Volume 1, Issue 6: Otto Neurath's Educational Story in Pictures and Texts

Otto Neurath’s Educational Story in Pictures and Texts

Otto Neurath: From hieroglyphics to Isotype: a visual autobiography. Edited by Matthew Eve and Christopher Burke. Devizes: Perpensa Press, 2019, pp. xxxii + 191. Paperback ISBN 978-1-9160539-1-5. £25.00

Otto Neurath (1882-1945) is one of the strangest figures in the history of so-called analytic philosophy. For many decades, during his lifetime and even during the second half of the twentieth century, he was viewed as a clumsy propagandist, an ardent defender of Marxism and thus as a philosophically irrelevant social scientist, an organizer and perhaps as an educator. Philosophers, who thought that his papers lacked the basic philosophical skills – namely precise argumentation, sharp definitions and clear identification of problems – often described him in hostile terms. It might be not at all accidental or surprising that Neurath fell from the canon of analytic philosophy almost immediately after his death.

            Nonetheless, after the 1990s – due to the untiring efforts of scholars like Jordi Cat, Rudolf Haller, Elisabeth Nemeth, Friedrich Stadler, and Thomas Uebel – Neurath reemerged as a scientific philosopher worthy of its name. It turned out that Neurath indeed had sharp argumentations, often disguised in ideological costumes, his papers contained neat and sharp distinctions behind the veil of his aggressive tone, and finally, he identified all the relevant and substantive problems of his field, though he often missed the requirement of making references and telling his reader whom he is arguing with. Bringing all this (and much more) to the surface was a major philosophical achievement and Neurath is often considered now as one of the forerunners of post-positivistic philosophy of science, an internal critic of the movement.

            Be that as it may, Neurath was not a typical philosopher of the analytic style. Many of his theoretical commitments and ideas surfaced with more strength and sharpness in his practical work of organization, education and directorship. His museums from the 1920s and 1930s in Vienna (about housing, planning and economics) influenced many people across the globe from Moscow to Chicago, and his way of developing housing and town planning was also internationally recognized and utilized even during the 1940s in Great Britain.

            But museums and town planning was just one side of the coin. Neurath developed (with a team of specialists) a particular method to represent the required data and information in the museums and to integrate his town planning ideas into a bigger socio-economic narrative. This method was first called the “Vienna Method”, later it became known as ISOTYPE, that is, International System Of TYpograhical Education. Neurath wrote about the internationalization and significance of this method as follow:

People from many countries collaborated with our museums – its studio, its photographic laboratory, its exhibition workshop and printing department – and helped in some way or another to develop this new technique. This international prestige of our work led us to an adaptation of our visual elements to the demands of different countries and in this way the language-like Isotype technique became more and more cosmopolitan. It appeared that the majority of our symbols are more or less understandable in most countries; the peculiarities are relatively few – only, so far as we could judge, a few per cent. (p. 102)

Many books and articles have appeared especially in the last two decades about Neurath’s educational and pictorial works. In this field, Christopher Burke, Robin Kinross, Sue Walker, Matthew Eve, Angélique Groß and many others have made great progress.

            What is often considered in less detail is Neurath’s internal viewpoint. How did he conceive himself as a practical scholar? Where did he come from? Why pictures? What are pictures good for?

            Ten years ago, in 2010, Christopher Burke and Matthew Eve edited Neurath’s almost forgotten book-manuscript, From hieroglyphics to Isotype: a visual autobiography (FHI). Neurath was working on this manuscript during the last two years of his residence in England (1943-1945), but he never finished the whole book for immediate publication. His widow, Marie Neurath, and one of his good friends and collaborators, the filmmaker Paul Rotha, published some excerpts from the book after Neurath’s death in 1946, but that was all. Besides some cryptic references, the book manuscript was hidden in the ISOTYPE archive at the University of Reading.

Figure 1

            In general, FHI is indeed what the subtitle promises, namely a visual autobiography of Otto Neurath. It describes and shows all the major influences on Neurath’s visual thinking, or better, thinking about visual matters. We got to know what type of books Neurath read during his childhood in his father’s enormous library – to be more precise, their whole home was a huge library – where approximately 13,000 books were freely at Neurath’s disposal (p. 23). And the young Neurath made great use of them. Much of his early experiences about what amused, attracted and puzzled him are reported vividly. Perhaps one of the biggest values of the books is that most pictures that Neurath is discussing are reproduced in good quality (even if not the same pictures are noted, then something similar in type to get the general feeling).

            After the “early impressions” a more historically aimed summary is given in Chapter Four about pictorial representations through the centuries, while the last chapter is devoted to the “renaissance of hieroglyphics”, namely to the birth and development of Neurath’s own ISOTYPE system.

            But one might justifiably raise the question that why should we care at all about Otto Neurath’s own experiences, judgments of taste regarding pictures? Neurath was perhaps aware of this problem as he noted in the book, “I only hope by describing my own visual career, with all its desires, to suggest research on the question of how visual consciousness grows up in various periods and in various countries” (p. 79). So, first of all, there is a question about the history of ideas and science, namely how visual learning and understanding has developed during the last centuries, especially in the twentieth century. For this story, Neurath occupied a distinguished position as one of the catalyzers of pictorial mass education. And the book provides some nice examples of where could one look for the historical and systematic roots of ISOTYPE constructions. At one point, Neurath brings up the idea of how one can combine simple symbols into complex ones: “I never forget the peculiar impression I got from the possibility to combine symbols as one may combine the letters of a monogram into a dovetailed unit [...]. Within out Isotype framework we have used combined symbols wholly in harmony with this tradition in children’s games” (p. 89). And indeed, the often cited-examples of “coal + worker = coal-worker” and “shoe + works = shoe-works” are nice examples of symbol-combinations in Isotype (see Figure 1).
            Or to take another example, there is a nice parallel how Oliver Byrne illustrated Euclid’s geometry in 1847, incorporating symbols and pictures into the argumentation of the text, and how the ISOTYPE team developed their own “picture-text” style, a method where pictures played an integral role in the inferential structure of the book (see Figure 2).

