A notable tendency of contemporary philosophy is academicism and specialization, which result in alienation and estrangement from life.″Philosophy as art of life″(Philosophie als Lebenskunst)has been one of the reactions among intellectuals to this tendency.At present, philosophy as art of life is intensely debated among contemporary European thinkers.This new style of philosophical understanding and practice is closely related to the Phenomenological Movement of the twentieth century.Edmund Husserl's conception of life-world(Lebenswelt)as a source of meaning relating to non-topicalization und pre-science and the corresponding genetic constitutions based on life-world are the original field of philosophy as art of life. Martin Heidegger's Daseins-analysis has subverted the understanding of essence of Being according to the traditional metaphysics and is focused on the experiences of existence in the world in the dimension of ″meta-practice″in order to establish the central theoretical basis for further discussions of the philosophy as art of life.Using descriptions of body and its field,and defending contingency as a foundation for truth,Maurice Merleau-Ponty has interpreted ego and world as a unity.The philosophical views and motivations guiding the above-mentioned topics, which belong to the field of classical phenomenology,involve inversions of the relationships between theory and practice, presence and absence, uncertainty and possibility, inevitability and contingency,and have laid the necessary theoretical foundation for philosophy as art of life. Based on this, philosophy as art of life, which centers on human existence and sensible relationship between human beings and the world as its fundamental motivation,has been fully developed in different dimensions, one example being the practice of philosophy and aestheticization. Odo Marquard treated philosophy as contemporary art of life for″Orientierungsdienstleistungsgewerbe″by his defense of contingency. Marquard's concept of compensation,as well as the practice of philosophy and the consolation of philosophy by Gerd Achenbach and Gernot B?hme,have attempted to provide guidance for the living dilemma of modern humans,while Wolfgang Welsch's aestheticization interpreted the whole world as a huge aesthetic system involving the life of modern human in terms of aesthetic guidance and artistic creations;Richard Shusterman's Somaesthetics aimed at the realization of human self-promotion in two directions,inward and outward.All these are variations on the theme of philosophy as art of life based on phenomenology.The phenomenological spirit of″small change,″the position against the tendency of theorizing,specialization and academicism in contemporary philosophy, the position of″pre-science,″i.e.of philosophy preceding empirical science and normal science, the defense of life-world and contingency,the focusing on the genetic constitution of meanings, the return to classical philosophy and the practice of philosophy,the attitude of mild criticism of modern technology based on the affirmation of everyday life — all these have become the starting point and standpoint of philosophy as art of life.Research into the theoretical connection between phenomenology and philosophy as art of life has therefore become indispensible to comprehending the values of and recent developments in contemporary phenomenology, as well as tounderstanding the origins and development trends of philosophy as art of life.