Johann Wolfgang von Goethe inspired the central concept of Chamberlain's picture of the world and his "theory of life," the concept of
Gestalt (form) as the expression of all that is timeless and unchangeable. The
Gestalt is encountered as the primary concept in the intuition of everything living (
Anschauung) and must be grasped and interpreted in thought. It is the key to metaphysics and art, two fields which Chamberlain passionately defended against rationalism and "the coarsely empirical theory of evolution."
Race
Chamberlain's "Lebenslehre" (Theory of life), which he first drafted in 1896 (it was not published until 1928 and was then titled Natur und Leben [Nature and life]), presented the position of most of his later writings, a position to which he frequently sacrificed historical truth in Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), his weakest but best-known work. Chamberlain upheld "Life," intuition, metaphysics, "holy art" in the Wagnerian sense, and antidemocratic thought against rationalism, biological materialism (of Jewish origin), the superficial belief in progress, and moral decadence. His Weltanschauung—a favorite word of Chamberlain's—is closely related to Wagner's theory of decadence and regeneration.
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