Enlightenment and the Spirit of the Vienna Circle

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Enlightenment and the Spirit of the Vienna CircleAuthor(s): Stephen ScottSource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 695-709Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40231563 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 695 Volume 17, Number 4, December 1987, pp. 695-710

Enlightenment and the Spirit of the Vienna Circle1

STEPHEN SCOTT Eastern Washington University Cheney, WA 99004 U.S.A.

I have two aims in this paper. My wide one is to discuss what it is for philosophy to enlighten. I am using the same concept of enlightenment that Kant wrote about: It is what brings a rational outlook to social and political life, in opposition to superstition, self-deception and other forms of immaturity.2 If philosophy is to do this, it is not suffi- cient for it to have a rational theory about society, nor is having such a theory even necessary, since philosophers can try to make a community more reasonable without formulating a social philosophy. The Vienna Circle is an example. The point of enlightenment is to change society rather than to develop research programs. The difference is between involvement with real life on the one hand and an idle theory on the other.

My narrow aim is to display the self-image of the Vienna Circle as philosophers of enlightenment. They agreed that the important task of any philosophical school was to enlighten and that positivism did so because it expressed the scientific spirit. This is the second concept I discuss. I will show that what they meant by 'the scientific spirit' was a moral outlook present in socialism and hostile to fascism. This is not what people usually understand by it. I am also not giving the received historical view of the Circle. Rather the English and American idea is

1 I gave a version of this paper as the Presidential Address to the Northwest Con- ference on Philosophy (November, 1985). The title then was 'Philosophy and Fascism/

2 Immanuel Kant, 'An Answer to the Question: //What is Enlightenment?"/ in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant's Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1971), 54



696 Stephen Scott

that positivism was entirely an academic movement. The social con- cerns of its advocates were incidental to its philosophical significance. The Frankfurt School's view is that it had a hidden alliance with technology. My purpose is to counter both these misinterpretations.

So, my two topics are philosophy as enlightenment and the Vienna Circle's understanding of the scientific spirit, the latter being an instance of the former. It will become obvious that I also have a further reason for connecting them. Any discussion of enlightenment requires both conceptual analysis and the history of philosophy. We must locate the Circle within the milieu of European politics in order to see the importance they saw in the scientific outlook. It is also a social fact that other European philosophies, which did not have the same spirit, found it possible to coexist with fascism. This must bear on their claim to offer moral clarity. We cannot understand enlightenment if we see philosophy as essentially self-contained and only accidentally connected with civilization and politics. We must see its relation to the social setting in which it is done- a matter that requires historical case studies.

I do not argue in this paper that philosophy should enlighten. It is true that our society is not and should be rational; but I do not know an argument to show that, in the present division of labor, the task of making it so belongs to philosophy; and it requires too much Platonism to say that philosophy itself has a nature that requires certain projects of it. All the same, I prefer the Circle's outlook to the scholasticism of our times.

Feigl wrote in his memoir, Tositivism attempted to retain from traditional philosophies the spirit of enlightenment and clarification.' Car- nap, Neurath and Schlick made similar remarks. Popper also, when praising the Circle, said that he felt very much at one with their 'attitude of enlightenment.'3 Their attitude was the scientific spirit. Three features they gave to it explained what it was and why it was important: the scientific spirit is rational, cooperative and modern.4

3 Herbert Feigl, "The Wiener Kreis in America/ in Robert S. Cohen, ed., Inquiries and Provocations: Selected Writings 1929-74 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Com- pany 1981), 75. See also, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn, 'Wis- senschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis/ in Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen, eds., Empiricism and Sociology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Com- pany 1973), 301; Moritz Schlick, The Vienna School and Traditional Philosophy,' Philosophical Papers, Volume III: 1925-1936 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Com- pany 1979), 496-7; and Karl Popper, 'Autobiography/ in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Vol. I (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1974), 70.

4 On rationality, see among many other places Hans Reichenbach, 'Aims and



Enlightenment and the Spirit of the Vienna Circle 697

Both Schlick and Feigl said that the intuitive concept of a rational person is of one willing to play the Socratic game -to take seriously 'What do you mean?' and 'How do you know?'5 The explication is that a rational answer to 'How do you know?' shows that a disputed sentence is analytic or verified. I will return later not to the explication but to the felt continuity with Socrates.

Cooperation is an ideal relation among scientific investigators. Each does some partial task that furthers a group project, and, in his will- ingness to submit his own ideas to appraisal by the group, each is toler- ant and non-competitive.6 Cooperation is a value inherent in scientific activity rather than in scientific theories. Most positivists thought that the latter are morally neutral, but they did not imply that every aspect of science is neutral. The scientific spirit includes the moral values of committed activity.

I can explain 'modern' by listing the movements the Circle so classi- fied. It was self-characterization first of all, just as metaphysics was reactionary. The other modern movements were relativity theory in physics, Bauhaus architecture, Freud's psychoanalysis, and socialism.7

Methods of Modern Philosophy of Nature/ in Maria Reichenbach and Robert S. Cohen, eds., Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1909-1953 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publish-

ing Company 1978), 383. On cooperation, see Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseu-

doproblems in Philosophy, trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-

sity of California Press 1967), xvi-xvii; also, Carnap, Hahn and Neurath in Neurath, 306; also Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley and Los An-

geles: University of California Press 1962), 117-19. On modernity, see Carnap, xviii; Carnap, Hahn and Neurath in Neurath, 317;

Reichenbach, Scientific Philosophy, vii.

5 Feigl, 409: 'As I see it, we are living in a new age of enlightenment in which we ask persistently, and we hope with good results, two major questions: "What do you mean?" and "How do you know?"' Schlick, 11.369: 'When we look for the most typical example of a philosophic mind we must direct our eyes towards Socrates. All the efforts of his acute mind and his fervent heart were devoted to the pursuit of meaning.'

6 Carnap, xvi

7 For relativity theory, see Feigl, 2; also, Reichenbach, Selected Writings, 1.2.

Feigl, 62-3, describes his mission to the Bauhaus. I assume that Carnap refers to the Bauhaus when he writes (xviii) that the attitude of positivism is present 'in artistic movements, especially in architecture.'

About psychoanalysis, Sidney Hook CMemories of Hans Reichenbach, 1928 and

Later,' in Reichenbach, Selected Writings, 1.34) notes that Reichenbach and all the

positivists he met 'were quite vehement in defending the scientific validity of Freud's basic views.' He adds that he never understood this.

For socialism, see Carnap, Hahn and Neurath in Neurath, 304-5; also, Carnap,



698 Stephen Scott

Although I cannot formulate what these have in common, there prob- ably is something, if only that the Nazis were opposed to all of them. They thought that even relativity theory was a Jewish science, and they campaigned for a German physics. On the other hand, the Circle not only appreciated the theory; they saw Einstein as a personal hero. What attracted them to the Bauhaus was its matter-of-fact style (Sachlichkeit). They defended the scientific validity of analysis, much to the surprise of Americans, and they committed themselves to socialism. (Sidney Hook reported that he and Reichenbach were not getting along when they first met, because he kept irritating the other's vanity. Hook men- tioned in passing that he was a socialist. Reichenbach smiled broadly and said, 'Ah! Now I like you better.'8)

One thing they did not identify as of kindred spirit was technology. Yet, when we hear that the Circle wanted to be scientific and progressive, we are more likely to connect them with technology than with socialism. This goes against their self-image, and the reason Schlick gave contradicts a standard idea that people have about the Circle:

In assessing our modern culture, it is generally the custom to speak of its great technical achievements ... but it is often forgotten that all these things are means

only, obviously not final ends, for the latter are always spiritual in nature.... Reflec- tion upon final ends ... is a real need of our age, and one which people, unfor-

tunately, are often not even aware of; it is a genuinely philosophical task.9

What I want to make clear is that the scientific spirit is a moral outlook. This is built into 'cooperative,' of course, and into 'modern,' since socialism is a paradigm. Here further is Carnap on the Circle's progressive attitude:

[It] manifests itself in entirely different walks of life; we feel that it is present ... in movements which strive for meaningful forms of personal and collective life, of education, and of external [that is, social] organization in general.... It is an orientation which acknowledges the bonds that tie men together, but at the same time strives for the free development of the individual.10

xviii. Reichenbach in 1918 wrote 'Socializing the University/ which he advertised as 'the first in a series of pamphlets presenting to the public the demands and

plans of Socialist students' (Selected Writings 1.136).

8 'Memories of Hans Reichenbach,' 34

9 Philosophical Papers, 11.497

10 Carnap, xviii




This is from his Preface to Logische Aufbau, in the passage Popper ad- mired for expressing the spirit of enlightenment.

'Rational' at first does not seem to characterize a moral viewpoint, but the continuity with Socrates is a mild suggestion otherwise, and Schlick stated it:

The Vienna group behaves, in regard to questions of value and morality, in the same fashion as the philosophy of Socrates: ethics, for us, is a philosophical task, and we know that the clarification of moral concepts is infinitely more important for man than all the problems of theory.11

What Reichenbach said about the importance of rationality over dogmatism, when he was talking to one of his students at U. C. L. A., agrees:

The whole movement of scientific philosophy is a crusade. Is it not clear that only by ending the dogmatism of irresponsible claims to know moral truth, that only by clarity and integrity in epistemology, people can attain tolerance and get along with one another? ...[W]hat I'm doing aims as directly at social consequences as the programs of those who call themselves "social reformers/'12

The Circle thought positivism was significant because it expressed the scientific spirit, and we see that this spirit was an ethical attitude. My own graduate school experience was that positivism was hard-nosed and antiseptic and in a different building from moral philosophy. This is not the location it had in Vienna and Berlin.

I want to explain now why a moral outlook was central to it. To do so, I must set it within the European milieu of fascism. I am not in- terested in the fact that some members of the Circle emigrated from Europe because they were Jewish, however, but only in the ideological hostility between fascism and positivism.

I take as fascist both an ideology and a kind of government. The first reinforces the second, which satisfies an emotional state widespread among its subjects. The ideology of German fascism was racial myth. The values were an idealized unity of the people (Volk) and a hostile superiority to outsiders.13 This appealed to Germans because it direct- ed their resentment to nonGermans and their submissiveness to their own political authorities. Here I am giving to these emotions the same


12 Selected Writings, 1.56-7

13 George lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicol- son 1972), 156-8



700 Stephen Scott

explanatory role which Marxists give to class consciousness. A fascist political system is one within which people can act on such emotions. It is any government organized internally around obedience to authori- ty and externally toward aggression. Its leading policies are suppres- sion of dissent and imperialism.

On all points its ideology is set against the scientific spirit- myth against rationality, obedience against tolerance, a closed Volk against open cooperation, reactionism against modernity. No clearheaded person can have both outlooks. People who have one despise those who have the other. C. L. Stevenson called this a disagreement in attitude. We need to remember his distinction between attitude and belief, or between spirit and doctrine, or between significance and truth, to understand the moral commitment of positivism. The Circle except for Schlick were ethical non-cognitivists. This view required them to separate moral outlook from philosophical content. It did not require them to devalue the former, and it is consistent with their meta-ethics that a moral attitude is the point of philosophy.

Carnap, Hahn and Neurath, who jointly wrote 'Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung/ and Schlick and Reichenbach elsewhere, all note the Circle's reticence to speak about ethics. At the same time, they all as- sert the primacy of morality in their thought.14 The primacy and the reticence are compossible if we distinguish the spirit of positivism from positivist doctrine. For the emotivists in the Circle, the scientific spirit is not a belief but an attitude. As such, although it is not something said or articulated, it is conspicuous when positivism is set in the right context.

It and its disagreement with fascism show plainly when we contrast

14 Carnap, Hahn and Neurath in Neurath, 304, note the reticence: 'The attitudes toward questions of life also showed noteworthy agreement, although these questions were not in the foreground of themes discussed within the Circle/ About the primacy, see all of 317-18, especially the concluding two sentences: 'We wit- ness the spirit of the scientific world-conception penetrating in growing measure the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing, architecture, and the shaping of economic and social life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it.'

Schlick asserts the importance of ethics in the text I have quoted (n. 11) from 11.497. In the same place he continues that there are only psychological reasons -not reasons of principle -why the Circle's investigations have not centered on ethics.

Reichenbach's dictum that scientific philosophy was a crusade (n. 12) shows his attitude. He continues, 'Don't be misled by the frequency with which others men- tion their concern for mankind and the infrequency with which I use such words/ This accords with his belief that morality is not learned from speculative philosophy (including positivism as a theory) but from practical activity (including scientific and philosophic activity). (See Selected Writings, 1.386.)




Carnap's Preface to Logische Aufbau with what Heidegger said when he became rector at Freiburg.

Heidegger's speech happens to be also about the scientific spirit, or 'the primordial and full essence of science/ in his own words. He states his main point in this sentence:

Only engaged knowledge about the people and knowledge about the destiny of the state that keeps itself in readiness, only these create, at one with knowledge about the spiritual mission, the primordial and full essence of science, whose realization is our task....15

'Our task' is that of the German university. Paragraphs earlier he explained that students could have 'engaged knowledge about the people' only by entering the German labor service. Similarly, they could serve 'the destiny of the state the keeps itself in readiness' only by entering the German armed service. (I believe this shows what it was for which the state was to be kept ready.) The spiritual mission of the people is a power that ties them 'to earth and blood.' Heidegger uses the adjective 'German' twenty-eight times in this speech. As he sees it, the scientific spirit belongs to the German university only in contact with the German Volk through German labor and German arms. His idea is fascist. How opposite it is from Carnap's socialist direction toward 'meaningful forms of personal and collective life'!

The two texts crystallize two antagonistic viewpoints of twentieth century European thought. They continue ones already present in the

eighteenth century. The first rejects rationalism in favor of romanti- cism; it expresses the self-consciousness of racial groups; it looks askance at Rousseau's social contract and Kant's moral autonomy; it bases the state on ethnic unity rather than citizenship; and it favors the historically individuated over the cosmopolitan. This is the outlook of the political right.16

15 The Self-Assertion of the German University/ The Review of Metaphysics 38 (1985) 477

16 Much of it is expressed by Mussolini in 'The Doctrine of Fascism/ in Michael

Oakeshott, ed., The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (New York: MacMillan 1947), 164-79. G. K. Chesterton made some of it the moral of an al-

most whimsical novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (London: J. Lane 1914). See Lichtheim, 156-60. Also, Peter Gay, 'Weimar Culture: The Outsider as In-

sider/ in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Eu-

rope and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1969), 13-14, 59-60. Also, Werner Koenne, 'On the Antagonism between Philosophy and Tech-

nology in Germany and Austria/ in Paul T. Durbin, ed., Research in Philosophy and Technology, Volume II, 1979 (Greenwich, CO: Jai Press 1979), 325-44.



702 Stephen Scott

It is also an outlook that enlightenment removes. Opposed to it is a rationalist (distinguished from 'romantic' and not

from 'empiricist') tradition that represents the left. Its tenets are one- to-one denials of those of the right. Here reason supports autonomy and equality against entrenched forms of domination. Scientific cooperation appears as an intellectual model for socialism. The origin of this tradition is the French Enlightenment. The scientific spirit contains its focal values.

Now, 'modern' had the same role in the Circle's vocabulary that 'Ger- man' did in Heidegger's. The original philosophes also had wanted to be known as 'progressive.' This is not mere coincidence between them and the Circle. At the First International Congress for Scientific Philo- sophy, Neurath concluded an address with, 'Vivent les nouveaux en- cyclopedistes!'17 The Circle allied themselves with the progressive movements of relativity theory, psychoanalysis, the Bauhaus, and socialism. They thereby acknowledged their inheritance of radical politics and their reasons for taking the moral outlook of science as enlightenment.

Neurath said that in the one hundred years before his time materialism had favored social progress and idealism had been reactionary.18 I was once baffled by this kind of remark. For there is no reason why people who like Plato or Bishop Berkeley should dislike Freud and func- tional architecture. The remark is intelligible, however, against the background of European politics. Materialism contradicts Christian theology and, therefore, has an emotional rapport with anticlericalism. (This is not an entailment, and all the connections I discuss in this paragraph are psychological ones.) The Catholic Church has allied itself regular- ly with fascist governments.19 So, materialism finds a center of gravi- ty on the left. A separate consideration: Because of the French Revolution, democracies have been based on citizenship rather than on racial unity. Some fascists have construed racial unity as a spiritual bond like an Hegelian group mind. Since they make use of an idealist metaphysics, materialism again drifts toward democracy and the left.

17 Reported by Karl Popper, 'Memories of Otto Neurath/ in Neurath, 53

18 Reported by Carnap, 'Intellectual Autobiography/ in P.A. Schilpp, ed., Philoso-

phy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1963), 51

19 Lichtheim, 161, 247-8, and 271. Also, Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi

Germany (New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company 1964) 39-43, 57, 99, 157 and 163. Also, H. R. Kedward, Fascism in Western Europe 1900-45 (Glas- gow and London: Blackie 1969), 147-51. All three sources note the ideological sym- pathy of Catholicism for fascism.




We can see even its harmony with a cosmopolitan rather than an ethnic architectural style. We see its link with progress as we reconstruct the ideological tradition within which Europeans locate materialism and idealism.

The fact that these traditions are not part of Canadian and United States politics very largely explains the apolitical reception of positivism here. Imagine an eighteenth century philosophe who held materialism because he thought it was true, and who thought it was important because of its political associations with anticlericalism and democracy. He thought that these connections made it an enlightenment. Sup- pose he emigrates to Mars. He can explain there why he thinks his theory is true, but the Martians will have to devise their own reasons for thinking it is important. After all, the grounds on which we think a theory is true and the grounds on which we think it is important are almost always different.

The thought experiment is like emigration between the wars from Austria to North America. In America, Carnap's disagreement in attitude with Heidegger became invisible. We also did not see Neurath's link between an abstract philosophy and social causes. We looked through the spirit of positivism and saw only its content. Was there a corresponding spirit of American empiricism? Perhaps it was tough- minded rather than tender-minded, but not left-wing rather than right- wing, not socialist rather than fascist. We could not locate positivism with European traditions of thought; therefore, we did not see the significance of the Circle's moral attitude.

What we did instead was to set it against our own philosophic background. We saw positivism as historically descended from British Em-

piricism. Although that had a political side like the French Enlightenment, it was moderately liberal rather than radical, and it was incidental to the core issues in epistemology. So, positivism lost its radical standing.20 Russell and Moore also shaded our interpretation,

20 Richard W. Miller construes it as a constant advocate of tolerance and modera-

tion, and he does so because he thinks the Vienna Circle resembled David Hume

(Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1984], 304-13). Miller makes this large mistake because he removes the Cir- cle from their real social background and interprets them based on the only similar-

ity he recognizes. The two authors I know who recognize that positivism was politically radical

are both Europeans. I do not know whether this is coincidence or not. One is Werner Koenne, who writes (240) that the Vienna Circle was 'a belated child of the Enlightenment which had not fallen on fertile ground in Germany/ The other is Hans Fink, Social Philosophy (London and New York: Methuen 1981), 105-6: Positivistic 'views received their first sharp formulation in Vienna and other parts



704 Stephen Scott

because their reaction against idealist metaphysics was apolitical. Moore was incredulous at McTaggart's ideas about time; Carnap ridiculed Heidegger's belief that the Nothing nothings; and neither Moore nor Carnap shows an ideological surface.

The Circle perhaps did not understand the relation of their philosophy to the societies into which they immigrated. They did not do the social analysis that Herbert Marcuse did. Schlick was the member who was clearest about the importance of ethics, as Neurath was about politics. These two were the most capable of analyzing the claim to offer enlightenment. Lacking their guidance and separated from the social environment in which their philosophy had political import, the other members appeared to be only academic inconoclasts. Positivism became self-contained and acquired the cold neutrality which has been its familiar genius in America.

I hope I have said enough both to defeat A. J. Ayer's view that mere iconoclasm was the real aim of the Circle and to explain why it is nevertheless the received image of them. Ayer writes, 'Nearly all the members of the Circle held left-wing views, but the others [except Neu- rath] did not bring them into their philosophy. Neurath alone saw the Circle as being in part a political movement.'21 In one way this is true,

of Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 30s. In the semi-feudal and deeply Catholic

atmosphere of these countries such views constituted a radical and efficient criticism of all kinds of pompous and religious defences of tradition; and they could also be used to attack fascist conceptions of "the people/' "the race" or "the historical task of the nation." When fascist parties came to power therefore, this kind of theorizing was abruptly eliminated in Eastern Europe.'

21 The Vienna Circle/ in Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI: The Foundations of Analy- tic Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1981), 180. Ayer might be misled by Carnap's account. Carnap said that most of the Circle were socialists, but they liked to keep philosophy separate from their political aims; Neurath

thought that this neutrality helped reactionaries (The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, 23).

Carnap meant that political views could not justify philosophical claims. He was talking about truth rather than importance, as is clear from a similar passage on page 51: Neurath defended materialism because 'during the last hundred years, materialism was usually connected with progressive ideas in political and social matters, while idealism was associated with reactionary attitudes. Schlick and I, however, asked for philosophical arguments instead of sociological correlations.' Neurath was urging that an ontological theory be accepted for its political impli- cations, and this is what Carnap opposed. He did not see positivism as apolitical. On the contrary, he credited Neurath with bringing him to see the 'connection between our philosophical activity and the great historical processes going on in the world' (23).

Ayer does recognize (inconsistently, I think) that fascism and the Circle were ideologically hostile: 'So far as I know, only Neurath and Waismann among its members were Jewish, but the radical spirit of the group, and its rational out-




and in all ways it misses the point. Although their philosophy did not contain political views in its content, its spirit was radical.

Compare Ayer and the authors of 'Wissenschaftliche Weltauff assung' on the dangers of metaphysics. First Ayer, describing the Circle's ac- complishment:

A strain of what I can best describe as woolly uplift was banished from

philosophy- I dare not say never to return, that would be too optimistic- but where it survives or reappears, at least to face criticism of a keenness which we owe very largely to those heroes of my youth.22

I think I know what woolly uplift is, and I believe it is not sinister. I suppose there is some in Bradley and Whitehead. Its banishment was from a few scholarly journals. On the other hand, Carnap, Hahn and Neurath approach hysteria when they talk about metaphysics, because they connect it with social change. Its then-current upsurge, they wrote,

seems to be based on the fierce social and economic struggles of the present: one

group of combatants, holding fast to traditional social forms, cultivates traditional attitudes of metaphysics and theology whose content has long since been su-

perseded; while the other group, especially in central Europe, faces modern times.... So it is that in many countries the masses now reject [metaphysical and

theological] doctrines much more consciously than ever before, and along with their socialist attitudes tend to lean towards a down-to-earth empiricist view.23

So, positivism was rampantly political. The Frankfurt School also misunderstands its viewpoint, not from

ignorance of the European setting, but from a mistake about what the scientific spirit is. They construe it as instrumental reason, which means for them that its focal value is technological efficiency. Positivism lo- cates itself on the wrong side of a moral divide by favoring technology over humanism. Habermas claims, first, that it has a surface neutrali-

ty to all ethical values, since it divorces reason and commitment, and, second, that it has a depth commitment to technical reason, which is all that remains of scientific praxis after the divorce.24

look, made it unacceptable to the Nazis' (180). Now, a radical spirit and a ration-

al outlook were essential to the Circle's philosophy; so, it was for all its members

and not for Neurath alone 'in part a political movement.'

22 Ayer, 187

23 Neurath, 317

24 Jurgen Habermas, T>ogmatism, Reason, and Decision: On Theory and Praxis in

Our Scientific Civilization,' Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Bea-

con Press 1973), 268-70



706 Stephen Scott

His second claim is certainly false. I have noted that the Circle did not ally themselves with technology and that they expressed scientific reason intuitively as Socratic inquiry and explicated it in terms of the verification principle, not in terms of technique. The two further features they attributed to the scientific spirit -cooperation and modernity- are clearly political values. Cooperation rather than in- strumentality was what they found in praxis.25

People incline to the idea that the scientific spirit is instrumental reason because of the social facts they take as the background of science. For instance, it is true that many scientists are indifferent to the goals for which their research is used. It is also true that major economic institutions are organized around technical rationality. But the Frank- furt School then speak as though they had discovered an intrinsic prop- erty of science, which must represent everyone's concept of its spirit. Here they mislead us. Different people can value different features of the same activity. The progressive and cooperative rationality that the Circle praised is not technical efficiency. The Frankfurt School have treated the social indifference of scientists as a de re necessity about science, and have then reported it as a commitment of positivism.

So, both Ayer and Habermas in their own ways misdescribe the Cir- cle's understanding of the scientific spirit. The Vienna Circle saw it as an outlook cementing their moral alliance with other progressive movements. It required them to see through romantic myths supporting an ideal of racial superiority and to support instead a socialist ideal of rational cooperation. It enlightened.

This account at least suggests some general conclusions about enlightenment, if it does not entail them. It indicates that philosophy must

25 Habermas and Reichenbach speak differently about what is to be learned from scientific activity. The former:

[A]ccording to these same [positivistic] criteria, it can be demonstrated quite compellingly that rationality is a means for the realization of values, and therefore cannot itself be placed on the same level with all other values. ... It guaran- tees the "efficiency" or "economy" of procedures. Both of these terms betray the interest of knowledge guiding the empirical sciences to be a technical one.

(269)

The latter:

Scientific work is group work; the contributions of individual men to the so- lution of a problem may be smaller or larger, but will always be small com-

pared to the amount of work invested in the problem by the group.... The social character of scientific work is the source of its strength. (Scientific Phi-

losophy, 117-18)




do two things now if it undertakes to enlighten. The first is to locate itself within a larger intellectual tradition, in the way positivism was incorporated in European rationalism. The second is to become clear about the relation of that intellectual tradition to contemporary social movements, in the way the Circle thought that scientific cooperation was an implicit socialism. Enlightenment is not a self-contained func- tion of philosophy. It requires placements within both the history of ideas and society.

I feel more certain about the second of these, the importance of the social context in which philosophy is done, although we give it little so long as we think of philosophy only as a research program geared to turning out new theories. The Circle's idea was more vital: It should have a role in directing people to meaningful forms of life. So, Schlick:

The true task of philosophy is at all times the same ... the harmonious fulfillment of spiritual life, so far as this is attainable by intellectual means.... But the partic- ular tasks that philosophic endeavours set themselves ... [depend also] on the circumstances confronting them in the spiritual life of the age, and it is in com-

pleting these that their mission consists. For these circumstances determine the means that this mission must employ to approach its goal.26

From this viewpoint -as soon as we ask what moral significance a movement has, what possibility it has of enlightening us in our times - its social place becomes an important fact about it.

Here we especially neglect twentieth century philosophy. I have always been puzzled to know why the schools that coexisted with fascism should be seen in North America as examples of humanism and why positivism should be seen otherwise. I know the people who see matters this way are not puzzled. They think that they have only separated the philosophical views of a school from the personal lives of its members. It happens that Heidegger was a Nazi27 but his philoso-

26 Philosophical Papers I. 107. Reichenbach thought that philosophy should bridge the gap for the uneducated between science and everyday life. "Thus we view the work of present-day philosophy of science not only from the standpoint of its scholarly significance, as a clarification of basic scientific concepts, but also at the same time from the standpoint of society' (Selected Works, 1.305).

27 I am referring not only to the fascist sentiments of his address at Freiburg but also to his membership in the Nazi party. In a reconsideration of the address, which he wrote in 1945, Heidegger still could say that he saw 'positive possibili- ties' in Nazism (The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,' The Review of Metaphysics 38 [1985] 485-6).

I am inclined to agree with Lichtheim's judgment (195): 'Heidegger was by no means the only German philosopher who jumped down the sewers of 1933, but the enthusiasm he evinced at the sight of the Hitler cloaca had few parallels.'



708 Stephen Scott

phy is a humanism. Other matters also: The ideological sympathies and the political alliances of the Catholic Church have been with fascism, and a form of scholasticism is the Church's official philosophy. No one thinks that this relation is transitive. No one infers that scholasticism has been valued for its fit with right-wing ideology. In the same vein: Even after World War II, Merleau-Ponty could articu- late a viewpoint from which the Moscow Trials of 1936-38 were justi- fied and thought that Stalinism might result in a humanistic future.28 This is only a blindness in him, and not viciousness, but no one lo- cates it within phenomenology.

Perhaps the accidental and the philosophical should be so separated, but it is not obvious that they should. And it is a live question whether philosophies consistent with such moral outlooks can at all enlighten. To that end they need moral clarity about the enveloping society. I agree with Schlick that Socrates is the true father of positivism;29 the argument needs to be made that some other European philosophies have the same line of descent.

I am inclined also to believe a second conclusion, that philosophy needs a place in the history of ideas. Some of the excitement people felt about the publication of A Theory of Justice was that it marked the return of philosophy to general intellectual life. It was perhaps a short return.

In its European context, postivism had a natural place within radical thought. It is possible that every enlightenment philosophy must be similarly located. Why was the movement the Circle started vital? We are bound to take seriously their own answer, that it expressed the scientific spirit of the intellectual left. Neurath urged the far stronger claim, that philosophy by nature is a left-wing activity. So also did Kant. Some university departments, Kant said, which are 'so to speak the Right of the parliament, defend the statutes of the government. But

28 Humanism and Terror, trans. John O'Neill (Boston: Beacon Press 1969). On the Moscow trials, see 25-70; on the future of Stalinism, 101-48. Steven Lukes dis- cusses Merleau-Ponty 's views in Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985), 132-8.

In Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty summarized his position in Hu- manism and Terror: 'Just after the war we tried to formulate a Marxist wait-and- see attitude.... Since adherence to communism was, we thought, impossible, it was all the more necessary to have a sympathetic attitude which would protect the chances of a new revolutionary flow' (trans. Joseph Bien [Evanston, IL: North- western University Press 1973], 228-9). I do not understand his last sentence, why the impossibility of adherence is a reason for a sympathetic attitude.





there must also be in a free constitution a party of opposition, the Left, the bench of the Faculty of Philosophy/30

I know it is too much to recommend that we draw from the history of the Vienna Circle Neurath's and Kant's moral. It suffices now to recommend the Circle's attitude, the scientific spirit, in the sense in which they understood it.

Received May, 1986

30 From The Conflict of the Faculties, quoted by Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars (New York: Vintage Books 1962), 185.



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Enlightenment and the Spirit of the Vienna Circle

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