Volume 2, Issue 2: From Vienna to Oxford: Bringing Waismann Home

From Vienna to Oxford: Bringing Waismann Home

Dejan Makovec and Stewart Shapiro, eds. Friedrich Waismann: The Open Texture of Analytic Philosophy, Cham: Palgrave MacMillan Press, 2019. xix + 343 pages. €106,99 Hardcover. ISBN 978-3-030-25007-2

The Vienna Circle, as it is well known, was formed by German-speaking scholars, most of whom were scientists-turned-philosophers. Among these figures, we find those who played a central role in leading and organizing the Circle and who in time gained a wide-ranging international reputation, such as Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Herbert Feigl or Philipp Frank. There are also those who influenced other members, attended most of the meetings, were recognized in their respected fields but did not enter the mainstream of the history of analytic philosophy. One might think of Karl Menger, Hans Hahn, Viktor Kraft, Felix Kaufmann, or Edgar Zilsel.

            And there is Friedrich Waismann. As a doctoral student of Schlick, he suggested – with Feigl – to his supervisor that he should organize a circle for the discussion about contemporary philosophical and scientific issues (the circle was also meant to be connected to the second edition of Schlick’s Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre that was on its way to the press). The idea did not come out of the blue; as a matter of fact, discussion groups mushroomed in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, and it is known that Hans Hahn had made significant efforts to bring Schlick to Vienna (perhaps to continue his own previous discussion groups he had with philosophers and mathematicians at the beginning of the century). Thus we may claim with relative safety that something similar to the Vienna Circle would have been born even without Waismann’s efforts. (In fact, Edgar Zilsel and Heinrich Gomperz organized their own circles, that had largely the same members as Schlick’s famous discussion group.) Nonetheless, without Waismann’s suggestion and his later organizational and motivational role, the historical Circle (as we know it) would have been either unborn or would have had an entirely different design. After Schlick’s death in 1936 (and even in the previous years), Waismann took the leading role in maintaining the continuity of the discussion groups; with more or less success, he was able to gather students and researchers (mainly psychologists) who were interested in the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

            But what do we know about Waismann? Here are some widely shared beliefs about his person and role: (1) Waismann was writing various editions and formats of a book that tried to capture Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in a popular, systematic, and understandable fashion; later he tried to incorporate Wittgenstein’s newest insights from the early 1930s. (2) Waismann was a clear-cut follower and supporter of (the early and the mature) Wittgenstein. (3) After Vienna, Waismann went to England, first to Cambridge, then to Oxford, and pursued a special version of ordinary language philosophy. (4) As Waismann was at pains to acclimatize himself to the British scene and culture, he wasn’t really productive (though he published some longer and well-received papers) and wasn’t really able to stay in the mainstream history of analytic philosophy.

            Dejan Makovec and Stewart Shapiro’s recently edited volume on Friedrich Waismann: The Open Texture of Analytic Philosophy – published in Palgrave’s “History of Analytic Philosophy” series – sheds some new light upon the above beliefs about Waismann’s role in the history of analytic philosophy. Firstly I will just glance over the chapters of the volume to see the large amount of topics and perspectives that are discussed in the book; after that, I will present some general considerations to approach my conclusions.

            Part I of the volume, entitled “Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle” presents a very natural starting point to discuss Waismann. Whatever we think about Waismann’s own role and novel ideas, his philosophy was shaped from the beginning by logical positivism. Whether this influence consisted in admiration or extended criticism is a different question (as most of the chapters show, in Waismann’s case it is more of the latter); but for many years, Waismann’s thinking, his perception of the problem-horizon and his conceptual toolkit were determined by the Circle. Nonetheless, only Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau’s paper seems to be a fine-grained analysis of Waismann’s relation to the Circle. This chapter is indeed a detailed discussion of Waismann’s role in the Circle, and of how he debated fellow-members (mostly Carnap) from Wittgenstein’s point of view. 

