Bruno Liebrucks - Against the Trend (1964-1979)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
An Untimely Thinker in Frankfurt
Bruno Liebrucks (1911-1986) occupies a singular position in German postwar philosophy. Professor in Frankfurt from 1960 to 1976—at the same time as Adorno and Horkheimer, later Habermas—he nonetheless followed an entirely independent path.[1] While the Frankfurt School criticized Hegel as a philosopher of identity, while postmodernism began to deconstruct the logos, Liebrucks developed a monumental project: the rehabilitation of Hegel through a philosophy grounded in language.[2]
His major work, Sprache und Bewußtsein (Language and Consciousness), appeared between 1964 and 1979 in seven volumes—over 4,000 printed pages. It is one of the most comprehensive interpretations of Hegel in the twentieth century and at the same time one of the least received. Why? Because Liebrucks thought against the spirit of the age. While the whole world was undergoing the “linguistic turn” and streaming toward Wittgenstein, structuralism, deconstruction, Liebrucks developed a philosophy of language that reached back to Herder, Humboldt, and Hegel.
The Project: Language and Consciousness
Liebrucks’ basic question was: how are language and consciousness connected? His thesis: not such that consciousness exists first and then uses language (instrumentalism). Nor such that language exists first and consciousness is merely its product (structuralism). Rather: language and consciousness develop in mutual constitution.[3]
The seven volumes are arranged like a spiral staircase:
Volume 1 (1964): Introduction - the scope of the problem. From non-dialectical formations (myth, everyday consciousness) to dialectical movement.
Volume 2 (1965): Wilhelm von Humboldt. The constitutive role of language for worldview. “Language is the formative organ of thought.”[4] Not a means for representing already-finished thoughts, but a medium of their genesis.
Volume 3 (1966): Paths to consciousness. Language and dialectic in the spaces that Kant and Marx closed off but that Hegel opened. Liebrucks shows: Kant separated sensibility and understanding too sharply. Marx reduced consciousness to social practice. Hegel alone grasped mediation.
Volumes 4 and 5 (1968/1970): The two revolutions of thought. Volume 4 treats Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Volume 5 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Liebrucks shows: Kant carries out the first revolution—consciousness constitutes its objects. Hegel the second—consciousness recognizes itself as becoming-historical.
Volume 6 (1974, in three sub-volumes): The human concept. Linguistic genesis of logic, logical genesis of language. Here Liebrucks comments on Hegel’s Science of Logic—being, essence, concept. His thesis: logic is not abstract but explicates the structure of linguistic engagement with the world.
Volume 7 (1979): “Und” - The language of Hölderlin. On myth and logos, reality and actuality. Liebrucks shows: Hölderlin completes what Hegel began—the poetic articulation of the dialectical movement.
The Hegel-Humboldt Connection: Language as Mediation
Liebrucks’ central innovation lies in the systematic connection of Hegel and Humboldt. Both, he shows, grasp language as a medium of mediation—not as an instrument transmitting finished thoughts, but as the process in which thinking first arises.[5]
In Humboldt: language is not ergon (finished work) but energeia (active force). It discloses world by articulating. Different languages disclose the world differently—not because they name different things, but because they carry out different articulations.
In Hegel: the concept is not an abstract schema but a concrete movement. It develops by differentiating itself and returning to itself. This movement is linguistically constituted—even if Hegel does not explicitly thematize this.
Liebrucks’ thesis: if one reads Hegel together with Humboldt, one understands why Hegel’s logic is not “abstract.” It explicates the movement that lies in language itself—the movement of differentiating and integrating, of determining and mediating.
An example: Hegel’s analysis of “something and other” in the Logic of Being. Liebrucks shows: this is no abstract speculation but explicates what we do when we linguistically determine something. We say “this is a tree”—and implicitly: “not a house, not an animal.” Every determination demarcates. The “other” is not added afterward, but is co-posited in every determination.
Against the Spirit of the Age: Liebrucks Between Adorno and Deconstruction
Liebrucks’ position becomes understandable only if one sees what he was arguing against. In Frankfurt, Adorno and Horkheimer taught at the same time. Adorno wrote, in 1966, Negative Dialectics—a critique of Hegel’s “identity-thinking.” Hegel’s dialectic, Adorno argued, wants to force everything non-identical into the identity of the concept. It is domination-thinking, reification, violence.
Liebrucks disagreed fundamentally. Hegel’s dialectic, correctly understood, is precisely the opposite: it holds fast to difference instead of eliminating it. The concept is not a rigid schema but a living movement. It integrates the other without swallowing it.[6]
Liebrucks also set his position against the emerging postmodernism. While Derrida deconstructed the logos, while Lyotard proclaimed the “end of grand narratives,” Liebrucks defended the possibility of systematic thought. But—and this is decisive—not as a closed system, but as an open movement that critically penetrates itself.
What Is True in This? The Rehabilitation of Mediation
Liebrucks’ work contains several lasting insights:
The rediscovery of the linguistic dimension in Hegel: Liebrucks showed that Hegel’s logic is not “abstract” when read as an explication of linguistic engagement with the world. Robert Brandom later took this up and developed it into a pragmatist interpretation of Hegel.[7]
The Humboldt-Hegel connection: Liebrucks showed for the first time, systematically, how Humboldt’s philosophy of language and Hegel’s dialectic complement each other. This opened a path between analytic and continental philosophy—even if this path has been too little traveled.
