Europe Discovers Nietzsche 319the word "life" a new ring that was both mysterious and seductive. The
academic community was initially wary of this approach. Heinrich
Rickert, a leader in the neo-Kantian school, explained: "As researchers,
we need to master and consolidate life conceptually, and therefore we
must advance beyond fidgeting our way through life to achieve a sys-
tematic wodd order" (Rickert 155). Beyond the confines of academic
philosophy, however, in daily intellectual life during the period
1890-1914, Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy) began its triumphant
advance, impelled by the reception of Nietzsche. "Life" became a piv-
otal concept, as had the terms "being," "nature," "God," and "ego" in
earlier eras. It also became a batrie cry on two fronts. On the one hand,
it posed a challenge to the halfhearted idealism of German neo-Kantian
professors and bourgeois moral conventions. "Life" countered the sys-
tem of eternal values that had been laboriously deduced or mindlessly
parroted. On the other hand, the watchword "life" was directed against
soulless materialism, the legacy of the late nineteenth century. Neo-
Kanrianism had already offered a response to this materialism and pos-
itivism, but the proponents of Lebensphilosophie judged that response
ineffectual. They contended that it does the mind a disservice to sepa-
rate it dualistically from material life, and surely fails to accomplish the
goal of defending the mind. Instead, the mind must be integrated into
material life itself.
The adherents of Lebensphilosophie rendered the term "life" so all-
inclusive and elastic that it subsumed everything: soul, mind, nature,
being, dynamism, and creativity. Lebensphilosophie revitalized the eigh-
teenth-century Storm and Stress protest against rationalism, the batrie
cry of which was "nature." The term "life" now assumed this same
function. "Life" signaled a plethora of forms, a wealth of invention, and
an ocean of possibilities so incalculable and adventurous that no
"beyond" would be required, since it would be amply represented in the
here and now. Life was a departure to far-off shores, yet remained, at the
same time, quite close at hand. It incorporated an individual's own vital-
ity in a process of self-configuration. "Life" became the motto of the