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Creative Understanding
Hermann Alexander Graf Keyserling (July 20, 1880-April 26, 1946) was a philosopher from the wealthy aristocratic Baltic German Keyserlingk family. In Creative Understanding Keyserling takes the reader on a wild ride through the wilderness of our minds as these relate to the infinite reality that surrounds us.
- GenresPhilosophy
524 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1922
3 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
Hermann Keyserling
62 books15 followersCount Hermann Alexander von Keyserling was a Baltic German philosopher. He was interested in natural science and in philosophy, and before World War I he was known both as a student of geology and as a popular essayist. After loosing his estate in the Russian Revolution, he founded the Gesellschaft für Freie Philosophie (Society for Free Philosophy) at Darmstadt.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 1, 2023
I came across Count Hermann Keyserling while reading The Letters of Oswald Spengler and got curious to who he was. In the responding letter, Spengler brushes him off and wants nothing to do with him and will mock him in one of his later letters he writes to the sister of Fredrich Nietzsche.
As I was reading this book, I was also reading Lacan’s Ecrits and the overlap between the two books became such that I would confound the two thinkers within my mind because they both had a very similar theme going on. Keyserling will say later on in his book after I finished Ecrits and resumed this book that he had discovered Freud after he had formatted his book in his mind and would incorporate Freud when he could.
It’s hard to make a comment on this book without first commenting how much racism, anti-Jewish thought, and absurdness on a country’s character coming from its blood and soil permeates this book. It is so very typical from German writers from this period and Spengler definitely influenced Keyserling with that kind of non-sense as illustrated by Spengler’s atrocious Decline of the West and Keyserling acknowledges that book in this book; or even Thomas Mann’s; yes, the same Thomas Mann who wrote one of the two greatest fictional books in the 20th century, The Magic Mountain also wrote the vile Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man which is just as bigoted and stupid as Spengler’s book; Thomas Mann does see the light by the time he writes the short story Mario and the Magician. BTW, the other one of the two greatest fictional books of the 20th century was Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust.
Keyserling is getting at something else with his bigotry but the fascist non-sense is definitely within this book and I’ll note the NYT book review for this book did not mention those travesties. It mostly dwelt on Count Keyserling’s school of wisdom and misdirected the reader to some of his orientalism of being versus doing, which is in the book but it is as if the reviewer only read part of the book. Here’s the review for anyone who is interested:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/time...
I got surprised by the ending in this book. Count Keyserling was most definitely interested in selling his school of wisdom and why it will change the world, but I really did not catch on to that until the last chapter or so because he makes a quick segue out of philosophy into his cultish like school of wisdom.
The Spengler belief that civilizations mean decline and the great man needs to come and save us from ourselves is where Keyserling and Spengler come together, and that character is developed by culture and makes us all special are definitely matters of overlap between the two thinkers, and both beliefs are at the core of what fascist believe.
I want to talk just a little bit of Count Keyserling and his philosophy presented in this book. He will say that everything is symbol and that our meaning makes our facts and that our significance comes from our logos as we rise above our eros and that meaning is unknowable since our symbols are only understandable through the intrinsic self and the external is what distracts us. Now, obviously this paragraph is a mouthful but it does capture succinctly what Keyserling is getting at.
The similarities to what Keyserling and Lacan writes in Ecrits strangely overlap, and as the NYT article points out the real being Keyserling is calling for is the ultimate being that comes about through just existing not doing. Keyserling is big on that and thinks that is what will save us. A great person is great because they are alive at the right time for who they need to be just as were Napoleon, Luther and Caesar. Luther, for example, would not have been great unless he was alive at that period in time, Keyserling will say.
Count Keyserling gave a shout-out to the Montessori school system for doing for children what he wants to do for adults in his school of wisdom. Keyserling is trying to integrate Eastern (Oriental) belief systems into Occidental paradigms while warding off collapse enabling a great person such as Luther, Jesus, Mohammed, Napoleon to save us from ourselves with our reliance on only 25 letters (German must only have 25 letters, I suppose) making up our thoughts which aren’t original except for when a great leader realizes the significance through their actualization of the reality of a particular time period.
Keyserling is laying a groundwork just as Spengler did for an Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump to come along and use the awe from instinctual thought circumventing our reason circuits and appealing to an imaginary character of a people that doesn’t really exist, and limiting democracy to an imaginary community of those like themselves, and with an admixture of mysticism in order to enslave us to their tyranny.
