Authoritarianism and Knowledge: Lessons from the Vienna Circle
I’ve just spent a few days in Vienna. This was the first time I had the opportunity to visit the city, which I enjoyed despite the relatively bad weather. While to most people Vienna will be synonymous with the Habsburg family, Mozart, or just the schnitzel, in my nerdy mind it evokes the Vienna Circle (VC), the intellectual movement that laid down the foundations of logical empiricism in the 1920s and 1930s.
The University of Vienna, main hall (photo: Eva B.)
Until relatively recently, I had a very caricatural and not charitable appreciation of the VC, its ideas, and its achievements. In many textbooks of philosophy of science, the VC tends to be presented as a homogenous school of thought responsible for a very narrow conception of science and knowledge based on the verificationnist criterion. While this school and its ideas have been influential for a time, they are largely outdated and have been superseded by “post-positivist” views emphasizing the social and historical nature of scientific activities, or so the story goes.
To be fair, the preceding paragraph is probably a caricature of the caricature. Nonetheless, it remains true that one would have a hard time finding today someone still adhering to logical empiricism as it has been developed by the VC. That may explain why it is not so easy to find detailed and nuanced contemporary philosophical accounts of the ideas of the movement. A notable exception is some of the books of the Austrian philosopher Friedrich Stadler, e.g., The Vienna Circle. Studies in the Origins, Developments, and Influence of Logical Empiricism (Springer) which I finished reading just before arriving in Vienna. Two more historical and popular accounts of the VC have been also recently published: Karl Sigmund’s Exact Thinking in Demented Times (Basic Books) and David Edmonds’s The Murder of Professor Schlick (Princeton University Press).
Courtyard of the University of Vienna, Karl Popper (photo: Eva B.)
Reading these books conveys a significantly different view of the VC compared to the above caricature. First, the VC appeared to be a less homogenous movement than usually suggested. There is no doubt that all its members, starting with its most prominent ones (Schlick, Neurath, Carnap, Waismann, Frank) were animated by a common rejection of idealism and metaphysics and a broad rationalist worldview. They obviously also shared what constituted the core of logical empiricism, namely a firm commitment to a logical and empirical conception of scientific knowledge. But beyond that, the views of the members of the VC were far from systematically converging, as witnessed by the many disagreements between Schlick and Neurath about the importance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, physicalism, and so on. A second interesting aspect is the rationalist and humanistic outlook developed by the VC, though again on this no full consensus prevails among the main protagonists. As an intellectual movement, the VC was largely animated by the willingness to promote the diffusion of knowledge and the use of reason in society. A particularly interesting aspect is the strong commitment of several members (starting with Neurath) to adult education. While the VC was overall claiming a neutral political stance (definitely true of Schlick, less of Neurath), this was of course a response to the madness of the times, marked by the rise of (Austro-) fascism and the Nazi threat. Finally, and this is related to this last point, it is striking to realize that while logical empiricism is generally presented as the ”received view” of the interwar philosophy of science, the VC was nowhere close to being dominant or even accepted within its own academic institution, the University of Vienna.
Courtyard of the University of Vienna, Carl Menger (photo: Eva B.)
Beyond the VC properly speaking, it is just fascinating to consider the intellectual richness of Central Europe during the 1900-1930 years. Just walking in the inner courtyard of the university of Vienna makes one realize the concentration of brilliant minds who have been there during a relatively short period of time (see some of the photos that illustrate this post). The rise of logical empiricism is largely related to the fantastic scientific developments, especially in physics and mathematics, that have taken place at this time in this region. The sad ending of the VC, marked by the murder of Schlick, is however a reminder of what happens to reason and knowledge in illiberal and authoritarian societies. Overall, it took less than a decade for a political system, animated by racism, hatred, and intolerance, to sabotage what is the most impressive intellectual and scientific culture since the Enlightenment. Political leaders like Hitler or Dollfuss are not the only ones responsible for this state of affairs. Reading the historical accounts of the VC make also one realize that some institutions of the civil society, starting with the press and the academic institutions, were largely fueling the hate and the ignorance displayed by the majority of the population toward some Viennese philosophers and scientists. This points toward a lesson that Jonathan Rauch has marvelously conveyed in a book that I reviewed here earlier this year: the destiny of the liberal order and the working of its epistemic institutions are tightly related.