Liebmann, Otto (1840–1912)

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LIEBMANN, OTTO
(1840–1912)

Otto Liebmann, the German neo-Kantian philosopher, was born at Löwenberg (Lwowek Slaski), Silesia, and became successively Privatdozent at Tübingen (1865), extraordinary professor at Strassburg (1872), and professor at Jena (1882). He served as a volunteer during the siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871 and published a memoir of his experiences.

In a Festschrift dedicated to Liebmann on his seventieth birthday, various thinkers discussed the aspects of his work that were of particular interest to them. Each interpreted him differently; for example, Bruno Bauch stressed transcendental-methodological aspects, Erich Adickes empirical openness, Wilhelm Windelband critical-metaphysical insight. Such variegated criticism was not without foundation, for Liebmann's thought had many facets and did not evolve so much as oscillate between impulsive outbursts and great restraint, passing from problem to problem.

In his notable early book, Kant und die Epigonen (1865), Liebmann swept aside the academic philosophy of his day and preached a return to Immanuel Kant. He simplified Kantian thought and streamlined the post-Kantian systems. The essence of the Kantian revolution, he claimed, was the discovery of the transcendental, which, however, must be freed from the caput mortuum of the thing-in-itself. The systematic effort of the great successors of Kant failed because Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Ego, Friedrich Schiller's Absolute, G. W. F. Hegel's Spirit, Johann Friedrich Herbart's "reals," and Arthur Schopenhauer's Will all represent the thing-in-itself, whereas J. F. Fries mistook the transcendental for the psychological. For Liebmann the only reality, immanent in consciousness and sufficient, is experience, which is both empirical reality and transcendental ideality. But could such simplified views be unequivocally developed?

In a subsequent essay, Über den individuellen Beweis für die Freiheit des Willens (1866), Liebmann dealt with the freedom of the will, in opposition to Schopenhauer. Are we, it can be asked, on the level of the transcendental or of the individual ego in dealing with this problem? Reexamining the question in 1901 (Gedanken und Tatsachen, Vol. II, p. 88), he referred it to the individual.

In Über den objektiven Anblick (1869) Liebmann distinguished three factors in perception: the sensitive, the intellectual, and the transcendent. The transcendent factor in perception "is the relationship between an unknown X and a likewise unknown Y, which appears to us as our body, and from which in turn there spring into our consciousness those sensitive qualities which our intellect transforms, according to a priori laws, into perceptible nature, a phenomenon of the external material world" (p. 153). In this work the thing-in-itself is not eliminated; on the contrary, two things-in-themselves—X and Y —are admitted.

Liebmann's major works, Analysis der Wirklichkeit (1876) and Gedanken und Tatsachen (2 vols., 1882–1907), are collections of problems, not only in the critique of knowledge but also in Naturphilosophie, psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. In all of these, self-consciousness recognizes its limits; but the resulting agnosticism is superseded by a program of "critical metaphysics."

In this connection Liebmann denounced as a doktrinäre Fiktion the neo-Baconian ideal (or idol) of pure experience, itself a notion that Liebmann took from Richard Avenarius and from the evolutionary genetic psychology of Herbert Spencer and others. Every experience and every science, Liebmann claimed, is possible only by means of certain nonempirical premises, such as the principles of real identity, of the continuity of existence, of constant causality or legality, and of the temporal continuity of becoming, or, in general, by means of fundamental a priori forms or principles, which constitute the organization of human cognitive powers but from whose transcendental validity by no means necessarily follows its transcendent reality.

Liebmann distinguished three types of theories, which seek explanatory principles in the immediate empirical data, in hypotheses by which the phenomena are deduced, or in absolute metaphysical realities. He rejected the first and third, and admitted the hypotheses, if and as long as the facts confirm them. This is true not only of scientific but also of philosophical theories, especially of critical metaphysics as a "strict discussion of human views, human hypotheses on the essence of things." Liebmann concentrated on the theories of science and their metaphysical pronouncements or assumptions. He claimed, for example, that the biological point of view is more than a mere postulation of an as-if; it is a positive affirmation of entelechies. Darwinism abounds with metascientific problems and teleological claims; but not even the transcendental philosopher can escape the problems posed by nature, with its own immanent logic (Weltlogik ), its dynamic causality that achieves an increase in perfection, even though he knows that every hypothesis and system is a product of the specifically human thinking apparatus. A study of space and time that Liebmann undertook to come to grips with non-Euclidean viewpoints led him to problems that appeared to Windelband as idle fancies.

In dealing with the problem of the multiplicity of subjects, Liebmann developed but did not elaborate upon a distinction between three conceptions of the ego: the metaphysical substrate, an objective never attained by dogmatic metaphysics; the individual ego, a tacit assumption of psychology; and the transcendental ego, a "typical" subject of the intelligence of the human species and a fundamental condition of the empirical world. The problem of psychophysical parallelism led him to postulate a coincidence of natural and logical laws on the metaphysical plane of natura naturans, but he did not draw the necessary methodological distinctions to adequately treat this problem.

Bibliography

works by liebmann

Kant und die Epigonen. Stuttgart: Schober, 1865; 2nd ed., Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1912.

Über den individuellen Beweis für die Freiheit des Willens. Stuttgart: Schober, 1866.

Über den objektiven Anblick. Stuttgart, 1869.

Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit. Strassburg, 1876; 4th enlarged ed., Strassburg: Trübner, 1911.

Über philosophischen Tradition. Strassburg, 1883.

Die Klimax der Theorien. Strassburg, 1884.

Gedanken und Tatsachen, 2 vols. Strassburg, 1882–1901; 2nd ed., Strassburg: Trübner, 1899–1904.

Immanuel Kant. Strassburg, 1904.

works on liebmann

Meyer, Adolf. Über Liebmanns Erkenntnislehre und ihr Verhältniss zu Kant. Jena, Germany, 1916. Dissertation.

Zum 70. Geburtstag Otto Liebmanns. A Festschrift in Kantstudien 15 (1910). Contains works by Adickes, Bauch, Hans Driesch, Windelband, and others.

Mariano Campo (1967)

Translated by Robert M. Connolly

Encyclopedia of Philosophy