Lebensphilosophie
Recapturing life in its very movement, which concepts freeze and science cuts up.
c. 1883 – c. 1932
A group of thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century who took life, not knowledge, as their starting point, against and neo-Kantianism. 's critique (Die Philosophie des Lebens, 1920) is a landmark in the discussion of the label "philosophy of life", already in use. grounded the human sciences in (). set against measured time and against the intellect. conceived life as a flow that gives itself forms and then breaks them. is its acknowledged precursor. The movement is not a school: Bergson does not belong to the German tradition, and the label was often polemical. Its critique of abstract reason passed into and .
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Justification
We explain nature, we understand mental life, writes : there are two ways of knowing reality, causal explanation and understanding, and the second does not reduce to the first. divides the roles differently: science, made for acting on matter, gives valid knowledge of it, but cuts reality up into things; only intuition, which metaphysics cultivates, grasps life from within. In Dilthey, this is a pluralism of scientific methods; in Bergson, a complementarity between science and metaphysics.
Dilthey, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894) · Bergson, "Introduction to Metaphysics" (1903), in The Creative Mind
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Justification
Life is first of all movement. When describes as a change in which there is no thing that changes, he rejects an immutable substrate beneath change, not the continuity of experience, which is on the contrary that of a melody. describes life as what constantly overflows its own forms. In , this becoming is mainly historical, not cosmological.
Bergson, "The Perception of Change" (1911), in The Creative Mind · Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), ch. IV · Simmel, The View of Life (1918), ch. I
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- Reacts againstPositivismLebensphilosophie was built against the positivist model of a knowledge that knows only laws: Dilthey refused to apply Comte's and Mill's method to the human sciences, and Bergson set the intuition of duration against…Read
- ContinuesNietzscheLebensphilosophie recognized in Nietzsche the one who made life the criterion of values and knowledge.Read