The Biocentric Worldview: Selected Essays and Poems of Ludwig Klages

by Ludwig Klages, Joseph D. Pryce (Translator, introduction), John B. Morgan (Editor)

This book is a selection of essays and poems by the German philosopher and psychologist, Ludwig Klages. He was a fierce critic of what he saw as the lack of quality in the modern world, which he held to be a product of the false ideas and belief systems of our times. For Klages, the world is divided between forces and ideas that enhance life in all its vigor (such as those of Nietzsche), and those which oppose life by reducing it to mere materialism, and by portraying it as something to be shunned as innately corrupt and evil (such as modern religion). To overcome the life-denying forces, Klages calls for a return to the pagan view of life, and to a direct relationship between humanity and the natural world, and opposition to the destruction of nature by the agents of progress. He also opposed the distortions and falsehoods which he claimed were being propagated by psychoanalysis. “Those who confidently predict the end of all life and the ultimate doom of the cosmos are mere swindlers, Klages assures us. Those who cannot successfully predict such mundane trivialities as next season's fashions in hemlines or the trends in popular music five years down the road can hardly expect to be taken seriously as prophets who can foretell the ultimate fate of the entire universe!” — From the Introduction by Joseph D. Pryce

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Politics, Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry, Ecology

156 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2013

About the author

Ludwig Klages was a German philosopher, psychologist and a theoretician in the field of handwriting analysis. Part of the Munich Cosmic Circle, he was known for his Lebensphilosophie. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[Jackson Burnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ludwig Klages was a psychologist, a pagan, and a philosopher of the late German Romantic period. He rejected empiricism and the Western tendency to equate life with the functioning of a machine.

Klages was also an anti-Semite. Place his name in a search engine and see what you find.

The collection of essays and sampling of poems found in Klages' The Biocentric Worldview should not be summarily dismissed as testament of ethnic hate even though he steers his ship into those rocks at times. His writings in this collection provide a provocative critique of the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Descartes, Klages suggests, "effectively sacrificed the entirety of man’s inner life to mere cognition" and that "through mere apprehension, we can never obtain the slightest understanding of life."

Klages believed life suffused all nature and that the horatorical (the "you shoulds") constituted a daemonic force that has become a blatantly destructive will to plunder the living world. The horatorical is a drive to power, a drive to destroy life.

I rate this book with three stars for several reasons. First, the translator should be commended for making this often dense material readable in English. Second, this webpage doesn't provide the option of rating this book with 2.75 stars. Third, this book provides useful insight into understanding those who reject empiricism and rationality.

For a long time, I have believed US politics has been dominated not by a religious coalition but by a new paganism; one that substitutes mythology for the historical record, that replaces scientific evidence with magic, that confounds American capitalism with theology, and one that confuses unbridled militarism with patriotism. Although Klages' essays predates the new paganism, this book helps those of us rooted in the Enlightenment tradition to understand the nature and origins of antirational thought.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Biocentric Worldview: Selected Essays and Poems by Ludwig Klages" is a collection of essays and poems by the German philosopher and psychologist Ludwig Klages. The book, first published in 1989, presents Klages' ideas on biocentrism, a philosophical worldview that emphasizes the importance of nature and the natural world over human interests.

Klages argues that the modern world is characterized by a dangerous separation from nature, which has led to a loss of meaning and purpose in human life. He believes that human beings are fundamentally connected to the natural world, and that our well-being and flourishing depend on our ability to live in harmony with nature.

Klages' ideas on biocentrism are influenced by a range of philosophical and scientific traditions, including Nietzschean philosophy, Romanticism, and the emerging field of ecology. He argues that a biocentric worldview can provide a new basis for ethics and morality, one that is rooted in the natural world and emphasizes the interdependence of all living things.

The essays in the book cover a range of topics, from the philosophy of life and the relationship between nature and culture, to the role of intuition and emotion in human experience. The book also includes a selection of Klages' poems, which explore themes of nature, love, and the human condition.

Overall, "The Biocentric Worldview" is a thought-provoking and challenging book that presents a radical alternative to traditional anthropocentric worldviews. Klages' ideas have been influential in the development of environmental ethics and the modern environmental movement, and the book remains a valuable contribution to the study of philosophy, ecology, and the relationship between human beings and the natural world.

GPT

[Mantas Martynaitis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read Oswald Spengler instead

[Spread Love And Terror · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems very odd that a grubby (now thankfully dead) neo-nazi like Joseph Pryce would translate Klages, a visionary whose worldview is vociferously at odds with the fascists that attempt to mold him in their own image. His very underlying message of the male urge to dominate being a disease and the sickening failure of the "civilised" European to bring anything but misery to the world seems to be completely lost on the rightoid weirdos.

Don't give the publisher your money, download for free and skip the fashy introduction.

