320 Epilogueyouth movement, art nouveau, neo-Romanticism, and pedagogical
reform. Zarathustra's call to "remain faithful to the earth" (4,15; ZFirst
Part, Prologue § 3) was now fervendy heeded. Even sun worshipers and
nudists could fancy themselves the disciples of Zarathustra.
In Nietzsche's day, young people were determined to look old. Youth
was considered a barrier to success. Products that claimed to accelerate
the growth of facial hair were being hawked to teenage boys, and eye-
glasses became a status symbol. Young men donned their fathers' stiff
stand-up collars, and adolescents were paraded around in frock coats
and taught a formal style of walking. Formerly, "life" had been consid-
ered something sobering, and young people were encouraged to use it to
sow their wild oats. Now "life" had taken on an impetuous and dynamic
quality, like youth itself "Youth" was no longer a blemish that had to be
hidden from view; instead, older people now had to justify and defend
themselves against the suspicion that they were deadwood. The entire
Wilhelminian culture was summoned before what the philosopher
Wilhelm Dilthey called the "judicial bench of life" and was confronted
with the question "Is this life still alive?"
Lebensphilosopbie viewed itself as a philosophy of life in the sense of a
subjective genitive. Rather than its philosophizing about life, life itself
was doing the philosophizing. As a philosophy, it aspired to be an organ
of life, improving its quality, developing new forms, and conferring new
shape. It did not stop at specifying which values were to apply, but dared
to aspire to create new values. Lebensphilosopbie was the vitalist variant of
pragmatism. It evaluated the quality of an insight not by its potential for
practical application but by its creative capability. For Lebensphilosophie,
life was richer than any theory, and thus it abhorred biological reduc-
tionism. It preferred a life of the alert mind.
These attitudes were decisively influenced by Nietzsche. Even those
who had never read him were affected by him, and his name became a
badge of recognition. People who valued youth and vitality, considered
themselves high-minded, and were not fastidious about moral obliga-
tions could call themselves Nietzscheans. Nietzscheanism became so