Ernst Heinrich Gustav Laas (; ; June 16, 1837 – July 25, 1885) was a German gymnasium teacher, philosopher of positivism and education, and chair of philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Strasbourg. The insights he found in the history of philosophy and philosophies based on sensualism are key aspects of his scholarly work.
Biography Laas grew up as the son of the master tailor Johann Peter Laas (1807–57) and his wife Berta Ida Flora (1818–52), née Beil, in economically limited circumstances in Fürstenwalde, Brandenburg, Prussia. Ernst's childhood was marked by various hardships, especially during the difficult years of 1846 and 1847 and the revolutionary period that followed. His father loyally supported the royalists, which led to retribution from the opposing party; they boycotted his work. During this time as a young boy, Ernst and his younger brother had to collect firewood from the heath in his area after school each day to help their parents, who struggled just to provide the most basic food through their hard work. He quickly became acquainted with the seriousness of life and believed his fate was tied to his own personal energy he put into it. Due to his rough years growing up, Paul Kannengiesser has said that Laas "truly earned everything himself."Paul Kannengiesserm, "Ernst Laas." In Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der classischen Alterthumswissenschaft. Biographisches Jahrbuch für Altertumskunde, ed. Iwan Müller, vol. 41, 123–136, Berlin: Verlag von S. Calvary & Co, 1885.
When Ernst completed his education at the local public school and was ready to choose a career, however, he faced the bleak prospect of becoming a waiter, an errand boy, or a tailor's apprentice. But thanks to the support of the school principal Rector Gaedke, and General von Massow who admired his father's loyalty to the crown, he was able to attend the Joachimsthal Gymnasium.Dr. H. Holtzmann. "Worte am Grabe von Dr. Ernst Laas, Professor der Philosophie in Strassburg, gesprochen im Auftrage der Collegen von Professor" Viertel Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, edited by Richard Avenarius. pp. 1–6, Leipzig: Fues's Verlag (R. Reisland). (1886).Starting Easter 1851, he attended Joachimsthal's Gymnasium in Berlin, later becoming a boarding student. Upon leaving school, Ernst noted that his personal struggles and experiences, combined with the educational methods used at home, led him to develop a shy and reserved demeanor which others found off-putting. His noble patron died in December 1853, but his heirs continued his charitable efforts until Laas was able to support himself by taking a position as a private tutor. He was eventually able to support himself financially from 1854 to 1856.
In October 1856, Laas enrolled at the University of Berlin to study theology at the request of his parents. But soon his interest soon shifted to study philosophy following the advice from Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg along with winning a prize with an essay on Aristotle. Laas's association with Trendelenburg was a pivotal moment in his intellectual development. He attended Trendelenburg's philosophical seminars from the time he entered the university until he earned his doctorate. He also enjoyed Trendelenburg's personal favor and dedicated his first major work to him. Yet it was not Trendelenburg's unique metaphysical ideas that significantly influenced Laas, but rather his reformative views on the approach to philosophical study as a whole: his historical method. This direction represents Adolf Trendelenburg's lasting contribution, and in this regard, Laas was truly his disciple. Laas applied this historical-critical approach not only in philosophy but wherever he aimed to assess the value of existing concepts by connecting them to the past. Trendelenburg was known for his knowledge of the history of philosophy and taught in his lectures that a philosopher could learn much for their own thinking and about the thinking of others from the history of philosophy. Through this "historical-critical"(1872). Die Pädagogik des Johannes Sturm historisch und kritisch beleuchtet. [A Historical and Critical Look at the Pedagogy of Johannes Sturm.] pp. iv-v, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. method, Trendelenburg advocated for a deep, critical study to distill the enduring elements from the works of the past, which should then inform the true philosophical task of the present.
Under Trendelenburg's guidance, Laas' philosophical thinking initially oriented around Aristotle, and in his doctoral dissertation, he adopted a similar method to what Lessing later successfully employed.Laas, Ernst. Idealismus und Postivismus. Eine Kritische Auseinandersetzung. Erster, allgemeiner und grundlegender Theil. Vol. 1, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1879: 2, fn. That is, Lessing claimed that: We remain inexperienced children without history. And without the history of the wisdom of the world in particular, which is nothing but the history of error and truth, we will never learn to appreciate the strength of the human intellect; we will forever remain a pompous sophist who, in love with his idiocies, believes that he is sitting in the lap of certainty; we will be exposed hourly to the danger of being deceived by ignorant prattlers who not seldom call new discoveries what we already knew and believed several thousand years ago.Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Zeitung of June 29, 1751,” Sämmtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann. vol. 3, Berlin: Voss, 1838: 173. LinkLaas thus following this method aims to critically extract the correct ideas from the judgments of his predecessors; a method that remained a characteristic feature of his entire approach to research. This approach also influenced his endeavor to search into the genesis of his subjects, guiding him in both philosophy and education. Laas even stated that for all human institutions that have evolved from historical life, immersing oneself in their development is the only way to gain a clear understanding of their validity.
