"Klages"1
“Klages” 1
Items of research: Klages as our problem today
I
- How to review Lebensphilosophie in the 1920s in Germany not only into its relation with Nazism and modernity, but to view it as one of the main sources of “history” in view to re-understand globalization, i.e. the remnants of global man, the world perspective of pure humanity as a whole.
Not “Weltgeschichte”, not “Weltgesellschaft”, but rather the anthropology of the single human being, his, its soul and his, its physics. Can we decline that this perspective is anything other than imposing the problem of modern man as a single being, individualism, generalizing it to all. Indeed, there are a few attempts in contemporary theory to take account of “Nietzsche” and “Frankfurt” in terms of a new anthropology of individualism, the single man as the incorporated myth: homo sacer, trickster, theater man, the affect guided man etc., the new sociology of the heteronomous man, the real conformity of the consumer man, etc.
- Why globalization theory in general is not brought in, when discussing the old issues, they are merely seen as preludes to fascism or redirections in the humanities from mythology to history, psychology and bio-politic thus Lebensphilosophie, the theory since the 1920s now reinvented for low political and banal purposes.-
- Globalization theory has been abolished since 9/11 at large, why? Would one ever have thought before of something like a secretly planned long term war inflicted transformation of nationally rebound societies under a monopolar power: Global Islamophobia and the reinvention of Difference and the foe, the enmity of heterodoxy. There, to re-discuss the issue of 1920s German thought is to show the need to bring Lebensphilosophie into a global perspective, difference as the identity of the non-identical: all source of identity of the concept, endangered by the Fetish of the commodity.
- Conceptually, everything these people taught, and as is seen in their texts, reveals this necessity: It is not only to re-think the modern relation to myth in terms of its abolishing and despite of this its continued presence, but rather also to show the limitedness of their globalization reflections, in viewing the reality of human being, e.g. the individual, the society, logic of organization etc. as they saw “us” and the “other” as the one being, the challenge of destruction, never the part of “us”, the heretical or even heterodox and retarded reverse dissenting inner powers, while in fact they never conceded that the myths were always part of the game, globalist rationalists became nameless watchers in relation to the inner constructions of what hence was called modern. So like the magician of the old times, there is the individual as the magician of our time, that makes in the one man the inside nature that is triumphing over all nature. The Heteronomous has ended in the discovery of the undiscovered inner reality. In fact, it did not really, the unknown remains a field of its own playground. Thus, the “Klages” issue should be rethought in a general framework of more varying types of peoples and individuals, and of multilayered patterns of exchange instead of building on the character of one man, modern man, ego, standing for the humanity as a whole.
- Let us take the issue of “Wirklichkeit der Bilder”, it is related to Klages’ study on the pre-historic Pelasgens and their pathetic thinking in symbols (GWS,1257ff). It focusses on the dominance of the belief in the power of pictures over the belief in the reality of things. Today this is an issue of reference in modern art, or a philosophic vision for aesthetic redemption of humanity from the modernist destruction of nature? However, after the media-explosion, can we still speak of the reality of vision, of form, and if, what is it now in this mediatic commodified mass grave of signs?
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- A note on the importance of Klages: If culture is the continuous fight over memory, as the Assmanns want to teach us, to speak about Klages is to speak about a de-memorialised thinker, he was one of the leading figures of pre- and post WW I Germany, despite a short 1956 note on his death in the FAZ by young Heidelbergian Jürgen Habermas, he was barely ever mentioned as a philosopher in post-WW II Germany, despite the efforts of a small cryptic group of followers and largely silent admirers there was no struggle for the “memory” of Ludwig Klages, a once outstanding figure of the late 1920s conservative movement, the pre-Fascist thinker, as Adorno would have called him. The reasons for that should be openly discussed: pre-fascist irrationalism and anti-Semitism, proto-fascist conservatives are the foremost issues, Zionism as well as new identitarian movements, are part of the Klages-revival, and the cynicist treatment of anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism. Youth wants to enter the struggle for his Memory, and does not know where to begin.
