Dzīvības gnostika pret prāta gribu: sabiedrības bez pasaules kritika Ludviga Klāgesa darbos

The ambivalently suggestive notions and themes of German philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) deserve to be translated today into a language, that brushes off the incipient connotations of the close symbiosis with metaphysics and social and political problematics, while not explaining away of the criticism-deserving consequences of such an amalgamation - a feature that had not escaped the attention of the thinker himself. This type of "translation for the present time" (M. Groftheim) is still only in a nascent stage, even if it has been going on for several decades. This work is attested both by the new projects of reinterpretation of Klages' philosophy, as well as by a kind of pause with regard to the accessibility of his archives for more extensive investigation and citation. In his main work, which had been composed during the period of more than twenty years "Spirit as Adversary of the Soul" Klages characterizes culture based on life as a soul/body polarity by contrasting it with the technical civilization arising out of the hate of the spirit/intellect towards life. The relation of life and environment becomes manifested in pulsating images and rhythms, being killed by the mechanical repetitiveness superimposed over the spirit of life. Spirit as existing for life and not being detrimental to it - this is the vision of Klages' philosophy. Due to the ambivalency of his conception containing counter-positioning distinctions, Klages has become an expositor of the ecological movement; he has often been referred to as a dissidentic ideologue of the National-Socialist Germany, as a fore-runner of the "rhythmic nation" and "biopolitics" conceptions; he has been turned into a scapegoat of occultistic an parapsychological deviations. In general - he has been regarded as an "icebreaker" of irrationalistic philosophy of life and an expressive critic of rationalism. Klages has been considered as a renovator of the romantic, natural (life) philosophy at a time of domination of causalistically-orientated sciences. He has been a visionary of post-structural ideas well before the appearance of post-structuralism, and an expounder of vitalism, as well as an original philosophy-of-language thinker. This kind of list may be continued indefinitely, and it becomes clear that the voice of Klages, his manner of expressism and his style, at times tinged with certain snobbishness and a gnostic sense of arrogance, coupled, as it is, with the "consequently anti-academical posture" (R. Falter) have contributed towards the appearance of the above-mentioned cliches and have caused justiable restraint of the scholars. At the same time, this has not been an obstacle for some present-day thinkers - like Gernoth Bohme ("the new aesthetics", "the new philosophy of nature") or Hermann Schmitz ("the new phenomenology"), Michael Hauskeller, Dirk Solies (the ethics of life, "the new bioethics"), etc. - to follow in the footsteps of Klages within their own original contextualizations. The present article does not accentuate any of the above-mentioned aspects of Klages' interpretative readings - neither by way of misunderstanding of them or continuation of his thought. Likewise, it has not been envisaged to offer an in-depth investigation of the language of Klages' philosophy or the genesis of his thought. The article attempts to overcome the inflexibility of Klages' expressiveness by way of avoiding to "fall pray" to his phraseology, or the criticism of his style. His pronouncements have been discussed in connection with the "world-less society" problematics concerning the modern culture, the modernity, even though they would deserve an even wider approach. Klages himself has never used such a designation. The purpose of the present article is to demonstrate the topicality of some of the philosophical notions of Klages by way of grouping them together under the "world-less society" concept and by showing that it is exactly under such a notion that Klages' philosophy is compatible with that kind of reflection that is concerned with critical account of some aspects of the modern civilization. "Spirit as Adversary of the Soul" is a composition that has been called by Klages' biographer Hans Eggert Schroder "the work of his life". This work contains the ideas that have been disseminated elsewhere, in a wholesome and interrelated fashion on the bases of his "initial metaphysical discovery". This discovery - included in the title of Klages' opus magnum - became a bone of contention both for his critics and his followers alike. This is the distinction between "life" and "spirit". Klages describes spirit - in view of the possible wide connotations of the word - as a specific force, existing at the level of human perception of the world, producing intentional acts of thought and non-demonstrable content-filled ideal thoughts. This ideally-produced content of thought is to be distinguished from impressions and visualisations that belong in an equal degree both to the "observation" and to "representation". This duality of the intentional act and the visually bodily impression is the medium through which the world becomes accessible to us, i.e. - appears to us. The spirit arranges the world as consisting of being (Sein) of non-spatial, non-temporal entities correlated to the "I". "The world of things [..] is the world of the intellect". The "I" of the mind - self-consciousness of "I" - is described by Klages in the following way. "This "I" is dot-like entity and timeless selfness. These are the very attributes of spirit. Spirit (intellect) produces the world of things (being) for the "I" to position itself against. At the same time the relationship between the human beings and the world obtains also of a different side. The world appears as reality (Wirklichkeit), the fluidity of which is given in the experience, the latter being correlated with "soul". The world is given in thought (traditional metaphysics) - or, to be more exact - the spirit produces the world as being through the use of humans as a medium. This way of producing of the world creates an illusion that "the reality is to be divided into things". Klages points out that even Parmenides allowed for the possibility of "reality being identical with thought". Yet, the world itself is not this kind of "thinkable entity" consisting of things, having existence and describable in logically deducible fashion. Spirit is not creating the world, but only, in a way, "snaps it out" in the form of being from the flux of reality. Though even within an experience the world is something "given for experiencing" - i.e. - the appearance of the encirclement of the experiencing soul as reality. This reality is experienced as images, flux of images. In book five of the work "Spirit as Adversary of the Soul" "The Reality of Images" Klages does not reduce the appearance of the flux of images in the experience of the soul to the notion of phenomenon but attempts to establish a relationship between appearance with the life, or with everything-that-is-alive in general. What appears is the living one - the same that is described in natural sciences as "organic" or "material" (these also being spiritual designations) stuff, as represented or thought of in this way. The equalization of appearance and everything-that-is-alive proposed by Klages is a problematic and an awe-inspiring perspective for the world-view formation. The world becomes a totality of life (All-Leben) and every image of it becomes a representation of life (in a wider than just in an organic sense).Thus, it becomes clear that Klages's philosophy is not "biocentrical" if one thinks of life only in biological categories, Klages' conception of life includes also the specifically biological aspect, yet he attempts to expand the thinking about life over and above these boundaries. There is another line of identification in the works of Klages deserving attention. Spirit in its intentionally productive being is identified with will. This kind of coupling of spirit and will leads to the idea about the subjugation of soul to the spirit, by disrupting of the ties with the world and producing a kind of a "screen" in the way of the flux of image-experiences. On this screen of abstractions the spirit projects bodily images which act as substitutes for the images of reality. The contact with the world as a reality (flux of images) becomes seriously affected. The thinking spirit "swallows" the world and substitutes it on the screen by bodily objects of the will, that are accessible to manipulation and control. Klages specially accentuates the close relation between spirit and will: "The act of thinking turns into an instrument of the will to power". The result being that people become "blind to the images of the world, the latter being annihilated [by the spirit]". Klages' philosophical considerations reach the level of culturological concern for the development of civilization in general through a specific typology of cultures. Thus, we come very close to the notion of "world-less sociality", which may serve to accommodate Klages' metaphysics and his philosophy of culture. This may also serve as a starting point for investigations in the direction of psychological studies. Klages himself has defined such expressions as graphology, character studies, study of the life of soul, etc.