This “philosophy of life” has vanished from the scene so completely that it is hard, especially in the English-speaking world, to get a sense of its overwhelming dominance from about 1880 to 1930. The sociologist George Simmel said at the time that the idea of “life” had come to dominate philosophy in the twentieth century in the way that concepts such as God, nature, being, or ego had in other periods.1 Philosophy of life clearly contained a number of contradictory tendencies that have since come apart—how else could it be blamed for so many different phenomena? It has been accurately (if abstractly) described as a vitalistic variant of pragmatism.2 It emphasized dynamism, activity, and striving and aimed to increase the qualitative intensity of experience. It placed humanity within nature, not above it, and saw humans as at once thinking subjects and natural objects. It emphasized a world full of possibility waiting to be actualized, so much so that there was no need of a “beyond.” It was naturalistic and this-worldly, but it insistently opposed the reduction of everything to material mechanism.
In subsequent decades its ethical message became part of existentialism, and its emphasis on “vitality” passed into biology. The pragmatic elements of the philosophy survived as a theory of scientific practice based in experience and giving special attention to contexts and relations. In 1900, however, these various components still seemed integrally connected. Exponents of “life” held to the coherence of science and arts and to classical means of investigation, newly accompanied by exaltation of a “vital freedom” that was somehow to be bound into the process of making art and doing science.
A number of philosophers, artists, and writers of stature devoted themselves to the elucidation of this prewar yearning for “life,” and a surprisingly large fraction of these turn out to be Alfred Wegener’s exact contemporaries. Among them is the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880–1942), born five days after Wegener. Musil’s great epic of the last years of the Habsburg Empire, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The man without qualities), portrays the agitated sensibility of a generation coming to maturity at the turn of the new century:
Out of the oil-smooth spirit of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, suddenly, there arose a kindling fever. Nobody knew exactly what was on the way; nobody was able to say whether it was to be a new art, a New Man, a new morality or perhaps a re-shuffling of society … these were different and had very different battle cries, but they all breathed the same breath of life.
Something at that time passed through the thicket of beliefs, as when many trees bend before one wind—a sectarian or reformist spirit, a blissful better self arising and setting forth, a little renascence and reformation such as only the best epochs know; and entering into the world in those days, even in coming around the very first corner, one felt the breath of the spirit on one’s cheeks.3
This sense of ferment provided abundant material for other writers, all of them concerned with young men’s search for meaning. Hermann Hesse’s (1877–1962) spiritual seekers in Demian (1920) and Siddhartha (1922), Roger Martin du Gard’s (1881–1958) fiery young journalist in Jean Barois (1913), and even Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) convalescent Hans Castorp in Der Zauberberg (1928), however different from one another, were all young men seeking life, health, and spiritual renewal in periods where crude and commercial materialism was on the rise and where outmoded creeds and ideologies offered no nourishment. All three of these writers, and many others who took up the theme, were a part of the “generation of 1880,” as was Wegener himself.
Also of this generation were the “philosophers of decline,” Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). The latter was, of course, not a German, but he was educated in Germany, and his premonitions of decline, as well as of the need for the best and the brightest to make a strenuous and vital effort on behalf of the survival of high culture, were based on his experiences in Germany as a student of philosophy in the first decade of the twentieth century.
One important effect of this life-philosophy movement was to shift the center of thought, in Wegener’s generation, outside the universities and the official organs of culture where they had comfortably resided for fifty years. Among those that answered the call to “life,” almost none had ordinary careers in the stolid Wilhelmine sense of “ordinary.” Albert Schweitzer was a virtuoso organist and musicologist who left Europe forever in 1913 to become a medical missionary in Africa. Ortega y Gasset was a newspaper editor and cultural commentator in Madrid, where he gave philosophy lectures to huge audiences in theaters, and whose books were read not by scholars but by a broad, nonacademic public. Spengler was a Gymnasium Oberlehrer (senior teacher) who had failed his PhD exams in philosophy the first time through and then, having obtained his degree, quit his position within a few years to become a writer. Hermann Hesse was a high school dropout and bookstore clerk who bypassed university altogether and went directly to writing. Robert Musil studied successively to be a military officer and civil engineer and then finally took a PhD in philosophy from Berlin—though he passed up a university position in Munich to become a freelance author. None of them followed their fathers; none of them were “pensioned,” and none of them stayed home.
