Abstract

It is intriguing to observe that the massive rise of a contemporary set of so-called life sciences at the turn of the twenty-first century has not only spurred philosophers of vastly different backgrounds worldwide to rethink the very concepts of “life,” “the living” or of “lived experience,” to name but a handful. What is more, the literal revival of this terminology has allowed historians of modern philosophy to shed new and unwont light on one genealogical compound in particular: that of the quite often charged and complex relations between French and German positions in twentieth-century philosophical thought. My paper aims at a specification of this new map of Franco-German philosophy that has secretly and insistently been centered upon the concept of life. On one level, it discusses an antagonism: whereas the paradigmatic tradition of modern German philosophical anthropology (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen) has coined the notion of a philosophical biology (philosophische Biologie), French thought, in reverse, witnessed the project of a biological philosophy (philosophie biologique), most pronouncedly in the historical epistemology of Georges Canguilhem. The paper will reflect on the diametrical antagonism between these two formulae. In its extended first part, however, it also tries to unearth the shared roots and sources of these two genealogies, that is of the French and the German constellation respectively. Attention will be drawn to the empirical biologies that resonated stronly both with thinkers such as Scheler, Plessner and Gehlen in Germany, and with figures such as Jacques Lacan or Raymond Ruyer, if it comes to the “French connection.” Thus, the overall discursive refraction between the conceptions of philosophical biology and biological philosophy does not rule out, but rather imply a corporate genealogy that traverses the works of Hermann Klaatsch, Paul Alsberg and Louis Bolk, and the history of the radical divergence between modern French and German philosophy on the subject of the philosophy and the science of life is finally attenuated by a space of unsuspected encounters.