The Paradox of the Simultaneist Will in Ludwig Klages’ Biocentric Metaphysics
Among the obscure luminaries that flicker on the periphery of early twentieth-century thought, Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) stands as a singular and problematic beacon, whose identificatory posture with the Dionysian spirit, and hostility towards the rationalist pathology of modern mankind, render him both a philosophical figure of tragic grandeur and a caustic corrective to the mechanistic view of life. Though often consigned to the margins for his vociferous anti-intellectualism and his alignment with a certain kind of Romantic vitalism, it is precisely within these extremities that one discovers moments of exhilarating conceptual transgression. This essay endeavours to explore one such moment—a subtle but significant detail within Klages’ philosophy: the paradox of the Simultaneist Will, a term I shall provisionally use to describe an aporia at the heart of his doctrine of the Lebensbewegung (“life-movement”).
In his magnum opus, *Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele*, Klages delineates a fundamental antagonism between three ontic principles: Geist (mind), Seele (soul), and Leben (life). Geist is the invasive, analytic, and abstracting faculty that is responsible for the “machinization” of the soul, the ushering in of rationalism, logic, and technology—all of which he viewed as inimical to authentic life. Seele, by contrast, is the world-soul, the locus of image, dream, and rhythm. Life itself, as Lebensbewegung, is marked by a pulsation, a dance of becoming and perishing, the movement of organism and nature alike in pre-rational synchrony.
It is here that the Simultaneist Will enters by implication, if not explicitly by name. Klages asserts that authentic experience is synchronistic, embedded in a rhythmic, temporal field where the moment flowers into meaning without being dissected by the conceptual scythe of Geist. In other words, the will, when attuned to life, expresses itself not through instrumental or telic structures but rather as an immanent participation in the simultaneity of the living moment. Yet this raises a profound conundrum: can that which is willed ever be simultaneous? Does not willing entail a displacement, a motion towards futurity—and if so, does not every act of will already bear within it the taint of Geist’s mediating abstraction?
Klages appears to attempt a transcendence of this dialectic by constructing a notion of will that is not teleological but ecstatic—akin, perhaps, to the Platonic eros, a longing not for possession but for unity. He writes, “Der Wille des Lebens entspringt nicht in der Absicht, sondern in der Bildhaftigkeit der Teilnahme,” or “The will of life does not arise from intention, but in the imagistic character of participation.” But such participation, grounded in the expressivity of images, implies a simultaneity that does not allow for deferral—one either partakes or does not. The will here is no longer futurally oriented, but aesthetically simultaneous: it neither constructs a future nor preserves a past, but exists momentously.
The paradox then can be framed thus: Klages posits a participatory will that is supposed to operate within the rhythm of life’s unbroken unfolding—and yet, will as resolve always introduces rupture. The very awareness of “willing” already announces a departure from unmediated life-flow into the reflective consciousness that Klages so ardently decries. Thus, the Simultaneist Will is necessarily a paradox: it is both prerequisite for and betrayal of the very synchrony it seeks to embody.
We may fruitfully compare this to a kindred problem in the work of Henri Bergson, who maintained that true duration (*durée réelle*) could not be apprehended intellectually but only intuited. For Bergson, the rational will distorts the temporal by spatializing it. Klages proffers something even more radical: not only does the will distort time; it also introduces a moral and metaphysical dichotomy that metastasizes into civilization, ethics, and science. His project is, in a way, the restoration of the prelapsarian will, whose nature is antediluvian—without cleavage, without abstraction, akin to the vegetal or lunar will.
Considered more closely, this Simultaneist Will bears traces of both Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic. Schopenhauer’s World as Will is anarchic and blind, but always striving—yet its striving is inherently temporal. Nietzsche, conversely, sought to affirm the moment through eternal recurrence and the tragic. Klages combines both strains: the will is the substrate of being, but unless it remains simultaneous—i.e., non-intentional—it succumbs to the corruption of Geist. He wants, paradoxically, a willing that does not will.
But herein arises an irreconcilable tension: to preserve the purity of life, one must remain passive, or better yet—aesthetically immersed. Yet can there be ethics in such a view? Of course, Klages’ answer is aesthetic, not moral. His is an ethics of form, not duty. The Simultaneist Will, to the extent that it exists at all, exists only in dance, in rite, in the moment when the dancer and the dance are not two but one. One is reminded of Hölderlin: “Denn wo Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch” – “Where danger is, the saving also grows.” The danger here is Geist; the saving, a reversion to immanence.
However, abstraction cannot but observe its own ruin. And in this sense, Klages underscores the futility inherent in all metaphysics post-Kant: that even the purest attempt at immediacy must be mediated the moment it is spoken or written. His very philosophy enacts the tragedy it describes. This is not its weakness but its evidentiary force. The Simultaneist Will fails not because it is incoherent, but because its coherence would entail the silencing of all thought—and yet we must think it.
Modern political ramifications of this notion are troubling: a vitalist will that refuses to teleologize easily lends itself to aestheticization of politics, as Walter Benjamin warned in his critique of fascism. Klages’ dream of a return to the primeval is fraught with risks. And yet, as a metaphysical ideal, the Simultaneist Will retains a tragic beauty. Like Eurydice, it flees when turned toward. One is forever at the threshold of its actualization.
In conclusion, the Simultaneist Will, as discerned in the interstices of Klages’ writings, stands as a metaphor for the impossible task of willing without rupture, of participating in life without stepping outside it. It is a symbol of metaphysical longing and poetic futility—the very kind of yearning which, though destined to falter, is the artistic soul’s sacred burden. Far from being a mere eccentricity, it may well encapsulate the heroic and doomed ambition of all true philosophy: to inhabit time as presence.
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By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, vitalism, metaphysics, simultaneity, Klages, paradox, aesthetics