At Berlin, philosophy and cultural history were the main focuses of his university studies; in the seminars of August Boeckh and Moriz Haupt, he developed the philological precision that marked his studies of Aristotle and Kant. Among his teachers was also Du Bois-Reymond. It was precisely during this time when the remarkable successes of the natural sciences were increasingly overshadowing philosophical speculation. As the significance of Hegel's system waned, the esteem for empirical research rose, which Hegel had somewhat dismissed. This was especially true in German philosophy, particularly in the fields of psychology and epistemology where there was a growing interest in identifying and dissecting empirical facts (Tatsachen). These facts were the objects of experience found in the sciences, which many thought would likewise complement the new historical movement on its path to being a science. And so, Laas was always on the lookout for a solid, fertile, naturalistic foundation, which was indeed greatly influenced by this empirical trend.
Thus, alongside his study of history, he delved into natural sciences. To be sure, while he did not conduct independent research in the natural sciences as he did in philosophy, education, and literary history, he nonetheless absorbed the results of scientific research with remarkable energy and gained a clear understanding of its methods. This is demonstrated in his philosophical writings, which show a wide range of citations of the top scientists of Laas' time. He was, in any case, increasingly keen to emphasize the seriousness and sobriety of scientific thinking. The more firmly he grounded himself in this new scientific reality, the more rigorously he analyzed phenomena and immersed himself in their development, and the more he distanced himself from theories that twist away from the facts or try to leap to a “higher” understanding through some intellectual gymnastics.
Laas received his doctorate in philosophy December 5, 1859 with a dissertation on The Principle of Aristotle's Eudaimonia and Its Significance in Ethics (Eudaimonia Aristotelis in ethicis principium quid velit et valeat). Laas regarded scientific psychology as the sole basis for ethics and praised Aristotle over Kant because Aristotle derived his moral directives from the specific nature of humans. He saw this as a valuable feature of his ideal of happiness, particularly because it could be realized on this earth. Here, then, one can see the beginnings of Laas's dispute with idealist thinking. He esteemed Aristotle's more empirical approach more highly than Plato's abstract suprasensory ethics based on ideas.
In 1860, he became a teacher of German, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew at the renowned Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Berlin and, in 1868, at Berlin's Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium. In 1861, he married Martha (1839–1919), née Vogeler and had five sons. His first major publication emerged from his teaching experiences—a guide on teaching German essay writing in the first class of the gymnasium which was published in 1868. Around the same time, he was appointed as a senior teacher with the title of professor at Wilhelms-Gymnasium. He published further studies on German instruction in 1870 and 1871, which led to plans for a thorough revision of his first book. However, his appointment as a full professor at the University of Strasbourg in 1872, advocated by Trendelenburg, somewhat disrupted these plans. Nonetheless, he published German Instruction at Higher Educational Institutions in the same year and revised his earlier work on essay writing in 1876. In 1872, he received a full professorship in philosophy at the newly re-established Kaiser Wilhelm University of Strasbourg, a position he held until his death. Additionally, he published The Pedagogy of Johannes Sturm in 1872 and a small treatise on Gymnasium and Realschule in 1875.
He was a well-informed and perceptive literary historian, as evidenced not only by many valuable comments on the essay topics he compiled from this field (found in his book on German essay writing), but also by his excellent study on Herder's influence on German lyric poetry that was published in Die Grenzboten in 1871. Moreover, he was a top-tier educator and educational writer, an expert on the history of education, a theorist of style, and capable of using elevated, powerfully effective language when he wrote freely. In his lectures, he initially dealt with literary and cultural-historical topics (including Luther, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe) and educational themes. He lectured on pedagogy during the time of Humanism and the Reformation and on educational theories in ancient and modern times. Although his early days as a professor exclusively focused on pedagogy, his lectures always included philosophical elements. That said, in his own field of philosophy, he was thoroughly familiar with every significant work of the past, especially those important in cultural history as well as contemporary studies. Paul Natorp has said that: "it's hard to name a highly regarded book on a philosophical subject that he hadn't referenced at some point in a way that shows he didn't just read it but studied it deeply."
From 1878 onwards, he lectured exclusively on philosophy and continued to further educated himself in mathematics and the natural sciences. His main philosophical works include Kant's Analogies of Experience in 1876 and Idealism and Positivism, a three-volume series published between 1879 and 1884, among other publications and reviews, where he fought against the philosophies of Plato and Kant with a deep and open disdain. In the last decade of his life, however, Laas turned with increasing interest and an almost passionate involvement to the problems of the social sciences, law, and political theory.