            The remaining papers in this part are, however, more focused on Waismann’s thinking (Limbeck-Lilienau provides a more general and comprehensive development-story). We have a paper about Waismann’s less known ethics and his related philosophy of action (by Constantine Sandis), one about Waismann’s philosophy of mathematics (by Severin Schroeder and Harry Tomany); another on Waismann’s epistemology and theory of knowledge (Annalisa Coliva), and one about Waismann’s relation to Wittgenstein (Katherine J. Morris). 

            The second part of the volume focuses on Waismann’s (meta)philosophy and philosophy of language. Three papers discuss Waismann’s forgotten but enormous inquiry into the nature and role of analyticity (by Gregory Lavers; Gillian Russell; Stewart Shapiro and Craige Roberts), while the fourth paper widens the scope by including psychoanalysis as a justifying case story for Waismann’s approach to linguistic philosophy.

            Finally, the third part is developed around three notions: “Law, Action, Fiction”. This is the most disintegrated section of the volume, with papers ranging from legal philosophy (Brian H. Bix; Frederick Schauer), philosophy of action (Ulrike Heuer) and philosophy of fictional characters and discourse (Graham Priest) to literary criticism and philosophy of life encapsulated in literary activities (Géza Kállay and Katalin G. Kállay).

            As it can perhaps be already seen from merely enlisting the chapters, Waismann had some very typical interests among logical positivists (of mathematics language and epistemology), nonetheless, his philosophical discussions included some curious elements as well (of actions and fictions). From this perspective, Waismann’s oeuvre might be seen as an explicit extension of logical positivism to more traditional issues of philosophy. One might counter suggest here that while Carnap, Reichenbach, and others had such a vision of philosophy that restricted the acceptable forms of investigations (usually they reduced it to some form of logical analysis), they had also extended the admissible forms to other fields (to ethics, metaphysics, religion, or history). This line of reasoning became evident in the works of A. Carus (2007) and Ch. Damböck (2017) who have shown in increasingly more comprehensive narratives that Carnap’s work (both early and mature) was not just embedded in a specific socio-cultural context that influenced his thinking, but his thinking had also had applications outside the field of theoretical science. Nonetheless, this extension might be even more obvious in the case of Waismann, and the Makovec-Shapiro volume accurately testifies just how wide-ranging Waismann’s philosophical concern truly was.

            Nevertheless, many chapters exemplify a strange orientation in this context. Waismann is not discussed on his own and for his merits but often in contrast to those of Wittgenstein. This might be understandable, of course, given the overwhelming character and personality of Wittgenstein in the history of analytic philosophy. It might be understandable also from Waismann’s point of view; that is, he took many of his themes, notions, and philosophical issues from his conversations with Wittgenstein. Waismann was indeed a spokesman for Wittgenstein in Vienna, and he carried Wittgenstein’s torch for a while in Oxford as well, even if somewhat more implicitly and in an indirect fashion. (It might be understandable also from a marketing point of view; Wittgenstein is not just the main hero of many historians, but also the misunderstood genius, while Waismann was officially always one step behind him.) It is still hard to escape the impression that Wittgenstein’s presence in many chapters is simply crushing. There are well-informed chapters, of course, where the Wittgenstein-contrast is very instructive and brings out important differentiations even from the contemporary scene of analytic philosophy. (I’m talking especially about the paper of Morris, who contrasts not just Waismann and Wittgenstein, but also relates the discussion to the debate between Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker’s discussion of each other’s work and their interpretations of Waismann and Wittgenstein.)

            One might get the feeling that Waismann is often criticized from a Wittgensteinian point of view; that is, he is criticized for not holding Wittgenstein’s view. The question is whether that is the only support behind such criticism, or have Waismann’s views been also inherently and immanently problematic and/or incorrect. But to overcome that feeling, we are given many clues here and there about what might back up the critics of Waismann. Two longer quotations from Coliva’s enlightening paper could make this explicit:

Waismann’s discussion of “believing-in” (in the sense of trusting someone/something) is more detailed than Wittgenstein’s in the Philosophical Investigations. However, while Wittgenstein puts it to philosophical use, especially in On Certainty, to characterize the kind of attitude we bear to some “hinges”, Waismann confines himself to noticing this particular use of “believing”, without applying it to interestingly new cases, or without using it to tackle substantive philosophical issues. (p. 101)

