Wolfgang Leidhold (born 12 December 1950 in Dortmund) is a German political scientist, philosopher and artist. He works as a full professor at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne, with a focus on political theory and the history of ideas. The scope of his work ranges from the Paleolithic to the present day. Since the 1980s he has been exploring the history of experience and its transformations. He recently published the results of his research in The History of Experience: A Study in Experiential Turns and Cultural Dynamics from the Paleolithic to the Present Day (New York, NY, 2023). The main focus of his artistic work is painting and drawing. His works have been exhibited in the US and Germany.
Academic career
Leidhold studied social sciences, philosophy and East Asian studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. His teachers included Norbert Elias, Günter Gawlick, Jürgen Gebhardt, Leo Kofler, Eric Voegelin and Peter Weber-Schäfer. After completing his master's degree with a thesis on René Descartes (unpublished) and studying at Stanford University, CA, he received his PhD in 1982 with a thesis on "Ethics and Politics in Francis Hutcheson."
From 1978 to 1989 he was an assistant professor at the University of Erlangen, teaching political philosophy, history of ideas and international relations. During the 80s, Leidhold focused on international relations, on security issues in particular, especially in cooperation with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). Funded by the Thyssen Foundation (Cologne) he initiated a project on the Pacific Island Region and international security (1986–1988). During this time, he worked as a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., than directed by Ray Cline. Later on he was associated with the East-West-Center and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.Claudius Mandel, Philipp Thimm, eds., Experience, Implikationen für Mensch, Gesellschaft und Politik. Festschrift für Wolfgang Leidhold, Würzburg (Königshausen & Neumann) 2021 (), pp. 13–20.
Extensive research trips took him to the Pacific Island states, Australia, and New Zealand. This provided the empirical basis for his monograph "Crisis Under the Southern Cross. The Pacific Island Region and International Security". With this thesis, Leidhold received his post-doctoral lecturing qualification in political science.The thesis was published as: Krise unter dem Kreuz des Südens, Die Pazifische Inselregion und die internationale Sicherheit, Baden-Baden (Nomos Publisher) 1991 ()
From 1991 to 1992, Leidhold served as Interim Professor the Eric Voegelin Chair at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of LMU Munich and the Chair of International Relations at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. In 1992, he became a full professor of political science at the University of Cologne, focusing on political theory and the history of ideas. The study of the structure of experience and its historical development from the Paleolithic to the present has been his priority since then. Aside from numerous other research projects, he initiated and designed ILIAS in 1997, an open-source online learning platform that enjoys worldwide distribution.Bertelsmann Stiftung, ed., Virtus, virtuelle Universitätssysteme Köln, Jahresbericht 1997/98, Gütersloh (Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung) 1998, pp. 14f, 33–39 () His dedication to the project was honored with the ILIAS honorary award in 2015.
Currently, he is exploring the relationship between experience and ecology, as well as the development of a trans-human ecological ethos.
The Festschrift "Experience" (2021) illustrates the international impact of Leidhold's ideas.
Artistic career
Parallel to his academic education, he studied painting and drawing in the class of Hans-Jürgen "Hänner" Schlieker (1924–2004) at the fine arts department of the Ruhr University Bochum (Musisches Zentrum, MZ) from 1972 to 1975.Kabus, Ortrud (ed.), Ausgangspunkt Musisches Zentrum, Bochum 2017, p. 21
In 2010, the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City invited Leidhold to present a solo exhibition the following year entitled "Knots and Other Stories" (Mar. 04, 2011 – Apr. 02, 2011).Ivan Gaete, ed., Wolfgang Leidhold, Knots & Other Stories, New York, NY, 2011 (Exhibition catalogue) Major galleries in the U.S. and Germany feature his work.
In addition, he assists the New York-based Boris Lurie Art Foundation as a consultant in promoting the Jewish artist Boris Lurie (1924–2008). He initiated and coordinated two solo exhibitions of Boris Lurie's artwork at the NS-Documentation Center in Cologne (2014)Igor Satanovsky, ed., KZ-Kampf-Kunst, Boris Lurie: No!Art, New York (No!Art-Publishing) 2014, pp. 15–21, 360 () and the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2016).Cilly Kugelmann, ed., Keine Kompromisse! Die Kunst des Boris Lurie, Bielefeld, Berlin (Kerber Verlag) 2016, pp. 117, 176 ()
Work
International security
In the field of international relations, Leidhold focused on military aspects of security policy, particularly in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. In addition, he developed the simulation game "Politics and International Security" (POLIS) as a teaching tool, which took into account the interdependence of political, economic and military aspects on a global level. The simulation was intended to complement theoretical knowledge with the experience of acting in complex and dynamic situations. For this he was awarded the Karl Carstens Prize by the Federal Academy for Security Policy (Bonn, Germany) in 2001.See: https://www.baks.bund.de/de/der-karl-carstens-preis – And: Karl Carstens-Preis 2001 für Professor Leidhold, https://idw-online.de/en/news30985 (both retrieved: March 30, 2023).