Life and Evolution: Philosophy at Berlin in 1901–1902
If “life” ruled outside the German universities, it was Kant who still ruled within, with his intellectualism and concern for categories and first principles. The only exception was Berlin. In Berlin, in Wegener’s student years, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) held sway, and his subject was “life.” For Dilthey the whole of “The History of Philosophy and Its Relationship to Culture” could be summed up in that one word: “life.” Life was all that existed: all the acts, dreams, and ideas of all the men and women who ever lived. All laws and all art, all philosophies and all science were not pale reflections of some greater reality beyond; they were “all that exists”—they were “life.” Dilthey, like his French contemporary and counterpart Henri Bergson (1859–1941), directed his students to the reality and intensity of their own experiences as a proper starting point—not to some categorical structure that lay beyond them, nor to some historical origin long before they were born.4
In the well-attended lectures that Alfred Wegener heard at the University of Berlin in the fall of 1901, Dilthey maintained the mildly shocking heresy that the conventional and traditional way of life of Wilhelmine Germany was not necessarily a good way of life; it was simply the way things were. If one’s parents and teachers and leaders tell one that something is “good,” that is the result of their view (Anschauung) of the world and the result of their education and their experiences. But your task (Dilthey told his listeners) is not only to inherit but to fashion for yourselves a Weltanschauung, a “worldview.”
Here was something that Alfred could grasp, employ, develop. He learned that we should and we must expect change because the world is nothing but change against a changing background. Fundamentally, Dilthey’s message was not radically opposed to the philosophical lessons Alfred had learned at home. All those schoolroom recitations of his father’s poem about butter and eggs—that what will do for one character will not suffice to firm up another—are more solemnly proclaimed here. Neither was the “openness to the future” of life-philosophy so different from Richard Wegener’s (and Schiller’s) view that we must bring the poetical spirit of play and creative novelty into things, to make the world our own, to make it better.
If Dilthey’s message was to some extent compatible with the philosophy Alfred had learned at home, it also had crucial differences that Alfred would come to embrace. Here no longer did the “diamond” of analytical science bow before the organic and perfect “pearl” of faith. Science, it turned out, was no less an organic development than religion—it was another Anchauung—another view of the whole. The character of such Anschauungen was to differ from one another and to struggle in Darwinian competition. These worldviews were the product of not just our t
hinking but the totality of our experience of life.5 Freedom was not simply the ability to think privately about truth and meaning free from coercion, as in Kant. Freedom, to be real, had to find expression in action: we are not what we think, but what we do.
This life-philosophy, in spite of its later reputation for irrationalism, exerted a tremendous influence over Alfred Wegener’s generation precisely because of its relationship to science and its connections to recent advances in the sciences. The vital dynamism of evolutionary biology and the principles of conservation and transformation of energy indicated a world of processes and movement in time, not one of fixity, stasis, or eternity. Many members of the “generation of 1880” besides Wegener were moved by this scientific message. It was no accident that Spengler wrote his thesis on Heraclitus, who had maintained that the only permanent and eternal thing is change. Nor was it happenstance that Robert Musil wrote his doctoral dissertation on the scientific ideas of Ernst Mach, who held that concepts of science are no more than economical and convenient fictions that help us to think about and fix the immensely complex and various flux of phenomena that are the real.6 Each and all of them—Alfred Wegener included—grasped science as activity, a kind of life, something that was meant to grow, to evolve, to change, as they were to evolve and change with it.
If Dilthey rephrased for Wegener the question “What should I believe?” as “What should I do?” he gave no answer.7 More promising in Wegener’s search for an answer was the work of Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908). In the summer of 1902 Alfred found himself with considerable free time. The demands of his military training were much lighter than in the previous six months, and except for several weeks of muddy maneuvers and the obligatory marching and parading, he was at leisure. He therefore enrolled for the summer semester, at Berlin, for a single course in philosophy with Paulsen.
Paulsen was much more empirically minded than Dilthey, and there was none of Dilthey’s relativism in his presentation. Paulsen had been (for decades) a fighter for educational reform in schools and universities, especially for the return of sciences to the secondary curriculum, and for a return of science to the center stage of philosophy. His course “History of Modern Philosophy with a Consideration of Contemporary Culture” was outlined in his plainspoken, modest, and, consequently, hugely popular books such as Einleitung in die Philosophie (Introduction to Philosophy, 1895).8 The book, like Paulsen’s lectures, aimed at a broad public outside the university. Paulsen addressed contemporary social and ethical problems, and in so doing he set a style of presentation that dominated the teaching of philosophy in Germany for the next forty years.9 William James wrote an effusive preface to the book for the American edition of 1895, and he was so excited by the book’s promise as an undergraduate text that he used it while it was still in proof sheets. He remarked, “In a long experience as a teacher, it is one of the very few text-books about which I have heard no grumbling.”10 He also defended it against its critics: “Professor Paulsen makes philosophy and life continuous again; so the pedants of both camps among us will unite in condemnation of his work. Life lies open, and the philosophy which their intellects desiderate must wear the form of a closed system. We need ever to be reminded afresh that no philosophy can be more than a hypothesis.”11
Paulsen’s candor was electrifying. Philosophy, he announced to his hearers, had lost ground in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, and it had not been doing very well in the eighteenth. The English had figured out more than 200 years earlier that the job of philosophy was to help out the natural sciences where it could, as Locke had tried to help Newton.12 Every German attempt to do the same had been thwarted by theologians and speculative metaphysicians, who succeeded in convincing the majority of listeners that philosophy was one sort of activity and natural science entirely another.13 The latter part of the nineteenth century had taken revenge on philosophy by progressively ignoring its swollen claims, in favor of the sciences. Yet, warned Paulsen, at the end of the century the lush and rampant growth of the sciences that had pushed speculative philosophy to the wall now threatened the scientific worldview with disintegration. Every science, proud and specialized, took the full attention of each of its practitioners, as each scientific field asserted its independence from every other branch of science.14
A generation later José Ortega y Gasset would make an industry of decrying the “barbarism of specialization,” but he learned of the danger from Paulsen’s introductory college text. The danger was real, and by 1900 Paulsen had been warning of it for twenty years. Paulsen offered a concrete plan and a procedure to remedy this defect. The plan was that philosophy would henceforth be a structural means of bringing the various parts of science together: “Modern science is its starting point and precondition, while the universal reign of law in natural occurrences is its fundamental idea. Whatever is not in accord with this thought lies outside the sphere of modern philosophy.”15 Philosophy will not be a “special science” but the name for all the sciences taken together.