So much for the history of ideas in general, and of ISOTYPE in particular. But why should we care about the history and sources of ISOTYPE? Neurath claimed that ISOTYPE was “something designed for mankind as a whole, enabling everyone to take part in argument by means of a common visual basis of information” (p. 126). That is, ISOTYPE had a clear-cut socio-political mission (taken in a broad sense) and the beginnings of Neurath’s method was determined by this idea of internationalizing and humanizing knowledge through the education of masses. As active political and social engagement reaches younger and younger generations recently, taking into account some alternative experienced ways of empowerment and enlightenment might be expedient and reviving.

            But there is another interesting issue that surfaces on almost every page and in every example of the book, namely the somewhat ambiguous and subjective distinction between artistic/entertaining and educational pictures. When Neurath described his own experiences about pictures at home, at school and on the street, he often ended up by praising one as a good educational picture or criticizing the other as purely artistic, aiming only for entertainment. While it might be a further issue to consider the role and place of purely entertaining visual issues, and it might another further thing to judge Neurath’s own examples and his judgments, it is still very interesting how he depicts his examples and how he evaluates the information they contained for children and young adults. What is even more interesting is that he provides another clue for the history of ISOTYPE, namely at one point he claims that they designed exhibitions, museums, pamphlets and all the charts with a specific idea in mind. 

The subject of the exhibition should be serious but it should be combined with a charm and direct appeal to everybody. As many people should be persuaded to visit it as would go to some public show of purely entertainment value. Education has to compete with entertainment – that is what we think is needed in our period. It would be dangerous if education were to become a purely occupational matter and something boring in itself. (p. 113)

Thus Neurath’s method was to unify or synthetize the values and merits of entertainment and education. Neurath has learned the lesson through his childhood and self-education that neither direction of reduction to pure entertainment or pure education would suffice in the “century of the eye”.

            What makes the whole book and its approach even more curious to the 2019 reader is the very upshot and background of the project:

Figure 2

Today an ever-changing visual stream flows before our eyes: never before has all that we see around us altered so completely from day to day. We shut our front door in the morning, posters shout at us from wall and tube station. [...] Today more and more new, sensational stories first reach the masses through the medium of cinema and the films that tell stories have but a short life. It is indeed rare to see the same film several years later. Even if the same story is told it is recounted in an entirely new version, ornamented by the latest ‘stars’. [...]. How rightly can our period be called the century of the eye. (p. 3)

If the above description was valid for the 1940s London and Oxford where Neurath lived, then what could one say about 2019? With an even more fluxing and changing network of films, pictures, internet and daily-developed innovations, Neurath’s book could perhaps provide an occasion to slow down a bit to see in more detail and with a special personal guidance the beginnings of the information-age.

            I shall note also that the book contains countless minor points that could be attracted to many and various readers. Besides the reproduced pictures (both entertaining and educating), Neurath provides a vivid sociological description of Vienna’s famous coffeehouse life (pp. 60-63). Though much has been written about the issue, Neurath’s first-person experiences might give it a new twist, and also some background to the history and philosophy of Viennese logical positivism, which developed exactly in those coffeehouses that Neurath depicts.

            We got also some nice but implicit suggestions and remarks about child rearing. Neurath noted that his appetite for books and pictures “was strengthened by the arrangement of the library.” That is, “the large books, many of which contained pictures and maps, mainly filled the extremely spacious bottom shelves, either standing or lying, and therefore were directly accessible to me, before I learnt to use the library steps properly. I could take the books and atlases out of the shelves onto the floor and than lie down and look at the pictures” (p. 26). Picture-text books thus have a nice advantage in attracting children both as entertainment and as implicit information-conveyers.

            As a matter of fact, Neurath’s ISOTYPE method was brought into Viennese schools for gaining some feedback and more information to develop the pictorial education method. Since students’ reactions were “overwhelmingly positive” (p. 116 and next pages), Neurath and his team went back to schools repeatedly; after Otto’s death, his third wife and partner, Marie Neurath continued Otto’s Isotype Institute in Oxford and London, and published many children books with ISOTYPE pictures (see Sue Walker 2013, “Graphic explanation for children, 1944-71,” in Ch. Burke, E. Kindel and S. Walker (eds.), Isotype: design and contexts, 1925-1971, Hyphen Press, London, 390-437). Furthermore, entertaining/educational picture books might be of great value for recent trends in attachment parenting as well (see figure 3 below).

Figure 3

FHI begins with a really useful introduction about ISOTYPE and the history of Neurath’s book; one can learn a lot about ISOTYPE and England’s intellectual scene of the 1940s. The last part of the book, “Otto Neurath as a Collector” is a sixty pages long collection of Neurath’s rare pictures, drawings, maps, posters and so on. As most of the pictures are reprinted in color, this part is invaluable for anyone interested in the history of pictures and the intellectual design of collections.

            The book ends with a useful index of names and subjects. In general, the cover, the layout, the fonts, and the arrangement of picture-texts are structured and designed beautifully, helping the reader to get through the book in a structured and meaningful way. The editors did a great job, and it should be welcomed that the new generation of readers has a chance to get in their hands a new edition of this rare and unique book.

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences 

Supported by the MTA BTK Lendület Morals and Science Research Group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship.