Background
Lipps, Theodor was born on July 28, 1851 in Wallhalben, RhinelandPalatinate.
Lipps, Theodor was born on July 28, 1851 in Wallhalben, RhinelandPalatinate.
Theology, Mathematics, Science and Psychology at Erlangen. Tübingen. Utrecht and Bonn (PhD in Philosophy 1874).
1877 90, Bonn University. 1890-1894, Breslau University. 1894-1914, Professor of Philosophy, Munich LIniversity.
Founder of the German Psychological Institute in Munich. 1896, joint President of the International Congress of Psychology.
Lipps’s ‘empathy’ theory, first presented m 1897. has been most influential in the philosophy of art but is also a theory of knowledge. According to Lipps, we gain knowledge of both an object and ourselves through empathy: that is, by responding to the qualities of an object sympathetically and, at the same time, projecting our own qualities into it. Lipps gave epistemological priority to mental perception over sense perception. Consciousness is responsive and active in the epistemic process of empathy, alternately 'having' a ‘content’ received from the object and acting of its own accord. Lipps, in the manner of Husserhan phenomenology, characterizes consciousness as ‘intentional’: it ‘reaches out’ something distinct from itself. This makes consciousness a dynamic activity, a ‘striving’. Striving determines aesthetic experience and judgement. An object is judged ‘beautiful’ to the extent to which its qualities correspond to and are in harmony with the subject’s own inner activity and ‘ugly’ if subject and object are in conflict- LipPs distinguishes between two kinds of objects, ones that can be classified by the ‘mind’s eye’ in simple act of ‘fixation’ and ones, art objects and other persons among them, which invite the very different approach of‘questioning’, in response to which they then make claims on the subject. While initially experienced as constraints, these demands are transformed into manifestations o freedom once actively acknowledged. Positive empathy here links aesthetics and ethics in Lipps. Lipps presents aesthetic qualities as a function of a dynamic interactionin which both subject and object are alternate y active and receptive. In German dialectics philosophy Lipps’s empathy theory has been received as an attempt to overcome th subject-object dualism in Western thin king, as can be seen in the early work of Ernst Bloch, a studen of Lipps at Munich.