[AvianBuddha · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Life is not 'observed,' but it is felt with all of our darkest powers. And we are only able to achieve access to this feeling of living actuality with complete certainty in our deepest inwardness; beyond that, nothing can be definitely asserted. Whether we judge, assert, will or wish, dream, or fantasize, each and every one of these activities is supported and penetrated by the self-same stream of elementary emotional life, which is incomparable, irreducible, and beyond the reach of rationalization or coercion, for we are apodictically certain that life can never, ever be 'grasped' (begriffen). And since we feel ourselves to be filled with this vitality, we therefore bring ourselves into that most intimate bond with the substance of life: the image of the world. Briefly put: we experience the personal and participate in the experience of a stranger" (95).
-- Ludwig Klages

Having just finished Biocentric Worldview, translated by Joseph D. Pyrce and published by Arktos in 2013, I was awed by Ludwig Klages' life-affirming vision. Klages was heavily influenced by the German Romanticists like Carl Gustav Carus and Goethe. In order to appreciate Klages' philosophy, one needs to understand the antagonistic relationship of spirit (Geist) and soul (Seele). Klages argues that conceptual/discursive/rational/purposeful thought, teleological notions of "progress", "commands", cold analytic quantification, and utilitarianism all constitute the spirit whereas the soul is defined by images, vitality, and authentic wonder in the landscape, poetry, and beauty; the soul's examples are gods, poets, and heroes (55). Furthermore, the spirit treats the world as mechanistic, "viewing the whole of nature entirely from the perspective of one who is only interested in rational, practical applications", whereas the soul "receives the world as 'images' as discrete, rhythmically pulsating intermittences" (64; 14). For example, Klages claims the Abrahamic notion that the world was created from a "commandment" is "logocentric", for it treats life as existing in a state of sin and in need of being renovated or "perfected"; the logocentrism inherent in spirit fundamentally weakens and erodes the soul, as evidenced by the destruction of primeval forests and biodiversity, mass migration and miscegenation, loss of communal ways of life and traditions, and estrangement from nature as a result of a "purpose" in rectifying the "the fall". The soul/life and spirit/apprehension are incommensurable entities that exist in conflict, and Klages goes as far as to state the spirit comes from "outside" of reality and its goal is to annihilate the soul. Note, he also claims the primal image of "soul" is "pure actuality" and can only be experienced and not conceived, and "the sea of the soul is at the point of contact of the inner and the outer world", which parallels Zen Buddhism in many ways (85). The soul is "primal actuality of life itself" where the meaning of the world reveals itself without the need for concepts or reflective/discursive thought. Klages is a hylozoist and praises the Pre-Socratics like Empedocles and German Romanticists, having a strong fondness for Goethe in particular. As Goethe said, 'The point of life is life itself', and as Klages argues, "The body is the phenomenal manifestation of the soul, just as the soul is the meaning of the living body" (120).

Klages argues the spirit reifies images into discrete manipulable, quantifiable "objects", which is an illusion (112). Moreover, spirit is focused on causes whereas soul on meaning (102). Also, Klages' view of "images as discrete, rhythmically pulsating intermittences" parallels Dogen's views regarding Uji (Being-Time) and even the "spasmodic gait" of Emily Dickinson's poetry.

Importantly, Klages encourage a "positive, caring attitude towards life" that naturally and spontaneously emerges without commandments, compulsion, or demand (54).

Klages argues the "soul" is "identical with the 'principal of life'... [and] cannot be divided into component parts any more than it can have received its nature from the addition of discrete components that can be assembled to form the whole" (103). Klages claims the spirit came from outside of reality and fundamentally seeks to annihilate the soul.

Here is a nice passage:

"At the dawn of history, and for many subsequent generations, spirit existed in a creative symbiosis with the soul. In the course of time, the balance of the poles shifted more and more towards the dominance of spirit over the soul. That development has continued all the way down to the present age. Among every people that we consider to be civilized, spirit eventually severs its ties with the soul" (122).

While the Zen Buddhist see spirit as "tameable" and "having its place", Klages would, most likely, retort that tolerance towards it has paved the way to "cash-crazed technocrats who mounted the Industrial Revolution" for the "ultimate enslavement of nature to the demands of man's will" and the "ever-increasing process of racial bastardization" (102; 108; 48).

Regardless of the degree to which you agree with Klages, there is no doubt this book will increase your enchantment with the landscape, poetry, and beauty and to hold a higher regard for one's gods, poets, and heroes.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Man and Earth” was such a good - albeit extremely desperate and frustrating, prophetic - work on Environmentalism and the repudiation of “progress.” Unfortunately I cannot say the same about the book’s introduction.

[cadfael · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's the poems that got me.

[Igor Capelari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apesar do racismo, Klages é um escritor maravilhoso. Minha nota do livro só não é maior porque o modelo ensaístico não permite a apresentação de um sistema.

[Bobby Daugherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly essays with some poems at the end. He was known during the dawn of the 20th century in Germany as an esoteric author. Read it to get into the mind of the time.

[cinna annelise · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The person whose innermost passion is to possess another utterly views the object of his passion as if through a fog that renders his gaze identical with the eye of the world-creating God, before whom the surface of the Earth is pulverized as the mortal coil of the flesh begins to glow with the penetrating radiance of the elemental soul. As if he were truly becoming a man on fire, he probes the humanity of his beloved, but with the ray of light that reveals merely the presence of his own demon."