (Chap. V), and on religion (Chap. VI). In the final chapter (Chap. VII), Beiser explores, and seeks to answer, the familiar charge thatLebensphilosophie is a kind of irrationalism.
The book’s admirable ambition is to introduce this philosophical movement to an anglophone audience. Beiser has penned a prodigious catalogue of monographs on German philosophy. Though he has written distinguished work on Hegel and German Idealism, as well as on the Jena Romantics, Beiser’s speciality, particularly in the past decade or so, is writing on figures in 18th and 19th-century philosophy who are less often discussed. He tends to avoid figures on whom there is already a large anglophone literature, and to champion those where there is not. This, to my mind, is a very welcome project. While there is of course an extensive anglophone literature on Nietzsche, the other two figures in the present study, Simmel and Dilthey, have not received nearly the same attention, even if their names and some of their signature ideas are recognizable.
Putting this trio together brings out some useful points of comparison and interconnection. The posture of the book, though, seems to be that this is the historically correct way of understanding them (3). That, to me, is unobvious. It is undoubtedly correct that there are some key themes in all three figures that are characteristic of Lebensphilosophie. But these figures fit in different, if partially overlapping, historical narratives, and it is not clear to me that Lebensphilosophieis the most illuminating philosophical lens for looking at these three figures, or, for that matter, that these three figures give us the best insight into Lebensphilosophie as a philosophical movement. Take Simmel by way of example. Is he best understood in the context of Lebensphilosophie? He self-describes using this term (3). But might he be just as well situated in a narrative of German social philosophy, paired with Weber, and perhaps tracing a through-line to the early Frankfurt School?
Probably there is no single right answer, and both of these ways of positioning him are good ones. But the organizing narrative should make good sense of the interconnectedness of the philosophical commitments that the particular study then goes on to chart, with reference back to the key theme. In the brief summaries that Beiser gives of Simmel’s, Dilthey’s, and Nietzsche’s views on various issues, this link back to Lebensphilosophie is not always apparent. I finished the book unsure whether this was the most philosophically notable thing about these figures, or the key thread uniting their most interesting philosophical commitments. Beiser’s suggestion that Lebensphilosophie is the animating approach of Nietzsche’s thought is perhaps the most plausible, but I had reservations about aspects of Beiser’s Nietzsche reading, a few points of which I will come to in a moment. And how about these three figures—Simmel, Dilthey, and Nietzsche—as the key representatives of Lebensphilosophie? Beiser notes that there are other figures he might have considered, and that his chosen three are the “most intellectually creative and philosophically sophisticated” (3). Fair enough. One should write about the figures one finds philosophically interesting and who repay one’s philosophical attention. An encyclopedic study including every possible figure would be unwieldy. Beiser anticipates the worry that Bergson and Ortega y Gasset might seem to belong in such a study, and he justifies their exclusion by saying that the movement was “essentially, and almost entirely, German” (3). The term of course is German, but the themes were also in broader circulation outside the German-speaking world. But again perhaps, fair enough; one must make choices and can’t write about every figure. This book, after all, bills itself as one about German Lebensphilosophie. Yet I find it especially odd to adjudicate the charge of irrationalism against Lebensphilosophie, without any engagement, in fact hardly any mention, of such notorious figures as Klages, Baeumler, and Spengler, none of whom are even listed in the book’s rather skeletal index (nor, for that matter, is Scheler or Jaspers listed either, despite their importance for German philosophy of the time). Beiser mentions in passing Klages’s right wing politics (163), so it’s clearly on the radar. Maybe Beiser is simply seeking to deflect the famous attack from Lukács in The Destruction of Reason that Lebensphilosophie is inextricably bound up with a kind of reactionary irrationalism, by way of trying to show key figures that speak against Lukács’s line. Still, the book would have done well to have offered more discussion and argument around how it was choosing to demarcate Lebensphilosophie and how its approach compared to that of other scholars of the movement.
As with Beiser’s previous work, this book is readable and approachable for those unfamiliar with this terrain. Beiser has a particular skill of offering a clear summary for a general philosophical audience. To be magisterial in this way, one must simplify considerably, and that simplification is not without potential costs. The non-expert, or relative non-expert, has to take Beiser’s word about the figures on whom he is writing. To one not personally versed in, say, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Beiser can be one’s introductory guide, and I have long admired his skill at that.
When reading the work of intellectual historians or philosophers with a broad reach in the figures they discuss, one metric is to look to how they treat the figures one knows most well. I can’t claim particular expertise in Simmel or Dilthey, and so my most critical attention as I was reading naturally gravitated toward Beiser’s treatment of Nietzsche. Beiser has so far had very little to say about Nietzsche in published work, to a point that has seemed a form of studied avoidance. His engaging 2016 treatment of 19th-century German pessimism from 1860–1900 leaves out Nietzsche entirely, with the observation that much has already been written about him. I’ve thus long been curious what Beiser would say, and had high expectations, given my fondness for his previous work. I was hoping for a new and illuminating angle on Nietzsche, well-informed by Beiser’s enviably vast knowledge of the historical context. There were some insights of that form. But alas, I found his treatment of Nietzsche in the present book on the whole something of a disappointment.