In his study "Crisis Under the Southern Cross, The Pacific Island Region and International Security" (1991), Leidhold explored the question of how security relations develop between the small Pacific island states and their larger neighbors on their periphery, such as Australia, New Zealand, but also the United States, China, Japan and the former Soviet Union.Zürn, Michael [Review of:] Wolfgang H. Leidhold: Krise unter dem Kreuz des Südens: die Pazifische Inselregion und die internationale Sicherheit, in: Politische Vierteljahresschrift (1992) Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 563–564. See: https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/112446 (retrieved: April 2, 2023). In addition to structural factors such as political systems, geography, economics, and political alliances, he also made experience a central theme, as small island states view their security situation quite differently than major powers and large territorial states.
Concept of experience
Dimensions of experience
The study of experience became the major focus in Leidhold's research and publications. The point of departure for his interest in this was his study of the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). Hutcheson, like John Locke, wanted to base ethics on experience, but considered the empiricist formula, classical since Aristotle, to be unsuitable. This formula stated: from the senses comes memory, and from many memories comes experience. Locke considered the sensory experience of pleasure and pain to be crucial. Hutcheson noted that many morally good actions are painful, such as risking one's lives to save someone from drowning in icy water. Therefore, he claimed that moral ideas emerge from their own dimension of experience, which he believed was based on a particular sense, which he called moral sense. In his last book, System of Moral Philosophy, he enumerated more than a dozen senses (Book I, Ch. II), including a sense of beauty, and an inner sense of self-awareness and reflection. Thus, Hutcheson proposed a multi-dimensional structure of experience. In addition to his dissertation on "Ethics and Politics in Francis Hutcheson" (1982), Leidhold published a critical edition (including an introduction) of Hutcheson's "Inquriy".Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. and introd. by Wolfgang Leidhold, 2. rev. ed., Indianapolis, In. 2008, Indianapolis (Liberty Fund) (Natural Law Series).
The structure of experience
While Hutcheson emphasized that a monistic conception of experience could not adequately explain the development of our ideas and concepts, the concept of experience itself remained outside his critical investigations – a deficit, moreover, that seemed to pervade the entire history of ideas. A fact confirmed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer who noted: "Paradoxical as it may seem, the concept of experience seems to me to be one of the most obscure we have".Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed., London (Continuum) 2006, p. 341. Therefore, exploring the nature of experience became Leidhold's next project. He published the results first in a series of essays and then in a book on "Political Philosophy."
There he proposes to define experience as "conscious participation" in reality.Politische Philosophie, 2nd ed., Würzburg (Königshausen & Neumann) 2003, pp. 121 ff. . Wolfgang Leidhold, The History of Experience, A Study in Experiential Turns and Cultural Dynamics from the Paleolithic to the Present Day, New York (Taylor & Francis) 2023 (Routledge Studies in Cultural History) ISBN 978-1-03-229131-4. S. 12. Since there are various kinds of participation, there are also various dimensions of experience. All dimensions have one feature in common: participation turns into experience when we become aware of it. The result of this analysis was a typology of experience that includes: sensory perception, imagination and creativity, spirituality and contemplation, self-reflection and consciousness. In the remainder of the book, Leidhold shows how this theory of experience affects our understanding of consciousness and religion, of metaphysics (especially of time), of anthropology, and of political reality as well.
In his next book, The Logic of Religious Experience,Gottes Gegenwart, Zur Logik der religiösen Erfahrung, Darmstadt (WBG, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft) 2008. . Leidhold focuses on the religious dimension, first systematically analyzing spiritual experience and then looking at it from an intercultural and historical perspective.
By applying his theory of experience to religion and its spiritual foundations, he shows how spiritual experience has evolved in the course of human history and throughout an array of Eastern and Western cultures. This examination reveals that the way people get in touch with the religious dimension of reality, i.e. the structure of spiritual experience, has changed several times, and that the elements of its structure were only gradually brought to light. Finally, the fully differentiated conception of religious experience is to be located in the period between 800 and 200 BC, that is, in an epoch that Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) called the "Axis Age."Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, New Haven and London (Yale University Press) 1953. However, Jaspers gave no reasons as to what triggered these achievements of the Axis Age, and even his successors such as Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (1923–2010) and Robert Bellah (1927–2013) spoke of a "conundrum".Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, The Axial Conundrum, Between Transcendental Visions and Vicissitudes of Their Institutionalizations, in: Análise Social, 199 (2011) pp. 201–217; Robert N. Bellah, What is Axial about the Axial Age? In: European Journal of Sociology, 46 (2005) pp. 69–89.
The dynamics of experience