Abstract
Over the past decade, Scandinavian and German scholars have been active in the redefinition of the terms “Vitalism” and “Vitalist” as descriptive categories for analytical purposes in the fields of literary and cultural history. In this context,“Vitalism”has primarily been used to describe an enthusiastic worshipping of life, one that holds youth, health, strength and beauty as its primary attributes, which was prevalent in all aspects of cultural life around 1900. But even the post war founders of the Vitalist re-conceptualisation of this era, Wolfdietrich Rasch and Gunter Martens, warned of taking such a unilateral view ofwhat constituted a Vitalist concept of life. It could lead to a misunderstanding of Vitalist way of thinking, Rasch said, if the focus wasonly set upon the enthusiastic surplus, the worshipping of youth and health. To Vitalists, life is more than that. It is a totality that also encompasses notions of destruction, decay and death. “All life symbols in literature around 1900 are at the same time symbols of death” (Rasch, 1967:24).Through the analyses of three poems, this article aims to show concrete examples of how cyclic Vitalist thinking is embedded in poetry of the era. The analyses include a further sub-categorisation to capture the different types of Life Force dealt with in the texts. By way of an introduction, Vitalism is discussed within the context of the scientific and social developments of the 19th Century.
Highlights
Between 1890-1930 the word life took on almost religious connotations
The best-known representative of this school was Hans Driesch (1867-1941), Professor at the University of Cologne. He named this universal life force “Entelechy”, borrowing this appellation from Aristotle, whom he regarded the true originator of Vitalism (Driesch, 1922)
The conception of an autonomous Life Force was in good harmony with the thinking of the era, whether this thinking derived from the paradigm of natural science or from the philosophical sphere
Summary
Received November 17th, 2013; revised December 20th, 2013; accepted January 4th, 2014. The concept of life as a self-directed, indivisible natural force like gravity and electricity emerged in Hans Driesch’s laboratories in the years 1896-1900. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, had reflected upon life in new and provocative ways since the 1870s Through his deliberations he came to place the concept of life in opposition to the idea of civilisation: “life” for Nietzsche meant candid, natural, biological, animalistic, instinctive. Against the backdrop of this threat tohumankind, new visions for humanity’s future arose, visions that lent towards a more natural and vital base This eulogising of life alongside predictions of humankind’s death and decay, the cult of décadence, is notable in that these two reactions, décadence and Vitalism, are often represented together in art. Beauty and strength became keywords in this new vision, but their close neighbours, not to say their twins, were decay, degeneration and death
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