Theodor Lipps (; 28 July 1851 – 17 October 1914) was a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

, famed for his theory regarding

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed thr ...

, creating the framework for the concept of ''Einfühlung'' (

empathy Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, co ...

)'','' defined as, "projecting oneself onto the object of

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...

." This has then led onto opening up a new branch of

interdisciplinary Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several other fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, ec ...

research in the overlap between psychology and philosophy.

Biography

Lipps was one of the most influential German university professors of his time, attracting many students from other countries. Lipps was very concerned with conceptions of

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

and the aesthetic, focusing much of his philosophy around such issues. Among his fervent admirers was

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...

. There were at least two theories that made an impact on Freud's works. The first was Lipps' theory of the unconscious mental events. Lipps was then a main supporter of the idea of the

Unconscious Unconscious may refer to: Physiology * Unconsciousness, the lack of consciousness or responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli Psychology * Unconscious mind, the mind operating well outside the attention of the conscious mind a ...

. The second was Lipps' works on humor.

''Einfühlung''

He adopted Robert Vischer's notions of

or esthetic sympathy (''Einfühlung'', literally translated to "feeling-into"). He was responsible for popularizing the term by modifying Vischer's conceptualization. Particularly, Lipps concealed some of the thinker's mysticism, hiding it within the sphere of scientific psychology in his work, ''Aesthetics of Space and Geometrical Illusions''. The term was used to describe the process of contemplating art objects as representation of our feelings. Lipps developed it into an aesthetic theory, which was refined further by other thinkers such as Roger Fry and Vernon Lee. This concept of aesthetic resonance finds parallels throughout aesthetic philosophy. In this concept, empathy is said to begin with both the object and the pleasure drawn together in a single act instead of a separate object with which we have aesthetic enjoyment or with pleasure taken in an object. According to Lipps, empathy incorporates movement or activity, which is bound up with observed object by: 1) being derived from it; and, 2) by being inseparable from it. For his works, he is considered one of the most important representatives of the psychology of aesthetics alongside Stephan Witasek and Johannes Volkelt.

Psychologism

Lipps was an important adherent of psychologism early in his career. This philosophy was based on the Neo-Kantianism that became influential in German philosophy during the second half of the nineteenth century. He became a spokesman of this school as evidenced in his early publications. In his work, ''Logik'' (1893), he declared his "unlimited foundational logical psychologism", which is based on a partial identity of psychology of thinking and the logic of thinking. Here, logic is considered the "physics of thinking" rather than an "ethics of thinking". According to Lipps, "logic is a psychological discipline, as certain as the cognition occurs only in the psyche, and the thinking, which completes itself in the cognition, is a psychical event." Late in life, Lipps adopted some ideas from

Edmund Husserl , thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title ...

as he developed in another direction. Disliking his

psychologism Psychologism is a family of philosophical positions, according to which certain psychological facts, laws, or entities play a central role in grounding or explaining certain non-psychological facts, laws, or entities. The word was coined by Johann ...

, some of his students joined with some of Husserl's to form a new branch of philosophy called

phenomenology of essences Munich phenomenology (also Munich phenomenological school) is the philosophical orientation of a group of philosophers and psychologists that studied and worked in Munich at the turn of the twentieth century. Their views are grouped under the names ...

. Among them there was

Moritz Geiger Moritz Geiger (26 June 1880 – 9 September 1937) was a German philosophy, German philosopher and a disciple of Edmund Husserl. He was a member of the Munich phenomenological school. Beside Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology, he dedicated h ...

who wrote one of the first phenomenological essays on the

essence Essence ( la, essentia) is a polysemic term, used in philosophy and theology as a designation for the property or set of properties that make an entity or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it ...

and meaning of empathy in which the influence of Lipps is relevant. There was also Paul Ferdinand Linke who studied under Lipps at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat and dealt with Husserlian phenomenology in his first publication, ''Die phaenomenale Sphaere''. In the so-called aesthetics of "oughtness", Lipps attempted to reconcile "ought" with "is".

References

Sources

* Hatfield, G
Psychology Old and New
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No.IRCS-01-07 (University of Pennsylvania, 2001) * Lyubimova, T

in: Aesthetics, Art, Life: A Collection of Articles, compiled by T. Lyubimova, M. Ovsyannikov; general editorship by A. Zis; translated from the Russian by Sergei Syrovatkin (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1988), pp. 200–211.

External links

* * * Som
digitized texts
by Lipps in the

Virtual Laboratory The online project Virtual Laboratory. Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, 1830-1930, located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, is dedicated to research in the history of the experimentalization of life. Th ...

of the

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (German: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte) is a scientific research institute founded in March 1994. It is dedicated to addressing fundamental questions of the history of knowledg ...