The defense of mediation: against all attempts to celebrate immediacy (existential philosophy, deconstruction, mystical traditions), Liebrucks shows: mediation is not loss, but gain. Only mediated, only through language and concept, do we reach concrete reality.
The Internal Tensions: Where Liebrucks Has His Limits
But even Liebrucks’ monumental project has limits—limits that follow from his own position:
First tension: the suppression of power. Liebrucks concentrates on the logical structure of language, on its disclosing power. But he too little thematizes that language is also an instrument of power, that linguistic norms are socially contested, that not everyone has equal access to “elevated” language.
A feminist critique might ask: which worldviews does the language Liebrucks analyzes articulate? A postcolonial critique: why does he concentrate on the German idealist tradition and blank out other linguistic cultures?
What is missing here is what Foucault would later work out: the entanglement of language and power, of discourse and domination. Liebrucks’ philosophy of language is too “pure”—it analyzes the logical structure without sufficiently asking who controls these structures, whose interests they serve.
Second tension: the lack of reception. Liebrucks wrote over 4,000 pages—and was scarcely read. Why? Not only because he thought against the spirit of the age. But also because his style is difficult, because he presupposes that one already knows Hegel, Humboldt, Hölderlin, because he makes no concessions to readability.
Here a performative contradiction arises: Liebrucks wants to show that language has a disclosing effect, that it mediates—but his own language rather closes off than opens up. The question of participation and accessibility becomes relevant here: a philosophical work that only specialists can read misses its own intention—to be mediation.
Third tension: the neglect of intersubjectivity. Liebrucks analyzes language primarily as a medium of world-disclosure—as a relation between subject and world. But he too little thematizes the dialogical dimension: that language is always already conversation, that it presupposes mutual recognition, that it functions only in community.
Here Liebrucks might have learned from Gadamer—or from Habermas, who taught in Frankfurt at the same time. But Liebrucks remained within his Humboldt-Hegel line without joining in the communication-theoretical turn. Recognition as an inescapable framework is missing from his reconstruction.
Systematic Placement: An Underrated Contribution
Liebrucks stands isolated in German postwar philosophy. Too Hegelian for postmodernism, too philosophical-linguistic for the Ritter school, too systematic for the Frankfurt School. His work found no school, no broad reception.
But in recent years interest has been growing. Why? Because Liebrucks’ questions are current again: how are language and thought connected? How can Hegel still be made fruitful today? How do we mediate between the analytic and continental traditions?
What remains of Liebrucks? The insight into linguisticality: Hegel’s logic is not abstract but articulates linguistic engagement with the world. The Humboldt-Hegel connection: it shows a path between instrumentalism and structuralism. The defense of systematicity: against postmodern fragmentation, Liebrucks shows that coherent thought remains possible.
But also the warning: a philosophy accessible only to the initiated, one that closes itself off from the public, misses the mediation it propagates. The task would be to make Liebrucks’ insights accessible—to work them up didactically, without trivializing them.
On the biography see: Max Gottschlich, “Leben, Werk und Wirkung von Bruno Liebrucks,” at www.bruno-liebrucks.de; Christian Tilitzki, Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2002, pp. 968–972. ↩︎
Bruno Liebrucks, Sprache und Bewußtsein, 7 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft (vols. 1–5) / Peter Lang (vols. 6–7), 1964–1979. For an overall interpretation see: Franz Ungler, Bruno Liebrucks’ “Sprache und Bewußtsein”. Vorlesung vom WS 1988, ed. Max Gottschlich, Freiburg/Munich: Alber 2014. ↩︎
Liebrucks, Sprache und Bewußtsein, Vol. 1: Einleitung. Spannweite des Problems, 1964, pp. 11–45. On its systematic placement see: Josef Simon, “Philosophie von der Sprache her” (1989), reprinted at www.bruno-liebrucks.de. ↩︎
Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Diversity of Human Language Structure” (1836), in: Werke, Vol. 3, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1963, p. 418. On its interpretation by Liebrucks see: Liebrucks, Sprache und Bewußtsein, Vol. 2, pp. 215–384. ↩︎
On the systematic significance of this connection see: Werner Schmitt, “Sprachformen des Hegelschen Begriffs. Beiträge zu Hegel, Humboldt, Hölderlin aus der Perspektive einer ‘Philosophie von der Sprache her’,” Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2025 (forthcoming); Max Gottschlich, “Das Problem von Sprache und Weltansicht bei Hamann, Herder und Humboldt,” in: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42/3 (2017), pp. 261–278. ↩︎
Liebrucks does not thematize Adorno explicitly, but his position is an implicit critique. On the reconstruction see: Brigitte Scheer, “Bruno Liebrucks und die Frankfurter Schule,” in: Max Gottschlich (ed.), Die drei Revolutionen der Denkart. Systematische Beiträge zum Denken von Bruno Liebrucks, Freiburg/Munich: Alber 2013, pp. 335–358. ↩︎
Although Brandom does not directly receive Liebrucks, the parallels are striking. Both see Hegel’s Logic as an explication of normative practices. On the connection see: Terry Pinkard, “Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic Art,” in: Revue Internationale de Philosophie 231 (2005), pp. 5–21. ↩︎