Bruno Liebrucks

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Bruno Liebrucks (born October 12, 1911 in Budupönen , Ragnit district , East Prussia ; † January 15, 1986 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German philosopher .

Life

Liebrucks was the son of an elementary school teacher. He attended the humanistic high school in Tilsit and Insterburg . He then studied German , history , theology and philosophy at the Albertina in Königsberg . During his studies he spent a semester in Munich , where he heard from the racial hygienist Fritz Lenz , but also from oceanography, about Thomas Mann and from Kurt Huber on the criticism of judgment and went on an excursion to Italy.

On July 7, 1933, Liebrucks did his doctorate in Königsberg with Albert Goedeckemeyer on problems of the subject-object relation (among others) with Kant , which was awarded the Kant Prize. From May 1933 to 1936 he was assistant to Hans Heyse in Königsberg , who went to Göttingen to succeed Georg Misch and whom he followed in 1937. Liebrucks joined the SA on June 28, 1933 , where he worked as a Rottenführer of SA Standard 1, Sturm 54/1. In addition, he was active in the student union camps of the NSDStB in Königsberg . He worked as an assistant at a science camp organized by Heyse at the Albertina. A break in his career occurred in 1936 when he signed an appeal in favor of the Germanist Paul Hankamer , whose lectures were repeatedly interrupted by National Socialist students because they attributed Hankamer to the Catholic Action . The NSDAP reacted by expelling him from the SA and canceling his scholarship. In 1936/37 Liebrucks did his military service. In May 1937, the chief of staff of the SA, Viktor Lutze , gave Liebruck's complaint instead of with the condition that “he must fully adhere to the views of the NSDStB and act accordingly.” As a result, Liebrucks became effective May 1, 1937 Member of the NSDAP (Member No. 4,860,585).

In 1938 Liebrucks moved to Alfred Baeumler in Berlin , where he partly earned his living with Latin lessons. No information is available about the reason for the change. Liebrucks began his work for his habilitation with an investigation into the difference between ancient and modern awareness of reality with the title “The Problem of the Soul in the Time from Plato to Augustine ” at Heyse. In his DFG application for a new scholarship, he changed the topic as an investigation to “clarify the difference between the Nordic-Greek understanding of the world and reality”, whereby he used the “spiritual manifestation of a racially related attitude” to the confrontation of National Socialism with the "Supranational and international powers" want to contribute. In addition to Baeumler, the racial ideologist Hans FK Günther and the historian Wilhelm Weber , who confirmed that “a young philosopher is interested in the anthropological-racial foundation of his thoughts” , supported the funding . Nevertheless, the application was initially rejected, until Liebrucks also received another received a positive opinion from the Lecturer Association . In March 1939 he was invited by Baeumler to the conference of Nazi philosophers at Buderose Castle near Guben . He could only use the new scholarship promised in 1939 for a short time because he was drafted into military service at the beginning of the war . Baeumler announced a new interpretation of Plato in 1940, but the completion of the work was delayed. According to Liebruck, all of his documents, including extensive translations of Plato's dialogues, were completely lost during the war. In 1943 he was given a three-month habilitation leave, in which he created a substantially shortened version of his originally planned work entitled "On the Problem of Eleatism in Plato". The first reviewer for this work on the Parmenides and Sophistes dialogues was Nicolai Hartmann , to whom he quickly found good access. For testing Commission, giving it the Venia legendi issued, belonged Hermann Grapow and Wolfgang Schadewaldt . After a serious injury, his military service ended in May 1944.

From 1945 to 1950 Liebrucks taught as a private lecturer in Göttingen. After Hartmann's death, Heinz Heimsoeth brought him in as a non-official ao. Professor in Cologne in 1950 . From 1952 he had a paid teaching position (" diet lecturer "). In 1959 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and was director of the philosophical seminar until his retirement. His students include the well-known Bonn language philosopher Josef Simon and the aesthetics specialist Brigitte Scheer.

His son Edgar Liebrucks is a criminal defense lawyer in Frankfurt am Main.

Teaching

In his habilitation, Bruno Liebrucks postulated a development in Plato's thinking from the Eleatic rigidity in the early writings to a dialectical approach in the later work.

The dialectic and the logic inherent in it is also an important methodological approach in Liebruck's post-war philosophy, in which he leaned heavily on Hegel . He did not develop a system of his own in his philosophy, but has found his own systematic approach in language . Liebrucks tried to use language to capture the human world and reality in philosophical thoughts. The scope of his research ranges from myth to modern analytical philosophy .

In his main work, Language and Consciousness, in several volumes (1964 to 1979), he examined the problem of language and dialectical logic on a broad basis under systematic and historical aspects. In the introductory volume he first commented on a number of language philosophers such as Vico , Herder , Hamann , Cassirer and Gehlen up to Karl Bühler , then in a single volume Wilhelm von Humboldt . This was followed by an examination of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment and Hegel's Philosophy of Law . The fourth volume focuses on the question of Kant's transcendental logic . In Kant, Liebrucks saw a first revolution in the way of thinking, which was continued in a second revolution in Hegel's philosophy, to which the fifth volume is dedicated. Liebrucks commented on Hegel's logic in three volumes, which make up the sixth volume of the main work. The final volume focuses on the word “and” and Hölderlin .

