Ludwig Klages is arguably one of the richest philosophers of the continental and vitalist traditions, and yet, his concepts and beliefs remain obscure in the Anglophone world, even despite growing popularity. The surface level slogans attributed to him—the anti-modernist, the anti-rationalist, the primitivist, the environmentalist—typically fail in giving his philosophy its due depth. Here, we set about explaining a number of his key concepts to give a complete “image” of his worldview, particularly through his early work, Vom Kosmogonischen Eros (1922).
Tune in for these things and many interesting tangents…
Klages the scientist: psychology, characterology, & rivalry w/ Freud
Was Klages the true successor to Nietzsche & Goethe?
On the meaning of symbols and their appearances
Seele and Geist properly understood
Klages’ theory of the will: repression of the vital drives
Are many “vitalists” actually so, or are they just Stoics?
Klages’ teaches you how to pick up women by critiquing Plato
Eros of a distance — ancestors, ecstasy, and Novalis’s blue flower
Goethe as Seelenforscher; the daimonic
The lie of the “eternal return”
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