Lou Andreas-Salomé: A Brief Biography
Kraus begins her chapter with a brief biographical account of Salomé. I provide it here as a short introduction to who she was personally and intellectually. Kraus writes,
Lou Salomé (1871–1937) was one of the most controversial female intellectuals of her day. Born in Russia, she was one of the most prolific women writers in Germany at the turn of the century, producing both literary works and essays on topics of religion, philosophy, gender theory, and psychoanalysis. She maintained numerous friendships with intellectuals of her time, lived an unconventional lifestyle, and had several love affairs, while she was married to Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846–1930), with whom she refused to have a sexual relationship. Among her close friends, for shorter or longer periods of time, were the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Paul Rée (1849–1901), as well as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) and, in later years, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis. She eventually became one of Freud’s first female students and the first female practitioner of psychoanalysis.
Salomé is best known for her novels and novellas in which she often portrays the lives of female characters, such as Ruth (1895), Fenitschka (1898), and A Deviation (Eine Ausschweifung, 1898), or explores themes of religious faith and doubt, such as The Struggle over God (Im Kampf um Gott, 1883) and The Hour Without God (Die Stunde ohne Gott, 1921). Her work is therefore primarily the subject of literary studies, whereas her essays on philosophical topics have received little attention. Her style has often been dismissed as overly metaphorical, too complex, and not succinctly argumentative. Nevertheless, a wealth of creative thinking, original ideas, intellectual breadth, and novelty make it worthwhile to explore her philosophical views in their own right.
Influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy as well as by the Lebensphilosophie movement in the nineteenth century, the central terms of Salomé’s philosophical oeuvre are “life,” “lived experience [Erleben]” (in the sense of “living or going through something”), and “co-living [Mitleben]” (in the sense of “living with others”). Although she neither saw herself primarily as a philosopher nor held a formal position at a university, she developed her own original philosophical viewpoint over the course of her life, which is manifested in several smaller writings as well as in her most extensive systematic work, the unpublished manuscript The God (Der Gott, 1910). In addition, her focus on life also plays a central role in her feminist works, in which she spells out the conditions of human life specifically in terms of a female way of life, as most clearly in The Human Being as a Woman (Der Mensch als Weib, 1899) and The Erotic (Die Erotik, 1910)
Her own contribution to philosophy is therefore best understood in the context of the Lebensphilosophie movement, which received growing attraction in the second half of the nineteenth century and which was significantly influenced by Nietzsche’s naturalism and antirationalism. Lebensphilosophie gained prominence through the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), who, although still largely inspired by Kant, sought a phenomenologically richer account of the psychological and psychosomatic reality of human life and focused attention on life forces (also called drives), such as natural instincts and sexual drives. In her early essays, Salomé already anticipated insights of Freud’s psychoanalysis, in which a theory of drives is also central, and she later became heavily involved in the study and practice of psychoanalysis. Salomé was personally acquainted with Dilthey’s research assistant, Helene Stöcker. She also valued the writings of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), whom she knew personally and with whom she corresponded from her time in Berlin in the 1880s. Simmel was one of the rst German sociologists and best known for his analyses of human individuality and social fragmentation. Moreover, Salomé actively engaged with the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose philosophy of life focuses on human creativity and the so-called élan vital. While her own position is inspired by these sources, she carves out an original philosophy of life and later expands her view in light of Freud’s psychoanalysis. Thus, two main phases can be distinguished in her systematic writings: the first period, in which she develops her original philosophy of life, extends roughly from the beginnings of her career as a writer in the 1880s to 1910; the second period, which incorporates the insights of psychoanalysis, begins with her turn to psychoanalysis and her personal encounter with Freud in 1911 and lasts until her death in 1937.
Kraus, Katharina Teresa, 'Lou Salomé (1861–1937)', in Kristin Gjesdal, and Dalia Nassar (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition, Oxford Handbooks (2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Mar. 2024), 195-198.