Again, Wittgenstein’s elaboration may be challenged. Yet, it is philosophically rich. Waismann, in contrast, contents himself with some sketchy remarks on the linguistic impropriety of certain linguistic constructions and, even if he notices that they may invite introspection, he does not elaborate the point any further. (p. 103)

The problem is not the lack of the systematic character of his investigations; Wittgenstein was famously against systematic explorations, while Waismann was known for many as the guy who aimed to provide a systematic exposition of Wittgenstein’s regularly impressionistic conceptions. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein put his impression into “philosophical use”, though often this usage ended up in dissolving philosophical problems. Even if Waismann had similar aspirations, many of his papers and insights were not put into the service of revolutionary solutions and did not become philosophical puzzles for us to dwell on in the future. “Yet, no doubt,” concludes Coliva, “reading Waismann could teach contemporary epistemologists a lot, as it would give them a lot of food for thought, to be developed in a philosophically rich and unorthodox way” (p. 105).

            There are important exceptions, of course; cases where Waismann was truly innovative, independently of, or especially in a critical tone towards Wittgenstein. The major example is reflected in the volume’s title, “open texture”. The notion of open texture is connected to the ambiguities of language, although it is not identical to “vagueness”; in fact, it reflects a much more crucial issue of language. “Open texture” is close to “indeterminateness” – given a concept C and an object o, if neither the linguistic rules and usages nor the extra-linguistic facts determine that either Co or non-Co holds, then C has an open texture. A simple example might be to suppose that a given object is identified by me as a cat on the mat by its external characteristics (look, voice, smell etc.), but when I go outside again, the object previously identified as a cat has grown to a gigantic size (Waismann’s example, quoted on p. 190). Was that never a cat, or has the cat taken up new qualities, or has the cat been transformed into something else? There are many possibilities, not determined uniquely by established usages. Waismann’s notions are much more detailed, of course, and at least three chapters are devoted to their discussion, mainly in the context of analyticity (Shapiro and Roberts) and legal philosophy (Bix; Schauer). (It might also be interesting to see how inferential roles relate to the idea of open texture: in the case of the first, mastering a given notion means being able and entitled to make certain inferences involving the given notions; the object that grows to a gigantic size in no time does not make you entitled to draw the inference about cats.)

            But there are further ideas, like language-strata, how philosophical problems emerge in this picture of philosophy and language, and how the logic that ties together the notions of given language-strata differ in different strata of the language. All of these are brand new ideas in the context of logical empiricism (though Carnap’s levels/spheres of the constitution might come to our mind, if not as a source, then as an approach to contrast), and are novel also in the Oxford-scene.

            Leaving behind the above-discussed Wittgenstein, another related and somewhat problematic issue is that Waismann was not contrasted to his own context at Oxford (the only exception is Bix’s paper on Hart and Waismann). Oxford philosophy could have provided a very fruitful ground for further discussions; it was filled with people related to logical positivism in various ways. Though Ayer went to London after World War Two, his impact on Oxford was still visible (not to mention that Waismann and Ayer had shared a few months together in Oxford before Ayer was enlisted for army services). It would have been important to contrast how logical positivism was seen in Oxford after Ayer’s overwhelming influence on the scene, and whether Waismann was able to remedy that impression with further nuances. And there was also Otto Neurath, who entered Oxford as a lecturer in early 1941, and lived in the city for four more years. While it is known from Neurath’s correspondence that they did not often meet personally (and perhaps they were not that sympathetic to each other, partially on philosophical grounds), again it might have been interesting to see whether they could have strengthened or weakened each others’ presence in the Oxford scene.

            Even if one might consider the suggestion of these contrasted parallels too far-fetched, some detailed investigations into the philosophical relations between Waismann and Isaiah Berlin, R.M. Hare, Stuart Hampshire, H.H. Price, Gilbert Ryle, and J.L. Austin would have been much welcome. Though one might find occasional references to such things in the chapters, the only substantive discussion occurs in Makovec’s editorial introduction (pp. 7-14). In fact, Makovec’s introduction helps a lot to situate Waismann in his original context and to see at which points did he engage with and improve Oxfordian philosophy. 