Take, for instance, Beiser’s discussion of Nietzsche on the subject of historicism in Chapter IV. Beiser writes: “Nietzsche is famous for his critique of historicism in the second of the Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen [Untimely Meditations, viz., “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”]” (106). Beiser says that Nietzsche soon becomes critical of the “passionate anti-historicism” he supposedly embraced in this text, and then advocates a full-blown historicism in his next book Human, All Too Human (106). In fairness, Beiser notes that although the purported rupture between these books is “dramatic and drastic,” there are still “points of continuity” (106), though he doesn’t elaborate on what those might be. But that is all we get about the “Uses and Disadvantages” essay by way of summary, and it is a rather misleading characterization. It is true that Nietzsche finds dangers in the veneration of history and in certain forms of historical investigation. But the key theme in this essay is that there are both unhealthy and healthy forms of historicism and of historical investigation. Forms of history can serve life. Nietzsche’s evenhandedness in this regard should be evident already from the essay’s title. The idea that history can be a threat to life, but also potentially a boon to it, is deeply pertinent to the theme of Lebensphilosophie and precisely the sort of thing that should be highlighted and explored. But we get no sense of this. There is thus no substantive engagement with what is arguably the most relevant and important text on Beiser’s theme. It is strange to find a discussion of Nietzsche on historicism where there is no real engagement with, and only the most passing mention of On the Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche says that he is looking toward an “actual history of morality” (GM, “Preface,” §7) in his signature genealogical enterprise. In place of the most fertile and focused texts for the theme at hand, Beiser looks instead to a few passages from Human, All-too-Human, and from Nietzsche’s unpublished notebooks (106–108). It is well and good to bring these to the table as well, and Beiser does in the process develop an intriguing, if highly speculative, potential link between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on some related issues. But as a short summary treatment of Nietzsche on this theme, this chapter was wanting.
The discussion of Nietzsche on “relativism” was similarly eyebrow-raising. Nearly all of Beiser’s references are from Nietzsche’s notebooks, which Nietzsche never himself published. Beiser doesn’t give the dates of these ideas from the notebooks, nor indicate any sense that Nietzsche’s views may have evolved, nor mention any tension with the published work, nor engage with the careful scholarship on this topic and related topics, such as Nietzsche’s so-called “perspectivism.” We seem to be getting from Beiser a pragmatist version of Nietzsche, with the view that the will to power is somehow itself the criterion of truth (120). Nietzsche has indeed been read, for instance by Arthur Danto in the 1960s, as having a view in this direction (2005, 80). But strong considerations have been raised against this philosophically and exegetically questionable interpretation for decades (e.g., Nehamas, 1985, 52–55; Clark, 1990, 32–34) . Of course, that needn’t settle the matter. Those lines of argument could themselves be challenged, textual evidence adduced and debated, further arguments and refinements made, and so on. But we don’t get any of that from Beiser. We just get the highly controversial interpretation repeated, as though it were the view we should come away with. The one passage Beiser cites (KSA, XII:114)—a passage consisting of a notebook sketch Nietzsche never published—doesn’t itself even offer good evidence for the specific position Beiser attributes to Nietzsche (120). The basic point—crucial to grapple with for any adequate treatment of Lebensphilosophie—is that what is true and what is valuable for life come apart. Nietzsche’s provocative suggestion, in Beyond Good and Evil §4 and many other places, is that untruth may well be what is most “life-promoting.” Turning the will to power itself into a criterion of truth would obscure this important point, and is probably why Nietzsche never published the implausible account of truth that Beiser attributes to him.
It was unfortunately characteristic of the book that there was little engagement with secondary literature, especially with the literature on Nietzsche. Work particularly relevant to Beiser’s main theme—for example, influential work by John Richardson and Bernard Reginster—doesn’t even get a passing mention. Beiser cites a handful of things, such as Walter Kaufmann’s classic study first published in 1950, but ignores much of the most influential anglophone scholarship of the past four decades on the questions he addresses. It can sometimes be refreshing to avoid the inside baseball and simply engage with the text. We don’t need to get deep into the scholarly weeds to have an informative book; sometimes it is better to stay out of them. Yet one starts to worry when selectively engaging with the primary text, and not engaging with the scholarship, begins to lead to misinformation and mischaracterization.
These concerns notwithstanding, this book has some significant virtues. It is welcome to have a book that is this well-written. It is nice to have a big picture historical narrative, reflecting on several different figures at once. To paint with a broad brush, one inevitably needs to sacrifice some of the finer bits of nuance. Scholarly caviling about this or that point of interpretation can perhaps be a distraction from what is illuminating about the narrative presented, and a hindrance to introducing the figures in question to new audiences in a readily comprehensible way. I wouldn’t want to discourage those who are not dedicated scholars of a given figure from writing about them, or weaving them into an interesting larger story. But I suspect that a longer gestation period of reading and engaging with the relevant scholarship would have improved this manuscript, without sacrificing its readability. The timeline of Beiser’s recent productivity suggests this book was written in a very short time indeed—a speed impressive and alarming in equal measure. I finished the book grateful for the exceptionally clear and engagingly readable summary of Dilthey and Simmel, but uneasy that the treatment of them may have some of the same limitations as the book’s uneven treatment of Nietzsche.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Tim Stoll and Johannes Steizinger for their helpful comments on this review.
REFERENCES
Frederick Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy 1860–1900, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.
Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965; 2nd Ed. 2005).
Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Harvard University Press, 1985), 52–55.
Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 32–34.
Reviewed by Andrew Huddleston, University of Warwick / University of Notre Dame