What happens when a philosophical tradition refines thinking so far that it loses contact with lived life? Gwendolin Kirchhoff refers to philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) to make visible the protest of the living against abstraction as a philosophical tradition continuing in her work. In the second half of the nineteenth century this question arose with an urgency that shook academic self-understanding. Hegel’s system was complete, German idealism broken into schools, university philosophy wedged between neo-Kantianism and positivist veneration of science. Into this gap stepped a movement of thought that had no common founder and no common system, but a common impulse: to make life itself the starting point of philosophising. This movement is called philosophy of life.
#Lived experience as source of knowledge
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) formulated the core problem most sharply. The natural sciences explain by subsuming phenomena under general laws. But human life cannot be subsumed, because it is always already experienced from within before it can be observed from outside. Dilthey called this pre-conceptual dimension Erlebnis, lived experience: the immediate unity of feeling, willing and thinking that precedes any analytic grasp. Lived experience is not the raw material from which science then distils its concepts. It is the ground on which concepts first gain sense at all.
From this basic distinction follows Dilthey’s methodology: the human sciences do not explain, they understand. Understanding means tracing an expression back to the lived experience from which it emerged, and thereby re-enacting the lived experience. This presupposes that the one who understands is themselves a living being, not a neutral observer. A philosophy that starts from lived experience cannot accept the separation of subject and object as starting point, because lived experience is precisely that unity which this separation only subsequently produces.
#Bergson’s élan vital and the critique of mechanical thinking
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) came from a different tradition, the French, and yet posed the same diagnosis. Analytic reason decomposes what it investigates. That is its strength with dead objects. But the living resists decomposition, because it exists in time — not as a sequence of discrete moments, but as inseparable duration. What Bergson called durée is the inner experience of time in which past and future resonate in the present without being separable from one another.
Bergson’s élan vital means the life-impulse that drives all organic development from within. The point lies less in biology than in epistemology: a philosophy that wants to grasp the living must develop a different form of thinking than the mechanical-decomposing procedure of natural science. Bergson called it intuition — not in the sense of a vague feeling, but as a cognitive faculty that enters into the movement of its object rather than fixing it from outside.
#Nietzsche and the concept of life as diagnostic tool
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) belongs chronologically before Dilthey and Bergson, but in effect he stands alongside them. His concept of life is less methodical than diagnostic: life functions as the measure by which the health or sickness of a culture can be read. What increases life is good. What inhibits it, denies it, or turns it against itself is symptom of decline.
Nietzsche described in The Gay Science the nihilistic will as that depressive impulse which sours or suppresses the life-impulses (cf. Nietzsche, 1882). Gwendolin Kirchhoff takes up this thread when she reads Nietzsche’s analysis of priesthood as analysis of a claim to domination disguised as care — the priest wants to dominate the other and believes they speak for the good or for God (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Vergessene Geister, 2024). Nietzsche thus becomes the diagnostician of that hostility to life which Dilthey fights methodically and Bergson epistemologically.
#From philosophy of life to living philosophy
Academic philosophy of life ran itself out in the twentieth century. Spengler and Klages overextended the concept of life into the irrational, existential philosophy took up the questions and reformulated them, analytic philosophy declared the whole enterprise unscientific. What remained was a cliché: philosophy of life as vague counter-enlightenment.
The cliché obscures what the impulse actually contained. The basic insight of philosophy of life — that thinking cannot be separated from life without losing its power of knowledge — is neither irrational nor outdated. It is the core of any philosophy that deserves the name. In the tradition Jochen Kirchhoff (1944–2025) continued, this insight is radicalised: not only human thinking but the entire cosmos is alive. Because we are alive, we must live in a living world, because the living arises from the living and not from the dead (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Was die Erde will, 1998). That is more than Dilthey’s hermeneutics of lived experience and more than Bergson’s intuition. It is an ontological thesis: life is not one phenomenon among others, but the foundational state of reality.
With this the starting question shifts. Dilthey asked: how do we understand life? Bergson asked: how do we think the living without killing it? Kirchhoff asks: what happens when we grasp that the world itself is alive? The answer leads into natural philosophy, which Schelling founded in the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as science of the living (cf. Schelling, 1797), and which Kirchhoff continues in Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle as cosmic philosophy of the living (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2006).
#The concept of life as touchstone
In philosophical work the concept of life from philosophy of life acts as touchstone. A thought that does not touch the living is a dead thought, regardless of how sharp its formulation may be. Gwendolin Kirchhoff has made this distinction precise: there are thoughts that circle like an abstract something in the understanding, and then there are the actually effective thoughts that have a livingness — thoughts that are embodied, out of which something arises (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026). That is Schelling’s insight — that every genuine thinking is feeling — applied to the practice of philosophising itself.
Whoever takes this for a merely poetic remark underestimates its ontological content. Philosophy of life has shown that access to reality lies not in abstracting but in deepening experience. Romanticism formulated this thought first, philosophy of life defended it against disciplining by natural science, and Kirchhoff’s natural philosophy has brought it to cosmological consequence: the world in which you think is itself a thinking being. Thinking, when it is alive, does not think about the world — it thinks with it.