- The Frankfurt-Myth of Klages. There are these small footnotes in “Die Dialektik der Aufklärung”. Ulysses and the myth. Der Kyklope vergisst ihn, den modernen Helden der List, aufzufressen, weil er sich Niemand nennt, und so überlebt er. „Das Moment des Betrugs im Opfer ist das Urbild der odyseischen , wie den viele Listen des Odysseus gleichsam einem Opfer an Naturgottheiten eingelegt sind.“ (DdA, 65). Adorno here developed „die Entfaltung des rationalen Elements im Opfer“, quotes Klages as one who already sees the potential dichotomy between authentic communication with nature and cunning. However, would not be able to see, that mythical thought and pretense of magical domination of nature, would contradict each other on the internal level. Adorno claims, in contrast to Klages, that this pretense of nature domination in fact belongs to the very essence of the Myth: The double-character of the victim, the magical self-victimization of the Individual as vice versa the collective – as ever one would like to see it – and the self-sustenance by way of such techniques of magic, implies an objective contradiction, which in itself drives insistently to the unfolding of the rational element inherent in victim.” Fn1, 65, DdA). On page 84 DdA Adorno testifies a certain humorous rationality of Klages: “Endlich könnte die häufige Läppischkeit des Dementen im Lichte eines todgeborenen Humors erscheinen“ quoting p. 1469 of vol. III of Klages‘ „Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele“, Leipzig 1932. We have and will in more detail develop on these entanglements between myth and victim, cunning and rationality. The point is, that DdA includes Klages theory of myths into its own reflections on the origin of rationality, i.e. this is a certain 1947, post-war recognition of Klages. However, Klages was never to be mentioned in Frankfurt seminars, despite long discussions on Bergson, and the DdA was never republished until rediscovered by students and reprinted on the black market in 1968. (First authorized re-edition then with Fischer in 1969). (See also Stauth/Turner and Stauth).
- What in fact, the youth with its heteronomous underground feelings in “rediscovering” Klages against mainstream and beyond Frankfurt-thinking did not know or neglect, is that, holding Klages’ “myth” as an anti-science and re-invention of feeling and affect, they overlooked the fact that there existed in the 1920s a real “scientific” Klages-machine with far-reaching branches into all humanities from philosophy of science to psychology, to bio-politics, to cultural history. This was recently shown in “The Philosophy of Life and Death” and our own perspective on Klages should be extended under the spell of this book and other recent Anglo-American re-discoveries of this period in terms of key issues of the plight of critical discourse and the future of modernity. It was recently shown how deeply involved the “erotic movement“ became with in respect of Nazi-fascist power politics, a mighty machine of petit bourgeois male youth unions, the pillar of re-building the deep state of Hitler’s German Reich. What is the core of this new civilizational trend?
II
• For the start let us return to Klages and the Frankfurt “myth”. There is a great reluctance among sociologists to concede a certain interactive dependency between the rightwing Lebensphilosophie and the leftwing Kritische Theorie on the intellectual and philosophical cross roads of the nineteen twenties’ Germany. Too diverse it seems are the respectively alternative prospects for a future re-arrangement of human knowledge, life practice and social development after the Decadence experience of western rationalism after WW I.
The point here is that the Chapter on “Odysseus oder Mythos und Aufklärung” is largely build on an inner conversation with Nietzsche and Klages and their positivist philologist adversaries, entangling on the myths and sacrifice and in a broader sense of civilizational mission the “abomination of Human sacrifice”. (65 fn3, DdA).
• On a second step we should discuss how Benjamin and the post-Benjamin “theorists” triggered an inherently religious debate on Messianism and homo sacer as the redemption issue emanating from Klages’ pre- and anti-religious and discussion of myth and Eros is turned into a political-theological issue of modern secular messianism
• Third we will discuss Deleuze’ end of binary, dual, and dichotomist perspectives, the end of causal and factual interpretations of history. How far this idea is related to Klages' Wirklichkeitsbewusstsein?
Starting Apparatus
Adorno
DdA, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente. Querido Verlag Amsterdam 1947
Klages
GWS, Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 3 Vols. Johann Ambosius Barth Verlag, Leipzig 1929f
Eros, Ludwig Klages, Vom Kosmogonischen Eros, Eugen Dietrichs Verlag, Jena, 1921
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Bruns, Caludia, Politik des Eros. Der Männerbund in Wissenschaft, Politik und Jugendkultur (1880 – 1934), Böhlau Verlag, Köln, Weimar, Wien
Lebovic, Nitzan, The Philosophy of Life and Death.Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitic. Palg Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History, 2013.
McCole, John, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1993.
Stauth, Georg and Bryan S. Turner, “A Note on Ludwig Klages (1827-1956) and Critical Theory”, in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 9 (1992), 45-63.
Stauth, Georg, “Critical Theory and Pre-Fascist Social Thought”, in History of European Ideas, Vol. 18, No 5, (1994) 711-727)
