Lebensphilosophie
1870 – 1930
Life is not the sort of thing a system can capture, and the attempt to fix it in concepts is what loses it.
- Active
- 1870 – 1930
- Where
- Germany and France
- Status
- extinct as a movement
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Lived experience is prior to the categories we use on it. Duration is not a series of instants, and a concept that stops something in order to examine it has already changed what it was examining.
What it held
The movement is a reaction against two things at once: the systems of German idealism, and the growing assumption that the methods of physics would eventually cover everything.
Bergson's contribution is the sharpest. Measured time is space in disguise — a line with points on it, all present at once. Lived time, duration, is nothing like that: it flows, it is heterogeneous, and each moment carries the whole of what came before. Intelligence, which evolved for handling solid objects, is very good at cutting things up and constitutively bad at grasping flow, so it needs intuition as a complement.
Dilthey's contribution is methodological and has outlasted the metaphysics. The human sciences do not explain, they understand — and understanding a life or a text is a different operation from subsuming an event under a law. That distinction underwrites hermeneutics and much of the social sciences.
Simmel applied the same instincts to money, fashion, cities and the stranger, and effectively founded a way of doing sociology philosophically.
How it argued
Description of lived experience, hermeneutic understanding, and sustained argument that the concepts of natural science are the wrong tools for their subject.
What it was arguing against
Positivism, mechanism, and the assumption that explanation in the human sciences must take the form it takes in physics.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether intuition is a method or the refusal of one — Russell's attack on Bergson was on exactly this. Whether the movement's anti-intellectualism was a philosophical position or a mood.
Common misconceptions
That it is irrationalist. Bergson argues carefully and at length, and Dilthey's project is precisely to give the human sciences a rigorous method of their own rather than to dispense with rigour.
How it began
The success of the natural sciences making the question sharp: is there anything the methods of physics cannot reach, and if so what should be used instead?
What became of it
Absorbed into phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics, which took the questions and rebuilt the methods.
Lasting influence
Heidegger read Dilthey closely. Deleuze rebuilt Bergson for a later generation. Proust's account of memory is unimaginable without him, and Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
Why it still matters
The explain-versus-understand distinction is still the fault line in philosophy of social science, and Bergson's account of time is being taken seriously again.
Put another way
A melody, which stops being a melody the moment you separate the notes.
Where to start
Time and Free Will. It is his clearest book and the argument about time is complete in it.
The surprising bit
Bergson's public lecture course in Paris was so oversubscribed that people queued for seats and the traffic outside had to be managed. Philosophers do not usually cause congestion.
In their own words
The universe is a machine for making gods.
We explain nature, we understand mental life.
Connections
- Answers
- German Idealism
- Opposed by
- Vienna Circle, Neo-Kantianism
- Influenced
- Phenomenology, Existentialism, French Spiritualism
The verdict
The last European philosophy to command a general audience, and the one most thoroughly eclipsed by what followed it.