Philosopher Gerd Irrlitz turns 90 – Homage to a great thinker

In the 1980s, there was a rumor among students in the East: If you want to know what spirit, what thinking, what history is, go to Humboldt University in Berlin! There, a professor teaches the likes of whom you wouldn't expect in the GDR .

And the rumor was right. Two generations of students in the GDR owe Gerd Irrlitz, in a sense, their introduction to the world of European thought—and not in the sense of mere acquaintance, but in the sense of genuine involvement. Of course, there are far more philosophy professors than philosophers everywhere; this wasn't just true in the GDR. And the fact that Gerd Irrlitz was probably the only humanities scholar in the East to receive a C4 professorship after 1990 doesn't change the fact that he belongs to the latter group.

You couldn't just "hear" his lectures anyway, just as he didn't read aloud. Instead, at some point, in the middle of the students' restlessness during the break, he simply began speaking. He did so quietly at first, but the audience fell silent. And then this free flow of thought continued for an hour and a half, taking such long, adventurous detours that you were almost certain it would never find its way back. But it did find its way back, every time. And we learned that apparent detours are often well-disguised main routes.

Beyond the Ivory Towers: Thinking about Home and History

The emphasis of his lecture took us into the conversation of great minds over the centuries, it turned listeners into participants, the world became broad, the doors to the past and future were open, and after an Irrlitz lecture one was inclined to consider the world of thought to be the real, the primary one.

All of this had nothing to do with a disconnect from reality or ivory towers, but rather with the phrase "Home is a space of time" in the spirit of Ernst Bloch . It is one of the most profound answers to the ancient question that philosophy shares with fairy tales: Where am I? Meaning: Where is the more or less random individual located in the context of the world?

Home is a space of time. There are sentences that you either understand immediately or never. Anyone who doesn't understand this probably wouldn't have gained much from an Irrlitz lecture. The historian of philosophy made Plato and Aristotle our contemporaries. Anyone who still has the sound of Marxism-Leninism in their ears might add: Weren't they objective idealists? Irrlitz considered every thinker of the past from his own unique standpoint, that is, from the standpoint of his greatest right, from the origin of his problem.

It's not as if philosophers have always held this view; Schopenhauer, for example, remarked that philosophers usually resemble sultans who murder their predecessors in order to take the throne themselves. Just as Hegel deposed Kant and Fichte not long after their major works had been published. He declared them three-quarters of the heads of a vanished age, namely the Enlightenment. No more "subjective reflection philosophy"!

In the GDR, Gerd Irrlitz not only edited Descartes and provided a congenial introduction, but also, among other works, Hegel's "Lectures on the History of Philosophy." Naturally, his approach here is entirely Hegelian, highlighting the richness the Swabian opened up to his audience—just as one is often amazed at how good GDR editions often were when rereading them. He declined Reclam Leipzig's offer to write a history of philosophy, even during the GDR era. He probably feared the clamor of the heretics; even his "History of Ethics" had only been published in Russian, when glasnost and perestroika were already in place there.

Dawn of Hope: Resistance and Free Spirit

1985 was not only the year Gorbachev came to power, it was also the 100th birthday of the philosopher Ernst Bloch. Bloch had been Irrlitz's great teacher in Leipzig. It's hard to imagine what it meant, after a childhood under Hitler and during his parents' anti-fascist resistance, to sit in on the lectures of the thinker of the "Principle of Hope." Irrlitz's father had belonged to the Leipzig resistance group of the Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), which had only been founded in 1931 in an attempt to bring about a unification of left-wing forces – in vain. The Leipzig group was exposed in 1935, and Irrlitz's father was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Irrlitz's son wrote a book about the 40 young Leipzigers from that time: "Resistance, Not Resignation."

"We had a good time under the looming dawn of Bloch's ideas," Irrlitz would once say, deliberately laconic, about his early years as a student. But after the uprising in Hungary in October 1956, the GDR could no longer tolerate Bloch's free spirit. Imprisonment was not an option, so forced retirement followed. Strangely, the exiled man's voice could still be heard weeks later at the Leipzig Institute: Bloch's secretary was transcribing the recordings of his lectures. It was eerie, and not only Bloch's student assistant, Gerd Irrlitz, wondered: How will we find ourselves again?

The mid-twenties man initially found himself working at the Buna factory as a transport worker. Until even Buna noticed that this transport worker could move more than just chemicals and components. He earned his doctorate on Rosa Luxemburg.

Gerd Irrlitz would have had reason to be irreconcilable and instead became a mind for whom being right is not a serious category of thought.