The Unnoticed Gesture: Mental Gesturalism in the Philosophy of Ludwig Klages
Amidst the murky recesses of early 20th century Lebensphilosophie, the name Ludwig Klages, though whispered with dubious cadence in much of Anglophonic academe, retains in certain secretive philosophical circles the glimmer of being a prophet cast into premature darkness. Renowned, if at all, for his vehement critique of rationalism and his Dionysian valorization of life-force (Lebensphorce) over mechanistic intellect (Geist), Klages remains a pariah among mainstream metaphysicians, more cited for his flirtations with vitalist ecstasies than for any meticulously abstract system. And yet, in the interstitial nodes of his magnum opus—Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul)—lies a fascinating, yet largely overlooked concept: that of mental gesturalism.
This notion, which I shall endeavor to excavate with proper methodical restraint, refers not to external gesture in the Phenomenological sense, nor to the symbolic bodily postures of expressive anthropologies, but to internal psychic gesture: dynamics of thought that precede logic, suffuse feeling, and partake, as it were, in the flaring shadows cast by what Klages terms the “Urbewegung,” or primal movement of the soul.
It must be stated at the outset that Klages’ texts, intentionally enigmatic and bristling with neobaroque prolixity, resist ordinary interpretative rigor. Their expression moves in spirals rather than lines, in spirito-mythic affirmations more than in dialectic denial. Nonetheless, within the first volume of Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, particularly in the chapters addressing seelenleben (soul-life), Klages introduces a phenomenologically unique type of ideational movement: a spiritually figural, pre-conceptual unfolding that he likens to an “inner gesture.” He writes:
“Denn jedem Seelenergriff geht ein Gebärde voraus, die nicht von der Hand noch vom Körper stammt, sondern von einer unverstandenen Bewegung des Innersten, die die lebendige Wahrheit trägt” (Klages, 1929, p. 341).*
Here Klages suggests that understanding is not born of syllogism, nor even of lyrical intuition per se, but of a kind of invisible choreography of the self, within the self. The mental gesture is a registered, though irreproducible, aesthetic act of inward expressiveness, through which meaning occurs not as deduction, but as embodiment.
This distinction has vast implications. First, it emerges that Klages pre-empts, by at least four decades, certain premises consequential to the later philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Eugene Gendlin. One may even detect in Klages’ notion of the “innere Gebärde” foreshadowings of what Gendlin would term the “felt sense,” an embodied awareness that is neither emotion nor cognition, but a kind of shaping resonance that precedes speech. However, Klages’ genius lies not merely in noting this phenomenon, but in radically reorienting epistemology around it.
Rather than treating cognition as a cold rational operation performed upon a neutral substrate, Klages considers every legitimate act of knowing to be an echo of a more primary movement—an internal flourishing, however slight, wherein Being momentarily coalesces in symbolic posture. To know something, for Klages, is to have gestured toward it in the soul, to have embraced its rhythm without strangling its breath.
He therefore stands in sharp opposition to the entire Western privileging of Logos: not because he discards structure, but because he divinizes structure’s prefiguration. Within this perspective, a thought that cannot be danced internally is hardly a thought at all.
This brings us to a subtle but critical consequence. If knowledge arises from internal gesture—not from static representation or linguistic convention—it follows that the modern abstraction of rationality, especially in the form of logic-chopping nominalism and the sterilized algorithms of what Klages mockingly called “Geistmechanik,” rests upon what may be deemed a mutilation of gesture. By imposing conceptual rigidity, modern thought atrophies the fluid soul-gesture into geometric paralysis.
This is not anti-intellectualism; it is anti-cadavericism. Klages heroically insists that the soul’s motion is neither arbitrary emotion nor mystical elusiveness, but an ontological grammar predating syntax. In this regard, his philosophy aligns with articulations of originary pathos as the prime datum—akin, perhaps, to Schelling’s vision of a “dark ground” beneath the will, or even to Plotinus’ hypostatic emanations, but stripped of Neoplatonic verticality in favor of horizontal, storm-like expression.
To explore this further, let us contrast mental gesturalism with Ecstatic Phenomenology—à la Michel Henry—who too locates subjective life in affective interiority. Yet whereas Henry collapses all phenomenality into self-affection, Klages insists on an inter-spheric dynamic: the mental gesture draws not only from within, but also reaches out toward the antithetical domain of Geist, even as it resists its colonization. There is in this view a dramatic tension wherein all subjective motion is also moral motion—a movement toward or away from falsifying Geist. Hence, the gesture is never mere expression, but battle.
One may even interpret Klages’ mental gesturalism as a metaphysical ethics. Each genuine idea must be gestured, not manufactured. Each authentic perception must arise ex origino mortali—a moment of psychic risk, a leaping forth of soul against the reducing tide of Spirit. Creation here is not invention but revelation; the inward gesture of assent, illumination, withdrawal or mourning allows Being to momentarily manifest in the symbolic realm. Thus, metaphysics itself becomes a dance of shadows lit only by the courage of soulful movement.
What Klages intuited, dimly but with prophetic fire, is that no thought transpires independently of a psychic configuration—one that we enact much as we enact posture or tone. To think clearly, one must first dare to move inwardly in a way that is attuned. The mental gesture is more than a metaphor; it is a forgotten ontological event.
Modern philosophy, encumbered with its redescriptive ambitions, seeks to clarify meanings without questioning the prior gestural orientation of the subject. In so doing, it trades vitality for lucidity, dynamis for definition. Klages’ subtle theory urges us to remember that before each verbal utterance lies a soul’s leaning, turning, cringing, embracing.
The inner gesture, therefore, must be recovered not merely as a phenomenological curiosity, but as an essential component of ontological method. Only through a deepened awareness of these prior movements may we actualize philosophy not as discursive procedure, but as poise before the abyss.
To conclude, the importance of mental gesturalism as conceived by Klages cannot be overstated. It provides a fertile correction to the sterile abstraction of post-Cartesian thought, while avoiding the anti-intellectual pitfalls of irrationalism. It recasts epistemology as aesthetic performance, the soul’s answer to the world’s cry.
Klages’ notoriety may have obscured his deeper contributions; yet within his stormy visions lies the quiet trace of a hand raised within the inward dark—an invisible sign, a gesture unrecorded by logic, but essential to all real knowledge.
*Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Barth, 1929), p. 341.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
gesture, Lebensphilosophie, soul, epistemology, Klages, metaphysical ethics