Language is the medium through which man encounters the world. There is no such thing as a direct encounter with reality that is detached from language. Language is a dialectical phenomenon : “In everyday language use we do not have the phenomenon of the German language on the one hand as an objective structure and then a second phenomenon of the subject moving in this language , but rather because the listening partner helps to create what is said in internal speech , is the phenomenon of language happening on all sides that are only separated in the ' concept ' and not in reality. ”The experience side of language is the subject of linguistic psychology , the lexical-grammatical structure of linguistics and the artistic forms of expression in literary studies . Philosophy, on the other hand, asks about the role and influence of language on the being of humans.

By intentionally referring to the world with language, man establishes a relationship with himself, that is, he cannot express anything about the world without reference to himself. And insofar as man makes language himself the object of his speaking, he establishes a self-reference of language to itself. "To the extent that language and consciousness understand each other as an intertwining of both sides, they can - we do not say with Hegel, the standard - but find the evidence of their living and historical structure in themselves."

The mediated access to reality through language means that human knowledge is determined by language. “The structure-forming movement of all human knowledge is called language. This has its movement in what Kant called subreption , trickery. “Language is a medium of communication and contains something of what is said, something of what is addressed and something of what is discussed ( threefold relation of sender, receiver and facts according to Bühler ). The structure of language can only be grasped by summarizing this threefold relationship. Trees and rain cannot teach people anything (Socrates in Kratylos ). Meaning beyond the symbolic arises only in the three-way nature of the semantic language relation.

It is part of the essence of language that it cannot be pronounced directly, but can only be paraphrased with difficulty. This means that one can only paraphrase the individual concrete and address it through the abstraction in the term. Without the universal moment of language, which lies in abstraction, an understanding would not be possible, since the attempt to represent a moment of reality could not overcome the limitation of reality. The symbolism of language also means that all speech is metaphorical and this is the reason for the fertility of language.

Works (selection)

  • Problems of the subject-object relation , (Phil. Diss.) Königsberg 1933.
  • Plato's development towards dialectics. Investigations into the problem of eleatism . Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M. 1949 (Habil.-Schr., Berlin 1943).
  • Language and Consciousness , Vols. 1 to 5, 6.1-6.3 and 7, Akad. Verl.-Ges., Frankfurt (volumes 1–5) and Lang, volumes 6 and 7, 1964 to 1979.
  • Knowledge and Dialectics , Nijhoff, Den Haag 1972. (Collection of articles)
  • Bruno Liebrucks . In: Ludwig Pongratz, ed., Philosophy in Self-Representations (3 Vols.), Volume 2, Meiner, Hamburg 1975-'77.
  • Irrational Logos and Rational Myth . Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1982. (Collection of articles)

literature

  • Bruno Liebrucks: Self-expression . in: Philosophy in Self-Representations II, ed. By Ludwig Pongratz, Meiner, Hamburg 1975, 170-223.
  • Heinz Röttges, Brigitte Scheer and Josef Simon (eds.): Language and Concept. Festschrift for Bruno Liebrucks . Anton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan 1974.
  • Brigitte Scheer, Günter Wohlfahrt (ed.): Dimensions of language in the philosophy of German idealism. Festschrift for Bruno Liebrucks. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1982.
  • Franz Ungler, Bruno Liebrucks' "Language and Consciousness". Lecture from winter semester 1988 , with a foreword by Josef Simon, edited from the estate and introduced by Max Gottschlich, Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2014
  • Max Gottschlich (ed.), The three revolutions of the way of thinking. Systematic contributions to thinking by Bruno Liebrucks , Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2013
  • Christian Tilitzki : The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich . Akademie, Berlin 2002. Review

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The information on the development up to 1945 comes largely from Christian Tilitzki: The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Akademie, Berlin 2002, as the corresponding information is missing in the self-portrayal and in the obituaries. A differently accentuated representation that relativizes the connection with National Socialism can be found in Max Gottschlich: Life, Work and Effect of Bruno Liebrucks ( PDF file )
  2. ^ A b Christian Tilitzki: The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Academy, Berlin 2002, 870.
  3. ^ Christian Tilitzki: The German University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich . Akademie, Berlin 2002, p. 871.
  4. ↑ Bruno Liebrucks: Self-Presentation . In: Philosophy in Self-Representations II, ed. by Ludwig Pongratz, Hamburg 1975, pp. 170-223, here 200-201.
  5. ↑ Bruno Liebrucks: Philosophical friendship. On the correspondence between N. Hartmann and H. Heimsoeth. In: Kant-Studien 73, 1982, pp. 82–86.
  6. ↑ Egmont R. Koch / Nina Svensson: Unbelievable! In: sueddeutsche.de . May 11, 2010, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  7. ^ First presented in the form of 15 theses at the Bremen Philosophy Congress in 1950, printed in: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung V, Heft 4, 465-484.
  8. ↑ Brigitte Scheer: In memory of Bruno Liebrucks. In: Journal for philosophical research , 41, 2/1987, 299-305.
  9. ↑ Bruno Liebrucks: Knowledge and Dialectics: For an introduction to a philosophy of language. The Hague 1972, 7.
  10. ↑ Bruno Liebrucks: Knowledge and Dialectics: For an introduction to a philosophy of language. The Hague 1972, 8-9.
  11. ↑ Bruno Liebrucks: Language and Consciousness, Volume 1, Introduction, Range of the Problem: from the undialectical structures to dialectical movement. Academy, Frankfurt 1964, 15.
  12. ↑ Bruno Liebrucks: Language and Consciousness, Volume 1, Introduction, Range of the Problem: from the undialectical structures to dialectical movement. Academy, Frankfurt 1964, 481.
personal data
SURNAME Liebrucks, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH October 12, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Budupönen , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1986
Place of death Frankfurt am Main