Abstract

Why does Hermann Schmitz, the founder of the so-called New Phenomenology, define Ludwig Klages the closest of all kindred spirits? What do a not metaphysical phenomenology based on the lived body and the involuntary life experiences and a life-philosophy based on irrational ecstasies and original images have in common? I defend this affinity by showing that they share, among many other things, the primacy of a pathic dimension, the rejection of any reductivism, the authonomy of phenomena, the recognition of the expressive qualities of the outside world conceived as emotional forces foreign to psychic introjection. Provided that Klages’ science of appearances would lack of a real theory of the lived body, I argue that Schmitz’s idea of atmospheric feelings as aggressive forces poured out into space is precisely a more sophisticated and secularized form of Klages’ theory of the “actuality of images”.