Lebensphilosophie

Lebensphilosophie ("philosophy of life" or life-philosophy in German) is a philosophical school of thought which emphasises the meaning, value and purpose of life as the foremost focus of philosophy.

Inspired by the critique of rationalism in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Lebensphilosophie emerged in 19th-century Germany as a reaction to the rise of positivism and the theoretical focus prominent in much of post-Kantian philosophy.

The Lebensphilosophie movement bore indirect relation to the subjectivist philosophy of vitalism developed by Henri Bergson, which lent importance to immediacy of experience.

Twentieth-century forms of Lebensphilosophie can be identified with a critical stress on norms and conventions. The Israeli-American historian Nitzan Lebovic identified Lebensphilosophie with the tight relation between a "corpus of life-concepts" and what the German education system came to see, during the 1920s, as the proper Lebenskunde, the ‘teaching of life’ or ‘science of life’—a name that seemed to support the broader philosophical outlook long held by most biologists of the time. In his book Lebovic traces the transformation of the post-Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie from the radical aesthetics of the Stefan George Circle to Nazi or "biopolitical" rhetoric and politics.

This philosophy pays special attention to life as a whole, which can only be understood from within. The movement can be regarded as a rejection of Kantian abstract philosophy or scientific reductionism of positivism.

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