Tra il 'magma' delle pulsioni e l'empireo dei valori: Wert e Weltanschauung nella filosofia tedesca tra Ottocento e Novecento

The article aims to document some of the transformations of the concepts ‘value’ and ‘Weltanschauung’ in the 19th-century German philosophy. Around 1900 the term Weltanschauung acquired an unexpected notoriety: it was attracted into the sphere of influence of the concept of value (in particular thanks to Nietzsche’s work) and gained new meanings. We analyse the history of these different meanings, which involved a complete reversal of the original usage of the term Weltanschauung by Kant at the end of the eighteenth century and Hegel during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In Nietzsche’s texts, reflections on values are influenced by Eugen Dühring’s book Der Wert des Lebens (1865), where the author’s investigation re-proposes reflections advanced by Feuerbach from 1843 onward. The paths that lead to the discussions of the early twentieth century around the ‘philosophies of life’ and the Weltanschauungen (Dilthey, Rickert) are thus rather tortuous: through Nietzsche, authors such as Feuerbach and Dühring continue to influence, around 1910, the philosophical debate.