Overall, I’m not really impressed by Keyserling’s philosophy or how he presented his arguments and unlike the reviewer for the NYT, I think Keyserling’s philosophy was mostly shallow, his racism is dangerous, and the school of wisdom he is trying to create is delusional at best. Even in 1929, our gatekeepers such as the NYT were not warning us about the monsters as they kept appearing on the horizon and were more interested in distracting us than warning us.
As I was reading this book, I was also reading Lacan’s Ecrits and the overlap between the two books became such that I would confound the two thinkers within my mind because they both had a very similar theme going on. Keyserling will say later on in his book after I finished Ecrits and resumed this book that he had discovered Freud after he had formatted his book in his mind and would incorporate Freud when he could.
It’s hard to make a comment on this book without first commenting how much racism, anti-Jewish thought, and absurdness on a country’s character coming from its blood and soil permeates this book. It is so very typical from German writers from this period and Spengler definitely influenced Keyserling with that kind of non-sense as illustrated by Spengler’s atrocious Decline of the West and Keyserling acknowledges that book in this book; or even Thomas Mann’s; yes, the same Thomas Mann who wrote one of the two greatest fictional books in the 20th century, The Magic Mountain also wrote the vile Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man which is just as bigoted and stupid as Spengler’s book; Thomas Mann does see the light by the time he writes the short story Mario and the Magician. BTW, the other one of the two greatest fictional books of the 20th century was Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust.
Keyserling is getting at something else with his bigotry but the fascist non-sense is definitely within this book and I’ll note the NYT book review for this book did not mention those travesties. It mostly dwelt on Count Keyserling’s school of wisdom and misdirected the reader to some of his orientalism of being versus doing, which is in the book but it is as if the reviewer only read part of the book. Here’s the review for anyone who is interested:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/time...
I got surprised by the ending in this book. Count Keyserling was most definitely interested in selling his school of wisdom and why it will change the world, but I really did not catch on to that until the last chapter or so because he makes a quick segue out of philosophy into his cultish like school of wisdom.
The Spengler belief that civilizations mean decline and the great man needs to come and save us from ourselves is where Keyserling and Spengler come together, and that character is developed by culture and makes us all special are definitely matters of overlap between the two thinkers, and both beliefs are at the core of what fascist believe.
I want to talk just a little bit of Count Keyserling and his philosophy presented in this book. He will say that everything is symbol and that our meaning makes our facts and that our significance comes from our logos as we rise above our eros and that meaning is unknowable since our symbols are only understandable through the intrinsic self and the external is what distracts us. Now, obviously this paragraph is a mouthful but it does capture succinctly what Keyserling is getting at.
The similarities to what Keyserling and Lacan writes in Ecrits strangely overlap, and as the NYT article points out the real being Keyserling is calling for is the ultimate being that comes about through just existing not doing. Keyserling is big on that and thinks that is what will save us. A great person is great because they are alive at the right time for who they need to be just as were Napoleon, Luther and Caesar. Luther, for example, would not have been great unless he was alive at that period in time, Keyserling will say.
Count Keyserling gave a shout-out to the Montessori school system for doing for children what he wants to do for adults in his school of wisdom. Keyserling is trying to integrate Eastern (Oriental) belief systems into Occidental paradigms while warding off collapse enabling a great person such as Luther, Jesus, Mohammed, Napoleon to save us from ourselves with our reliance on only 25 letters (German must only have 25 letters, I suppose) making up our thoughts which aren’t original except for when a great leader realizes the significance through their actualization of the reality of a particular time period.
Keyserling is laying a groundwork just as Spengler did for an Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump to come along and use the awe from instinctual thought circumventing our reason circuits and appealing to an imaginary character of a people that doesn’t really exist, and limiting democracy to an imaginary community of those like themselves, and with an admixture of mysticism in order to enslave us to their tyranny.
Overall, I’m not really impressed by Keyserling’s philosophy or how he presented his arguments and unlike the reviewer for the NYT, I think Keyserling’s philosophy was mostly shallow, his racism is dangerous, and the school of wisdom he is trying to create is delusional at best. Even in 1929, our gatekeepers such as the NYT were not warning us about the monsters as they kept appearing on the horizon and were more interested in distracting us than warning us.
July 22, 2020
THIS BOOK SHOULD BE MORE WELL KNOWN!
Quite simply one of the great works of 20th century German philosophy, and truly deserves to be read far more widely.
Quite simply one of the great works of 20th century German philosophy, and truly deserves to be read far more widely.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews