Volume 3, Issue 2: Manifesto for a Future Research – Vienna Circle and the Artistic World-Conception

 Manifesto for a Future Research: Vienna Circle and the Artistic World-Conception

 

Ulrich Arnswald, Friedrich Stadler, and Peter Weibel (eds.), Der Wiener Kreis – Aktualität in Wissenschaft, Literatur, Architektur und Kunst. Wien: LIT Verlag, 2019, pp. 298. Paperback ISBN 978-3-643-50937-6, 34,90 €.

 

If logical empiricism is known for something, then it is their work on the logico-epistemological side of the natural sciences, including formal logic and mathematics. On has to be more precise, of course, as logical empiricists, in general, did not care much about most of the natural sciences; core members of the movement – such as Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, and Frank – studied physics, thus theoretical physics played the most important role among the natural sciences. When it turned out that quantum mechanics might have some importance for the interpretation and understanding of biology and life sciences, then some logical empiricists turned their attention toward them as well (most notably at the 1936 congress on unified science in Copenhagen). But mainly that’s it.

            That is a well-known story. If logical empiricism is entirely unknown for something among the general public, then is their importance and relations to literature, arts, and architecture. While scholars of logical empiricism had noted these curious and unexpected relationships sometime before, they are still able to provoke incredulous stares. Recently Ulrich Arnswald, Friedrich Stadler, and Peter Weibel made important efforts to change this situation and posed well-informed arguments and essays to show that logical empiricism is not just apt for broader cultural understandings, but it is also an immanent requirement for a comprehensive interpretation of the movement. Their jointly edited book, Der Wiener Kreis – Aktualität in Wissenschaft, Literatur, Architektur und Kunst (The Vienna Circle – Actuality in Science, Literature, Architecture, and Arts) contains twelve original German essays and one republished article that shall set the whole engine to work. 

            That the Vienna Circle had scientific relevance is (and was) beyond question – whether the relevance and influence shall be taken in positive or negative terms was another issue. The volume is not structured (chapters are not numbered), thus to the reader who has a specific interest, it is not at all obvious at the first sight where to look for a specific topic. But presumably, there are five chapters about the scientific actuality of the Circle. The book’s beginning essay by Ulrich Arnswald discusses the relation between thought experiments and utopias from Mach to the Circle (mainly through the lineage of Popper-Lynkeus, Neurath, and Karl Popper) and draws different conceptualizations and evaluations of utopias within science and social reality. Martin Lemke’s chapter is about Moritz Schlick and his conceptions of laws, be they logical, mathematical, natural, or socio-political. As the chapter discusses mainly Schlick’s posthumously published “Natur und Kultur” (“Nature and Culture”), one might reasonably expect that the chapter shall contribute to the socio-political sciences. Johan F. Hartle’s paper touches upon Otto Neurath’s ideas on technology and society, with a special focus on socialization – another chapter on the social sciences.

            Volker Peckhaus and Karl Sigmund focus on logic and mathematics, respectively. The first one is a well-written summary about the main logical influences on the Circle, though it discusses foremost the triad of Frege-Russell-Wittgenstein (without many new issues). The main strength of the chapter is the section devoted to Heinrich Scholz, the Münster-based historian of logic who was quite close to Carnap and others. But the reader would be in a better position if more would have been written about how the Circle influenced the history of logic and trends within it (or at least one were informed about the various debates of how e.g. Carnap, Waismann, and Hahn debated the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s logic and Russell’s Principia Mathematica). Sigmund’s chapter is, as usual, a very informative piece, focusing on the mathematical-trio of the Circle, namely Hahn, and his students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. The paper has a very strong biographical flavor, detracting the reader from the mathematical legacy of the Circle; unfortunately, we also do not get many ideas about how members of the Circle integrated the newest mathematical (and philosophical) results into their debates on the foundations of mathematics. I am quite certain that most readers have already heard about the famous debate on the foundations of mathematics, while less reader knows much about what has happened to the individual positions (formalism, logicism, intuitionism) in the 1940s and whether any of these philosophical positions had any resonance among practicing mathematicians.

            The fifth paper that is concerned with the sciences comes only one hundred pages later. Hans Lenk is discussing interdisciplinarity and metatheoretical methods and theses of the Circle within rather contemporary discussions. In fact, the chapter is a really nice addition given its intentions: logical empiricism was always viewed by many as a methodical enterprise having a meta-level influence on many scientists, thus it would be indeed nice to have more similar chapters about the scientific actuality and historical influences of the Circle. (For example, it would be nice to read more about why Popper got to be the hero of many natural scientists, and not Carnap or Reichenbach, given that it would be a highly unbelievable hypothesis that most natural scientists would have read all the internal criticisms of the verification-idea and thus they settled with naive falsification.)

            Literature got one major chapter by Stefan Scherer. It is a really helpful survey, focusing on Musil, Broch, Brunngraber, and Bachmann (who is a recurring figure in the volume). Though only a few words are devoted to internal relations of the Circle, we got a few nice examples of actual influences of logical empiricists on literary figures like Musil, and Brunngaber’s Karl und das zwanzigste Jahrhundert, which uses Neurath-like statistical information frequently. 

            Explicitly and in a focused manner, only Georg Vrachliotis and Lukas Bessai present architecture in their five pages long (or short) essay, which is a very general survey of Carnap’s presentation in the Aufbau and Neurath’s personal relations to the CIAM. The topic is well-known, of course, due to Peter Galison’s famous essay on ‘Aufbau and Bauhaus’, and the paper does not bring up new perspectives. To make things worse, they refer to (and quote from) the famous (63 pages long) 1929 manifesto as “Carnap’s Habilitation Study” (with the page number of 314). Though this might not be a big deal in general, it could have been spotted by someone easily. While architecture comes up from time to time as an example, there isn’t any more focused discussion of it in the volume.

            The arts seem to get the most detailed attention, especially if we include here aesthetics in general as well. Already the second chapter, by Romana K. Schuler, describes in an enlightening fashion the relation between Mach’s scientific experiments and experimental/avant-garde arts. The author shows convincingly how “visionary” approaches towards both the sciences and the arts might get these activities closer to each other. While Mach is both a helpful and apt choice for this (it is indeed very nicely illustrated by various photos, paintings, and Mach’s original pictures), it would at least doubtful whether Mach could be included in a discussion that shall set straight the Vienna Circle’s actuality. True that Mach was one of the intellectual founders of the movement in the eyes of the so-called left-wing of the Circle, but it is at least questionable whether Mach as someone having artistic relevance was ever discussed in the Circle.

            One could include here Jochen Hörisch’s six pages long “sketch” of key points about how to relate logical empiricism and the media. Peter Weibel provides another survey-like chapter that helps the reader to see where are those joints that could serve as starting points for further research. Weibel focuses mainly on Mach (as did before other chapters as well), but some Wittgenstein and the aforementioned Ingeborg Bachmann also get a few passages. 

            The best chapter of the volume belongs also to the “arts-group”, namely Károly Kókai’s “Ästhetik und Logischer Empirismus” (“Aesthetics and Logical Empiricism”). Kókai’s piece is mainly an explorative paper, but that is what makes it so interesting and novel among all the other chapters. He does not claim at the beginning that there is an explicit and fruitful relation between arts/architecture/literature and the Vienna Circle to go on and provides some (generally illuminative, but often highly indirect) examples of distant relations but asks important questions. These include what is aesthetics, how could it be related at all to the Circle, who has ever written on the topic within and around the Vienna Circle, whether the available pieces of evidence and texts suffice for any substantial treatment, and so on. He discusses Charles Morris, Richard von Mises, Franz Roh, Carnap, and other figures as well. One of Kókai’s main points is that aesthetics was not on the table, after all, of the Vienna Circle in any substantial manner. Aesthetics has a certain contextual relevance: “Why is the question of the aesthetics of logical empiricism or the Vienna Circle important?” asks Kókai, and answers immediately that to provide a faithful picture of what the Circle was, “the context in which it was created, in which it existed, with which it struggled, which makes its questions and answers understandable, has to be reconstructed” (p. 210). And that context, with all the details, visible and lively forces includes the arts and the aesthetical dimension as well. Kókai’s paper is a highly informative, novel, and well-balanced paper that indeed shows the relevance of the arts and aesthetics for the understanding of logical empiricism, though it does not say much about its actuality.

            The book is closed with an unaltered (though newly introduced and contextualized) publication of Friedrich Stadler’s influential 1995 text on the scientific world-conception and the arts. He discusses value-theory and morality (Carnap, Schlick, Kaufmann, Menger), art and theory (the manifesto), architecture (Bauhaus, Josef Frank, and Neurath), and Neurath’s picture education. Stadler has paid much attention to the philosophical background and parts of these issues, and he did more satisfyingly than Kókai. Thus, if one would like to reach a comprehensive overview of the Vienna Circle’s relation to arts and architecture, then one shall read both Stadler and Kókai. The most surprising aspect of Stadler’s paper is when he talks about logical empiricism and the arts as a “future research area” (p. 281 ff.) – seemingly researchers of the Vienna Circle and art historians did not live up to the challenge since 1995 as no comprehensive account of these questions exists. Often philosophers lack the expected training in art history, or art historians did not spend too much time to understand the nuances of the Vienna Circle. While the present volume will not change the world, it is a good initiative to start things afresh.

            Despite the topical relevance of the volume, and even despite its highly original and novel perspective on the Vienna Circle, it still cannot fulfill all the promises. (Many would wonder why there is nothing about A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic and the stir it caused within poetry, with the various volumes entitled “Language, Truth, and Poetry” (by Victor Hamm 1960, and by Graham D. Martin 1975, or more about Neurath’s art-historical exhibitions in the Netherlands). The book is highly uneven in many respects (especially regarding, the depths and range of the papers, but it also lacks a general editorial consistency on formal matters), but if you are just about to get acquainted with the newest literature on the revision of logical empiricism, it is a must-have at home to have a first glance on what happens when Rudolf Carnap the logician enters the Dessau Bauhaus. Spoiler alert: the Vienna Circle get close to its best, most lively period when the inner link between the scientific world-conception and the modernist movements within literature, arts, and architecture became not just obvious, but even visible. 

 

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, ELRN

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