UTITZ, EMIL

UTITZ, EMIL (1883–1956), philosopher. Born in Prague, Utitz was professor at Halle and Prague. From 1942 to 1945 he was interned in the German concentration camp at Theresienstadt. His principal fields of interest were (1) aesthetics, in which he used a phenomenological analysis to assert the autonomy of art: art and aesthetics are related but not identical, the latter being a branch of the philosophy of culture; (2) characterology, i.e., the scientific study of the drives of the human personality in its manifold manifestations. Utitz edited the Jahrbuch fuer Charakterologie (6 vols.); and (3) the philosophy of man and the philosophy of culture: culture is explained as man's attempt to overcome his finite limitations, hence its universality.

Utitz sought to expound the problem of time; he also wrote on the psychology of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and on "Germany between yesterday and tomorrow." As a young man Utitz dissociated himself from the Jewish community, but the influence of Nazism brought about his return.

His principal works are Grundlegung der allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft (2 vols., 1914–20); Der Kuenstler (1925); Geschichte der Aesthetik (1932); Psychologie der Simulation (1918); Charakterologie (1925); Kultur der Gegenwart (1922); Ueberwindung des Expressionismus (1927); Mensch und Kultur (1933); Sendung der Philosophie in unserer Zeit (1935); "Erinnerungen an F. Brentano", in: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Universitaet Halle (4 no. 1, 1954); and Egon Erwin Kisch, der klassische Journalist (1956). As a young man Utitz published (c. 1904) a book of poems under the pseudonym Ernst Limé.

bibliography:

S. Ẓemaḥ, Al ha-Yafeh (1939), 242–64; Bergman, in: Hogim u-Ma'aminim (1959), 211–23.

[Samuel Hugo Bergman]