Ludwig Klages

Life and work

The story behind the role.

German psychologist and philosopher (1872–1956).

Friedrich Konrad Eduard Wilhelm Ludwig Klages (German: [ˈklaːɡəs]; 10 December 1872 – 29 July 1956) was a German philosopher, psychologist, graphologist, poet, writer, and lecturer, who was a two-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the Germanosphere, he is considered one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He began his career as a research chemist according to his family's wishes, though soon returned to his passions for poetry, philosophy and classical studies. He held a post at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where in 1905 he founded the Psychodiagnostisches Seminar; the latter was forced to close in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. In 1915, Klages moved to neutral Switzerland, where over the following decades much of his mature philosophical works were written. Klages died in 1956. Klages was a central figure of characterological psychology and the Lebensphilosophie school of thought. Prominent elements of his philosophy include: the opposition between life-affirming Seele and life-denying Geist; reality as the ongoing creation and interpretation of sensory images, rather than feelings; a biocentric ethics in response to modern ecological issues and militarism; an affirmation of eroticism in critique of both Christian patriarchy and the notion of the "sexual"; a theory of psychology focused on expression, including handwriting analysis; and a science of character aimed at reconciling the human ego to the divide it effectuates between living beings. Central to Klages's thought is a linguistic opposition to logocentrism, a term introduced by Klages to diagnose a fixation on language or words to the detriment of the things to which they refer. His formulation of this concept came to be of significant importance to semi…

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