Theodor Lipps

Theodor Lipps was born on 28 July 1851 in Wallhalben, in what is now Rhineland-Palatinate, the son of a Protestant pastor. He studied Protestant theology, philosophy and natural science at Bonn, Erlangen, Tübingen and Utrecht, and took his doctorate in philosophy at Bonn in 1874 with a dissertation on the philosophy of religion. He then habilitated and became a Privatdozent at Bonn in 1877. After a decade of teaching there, he was promoted to extraordinary professor at Bonn in 1884, called as full professor to the University of Breslau in 1890, and finally summoned to the University of Munich in 1894 as professor of philosophy and head of the experimental psychology laboratory, a post he held until his death. Munich under Lipps became one of the most attractive philosophical training grounds in the German-speaking world, drawing the students who would form the Munich phenomenology circle: Moritz Geiger, Alexander Pfänder, Johannes Daubert, Aloys Fischer, Paul Ferdinand Linke and the young Edith Stein who later moved to Husserl in Göttingen.

The organising idea of his work is Einfühlung, empathy or feeling-into. The word had been coined by Robert Vischer in 1873 as an aesthetic term with mystical overtones, but Lipps gave it a psychological foundation in his Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (1897), his three-volume Ästhetik (Hamburg: Voss, 1903-06) and the Leitfaden der Psychologie (Engelmann, 1903). Einfühlung is the projection of the self into the perceived object; aesthetic experience is not pleasure plus object but a single act in which the two are inseparable. Looking at a column with an entasis swelling, we feel the column straining against the load; that strain is our own kinaesthetic sense lent to stone. Looking at a tragic scene we lend our own resignation to the figure. Lipps generalised this from architecture to drama, from the human form to natural landscape, and made it the basic mechanism of art's hold on us. Through Roger Fry, Vernon Lee in Italy and especially Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908) this analysis became one of the main currents of early twentieth century aesthetics and an organising concept for German Expressionism. The Lipps illusion, his geometrical-directional optical illusion in which the collinear middle segments of five inserted polygons appear tilted because of flanking kinks, is the same project carried into perception research.

The second legacy is the unconscious. Lipps argued from early on, especially in Der Streit über die Tragödie (1891) and Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), for the reality of unconscious mental events. Sigmund Freud read him closely. The revised Interpretation of Dreams and the 1905 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious cite Lipps explicitly; the entire analysis of wit in the latter takes Lipps' 1898 Komik und Humor as its starting point, and Freud's own letters to Fliess thank Lipps for confirming the existence of the unconscious. Part of the theoretical scaffolding of Viennese psychoanalysis comes directly from this Munich lectern. He also worked with Max Friedrich Meyer to formulate the Lipps-Meyer law on the perception of musical intervals.

The third field is logic. In Grundzüge der Logik (1893) Lipps declared his "unlimited foundational logical psychologism". Logic is the physics of thinking, not its ethics, because cognition is a psychological event and nothing else; the laws of valid inference must therefore be empirical laws of the human mind. Edmund Husserl's first volume of the Logical Investigations (1900) opened the new century with a direct attack on exactly this position, taking Lipps as the representative case and arguing that to ground logic in psychology was to confuse normative and descriptive disciplines. The polemic was decisive for the intellectual mood of German-speaking philosophy. Lipps in his later years partially absorbed Husserlian distinctions and tried an aesthetics of oughtness mediating Sollen and Sein, but his students Geiger, Pfänder and Daubert broke away to form the Munich phenomenology school, which made a quiet pilgrimage to Husserl in Göttingen in 1905. Lipps died on 17 October 1914, two months into the Great War, just as continental philosophy was completing its turn to phenomenology and hermeneutics. For most of the twentieth century he was referenced mainly as the canonical psychologist that Husserl had refuted, and his aesthetics fell out of fashion as formalist and structuralist approaches replaced expressionist empathy.

The twenty-first century has reopened the question. The discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque premotor cortex by Giacomo Rizzolatti's group, the explosion of empathy research in social neuroscience, and simulation theory in philosophy of mind all flow back into the conceptual space Lipps marked out. What he called projection is now embodied simulation; what he treated as the psychology of aesthetics is now the affective neuroscience of art. The eclipse has lifted enough that historians of psychology and aesthetics now regard him as one of the founders, not the discredited residue, of the empathy tradition that runs from Vischer through Freud and Stein to contemporary cognitive science.