Imagini și conștiință la Ludwig Klages
Images and consciousness in Ludwig Klages

Summary/Abstract: One of the thinkers who, in the wake of Nietzsche, criticized reason in the name of Life, Soul, and emotions, Ludwig Klages is not only a very analytical thinker able to approach critically, in a systematic manner, topics of phenomenology, ontology, or even science but also a creative thinker who proposes a metaphysical view that endeavours to overcome the post-Kantian bracketing of the world. A representative himself of Lebensphilosophie, Klages considers that the static structure of consciousness – which he calls „Spirit,” and which corresponds to what we usually call „concept” – is what has created the worldview that has led the Western human being into the present profound rift with reality, and with himself too. In the following paper we discuss first some of Klages’ arguments concerning the misconceptions that made possible such an overvaluation of concepts as fundamental instruments of the human mind. Secondly, we present his response to this rationalist bias and prejudice, namely his theory about the „reality of images.” The latter are not conceived of as mirror-like reflections of external reality but as highly significant „expressions” of this reality, allowing us a specific metaphysical knowledge of it. What is more, as such „expressions,” images do not inform us – this is the role of the concept – but rather, they „build” us (somewhat in the classical sense of the German Bildung and also Bildungsroman) and are the real profound source of our (changing) truths. On this point, Klages abandons the classical view of truth as correspondence that we inherited from Aristotle, proposing a theory in which, although the human being is receptive towards the external world, he is not conceived of as immutable or endowed with an intellectual grid that passes unchanged through the ages.

• Details
• Contents