Paulsen’s history of philosophy aimed to show that this had always been the case from the Greeks to the present: “Philosophy,” he wrote, “cannot be separated from the sciences; it is simply the sum-total of all scientific knowledge. This never-completed system, which the ages are building, is philosophy. Each particular science investigates a definite portion or cross-section of reality.”16 Note that there are no “worldviews” here, but a series of cuts through a single reality: the world is one, not many.
Paulsen’s plan was to continue the construction of the never-completed system, and this dictated a common procedure, at once pragmatic and personal. In the common and joint effort to build a picture of all of reality, Paulsen argued, we must be problem solvers: we must find our problems, analyze them, and construct the range of possible solutions. Next, we must look to the historical development of thought on each problem. Then, from among the competing adequate solutions, we should choose the most inclusive, the one that brings the most phenomena together.17
However abstract this formula sounds, there is no mistaking its profound effect on Wegener, and its signature is visible in every piece of scientific work he ever did. Certainly the elements of Paulsen’s “procedure” can be found in any description of scientific method, but there are special emphases here: the classical picture of science as an evolving collaboration and not as individual achievement, the insistence on the enduring historical importance of previous work, and the exhortation to synthesize, to bring together, to unify, to generalize, to ensure the survival of philosophy.
Wegener accepted this view of science, of philosophy, and of the world. It was to some degree the scientization of the philosophy of his childhood lessons and home life, but its call to action, its avoidance of intricate dialectic and fine categorical preconditions, its disinterest in theology, its historical sweep, and its universal scope all suited his mind and his temperament. In addition to this view of science, Wegener obtained two additional things from Paulsen. The first was a more extensive introduction to the Darwinian theory of evolution, a theory that Paulsen accepted as absolutely descriptive of the world and as governing all life and all aspects of human life, including politics and morals.18 The second thing that Paulsen provided for Wegener was an inspirational rhetoric of spirit and soul that allowed him to use these concepts without ever straying far from the detailed study of physical phenomena.
Pressing the theory of evolution to its full extent, as Paulsen did, had an important psychological consequence as well: what was true of science was true of our own lives. We try to plan and shape our lives, but they will be shaped and determined by the world in spite of our plans, and we must understand this as a natural outcome, welcome it, and accept it: “Plan and design do not play a very important part in the history of the mind. The same law of development prevails in the mental world that prevails in the organic world. Organic creations are produced in nature and in history not by forethought, but by the spontaneous unfoldin
g of germinal beginnings. Thing are not made, they grow; that is the fundamental law of reality. Even the works of the human mind are on the whole the results of unintentional growth. A planned outcome is a rare variant form of such growth.”19
On the inspirational side, Paulsen’s rhetoric of soul and spirit “ran cover” for Darwin’s theory in the same way that many other popularizers of Darwin in Germany had employed it, blurring or ignoring previous demarcations between nature and God, between science and religion.
Such expressions at the turn of the century did not even stop short of seeing science and scientific laws as “holy,” insofar as they expressed the universal harmony of nature.20 Recognizing the power and persuasiveness of this sort of philosophical vision can help us make sense of statements (otherwise puzzling) by Wegener and his contemporaries, including the oft-quoted Albert Einstein (1879–1955), one year Wegener’s senior. When Einstein called Euclid’s Elements the “holy geometry book” or spoke of physics as finding out “the secrets of the Old One,” or said that “God is subtle, but He is not malicious,” he was using the common language of this movement in a way that all his contemporaries understood. When he said that “science is a free creation of the human spirit,” a phrase emblazoned across many an Einstein poster, he was quoting Friedrich Paulsen.21
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