            It is known that Waismann had to face numerous personal tragedies and crises (both his wife and son committed suicide in England), but he was unhappy in his professional life as well. Otto Neurath has written to Rudolf Carnap that “I do not think that Waismann is very happy in all his intellectual relations. The break [up] with Wittgenstein – [a] disaster for him. The main ideas remain and therefore he seems to be relatively isolated. Sad experience, as he told me, with Braithwaite” (in Cat and Tuboly 2019, 603). This quotation points toward two considerations: first, even among his close colleagues, Waismann was mainly known and appreciated as a Wittgenstein-related figure (unfortunately, the reader has to make some extra effort to overcome this simplification after reading the volume); and second, that Waismann was isolated exactly because of this troublesome Wittgenstein-relation. As Makovec shows in his introduction, Waismann was way more than a simple Wittgenstein-initiator in Oxford; this means that the “isolation in intellectual relations because of Wittgenstein” narrative needs to be amplified by further historical and philosophical investigations.

            A nice contrast with Neurath might emerge here as well. In fact, while Neurath was known mainly as the sociologist of happiness, an educator of pictorial representations, Waismann knew much more about the contemporary scene of philosophy. Neurath had a broader interdisciplinary background, he was engaged with sociologists (like Karl Mannheim) and anthropologists (like A. R. Radcliff-Brown), furthermore, his philosophical background had its roots in such continental European figures as Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scientific philosophers, mainly Karl Pearson and C.D. Broad had a major impact on British thought (though the latter was a well-known advocate of ethical issues and had left behind scientific philosophy quite early), thus Neurath’s philosophical education had perhaps emerged as a form of some old-fashioned tradition, especially if it was contrasted with Waismann’s oeuvre that had many more explicit relations to Wittgenstein and to the contemporary scene. Be as it may, a story needs to be told about this.

            Another problem to be noted is that one has the feeling that many of the renowned authors have just read a few papers of Waismann, contrasted them with Wittgenstein, and referred to their own works on Wittgenstein and the given subject matter. Thus Waismann was somehow lost in between. Impressions might be misleading, of course, but if the recent histories of analytic philosophy have shown us anything at all, then they seem to point to the fact that a more fine-grained, contextual and colorful engagement is needed to understand a given figure and era than simply stating the arguments and stakes and pointing out the deficiencies in one’s thinking. (In fact, Waismann, as the historical figure who had original thoughts in his given field and who might have contemporary philosophical relevance surfaces mainly in Part II). Nonetheless, one has to take notice here of the efforts of the editors; namely, whatever one thinks about the chosen approach of the volume, important names of their fields have accepted the invitation to consider and reconsider Waismann’s thoughts. Whatever personal bias we might have (i.e. more or less Wittgenstein would have been helpful, more or less history would have been required), the editors and contributors deserve all our respect and appreciation for putting Waismann back on the map.

            It is hard to do justice to a scholar like Waismann: neglected for decades,  in his entire life in fact, known mainly for the wrong reasons, but still contributing many debatable but refreshing and enlightening thoughts on a wide scale of subjects, ranging from language and metaphilosophy to fictive characters, law and literary theory. The Open Texture of Analytic Philosophy, with its nicely constructed title, is a significant step towards the rehabilitation of Waismann. Makovec and Shapiro have done a great job to enhance our understanding Waismann; whatever defects this review critically emphasized might be rooted in the peculiar figure of Waismann and in his contested roles in the history of analytic philosophy. Perhaps this volume will beat a path towards a more consensual standpoint. Although not just analytic philosophy, but also the history of analytic philosophy has an open texture, the promise of settling down on problematic issues with a consensual convention is still hopefully emerging.

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Supported by the MTA Lendulet Morals and Science Research group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship.

References

Carus, André, 2007. Carnap in Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cat, Jordi, and Adam Tamas Tuboly, (eds) 2019. Neurath Reconsidered: New Sources and Perspectives. Cham: Springer.

Damböck, Christian, 2017. Deutscher Empirismus. Studien zur Philosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum 1830-1930. Dordrecht: Springer.