In retrospect it is easy to heap scorn on the restauration of those post-war years, pointing out how provincial and out of tune with international developments they eventually proved to be. By drawing attention to the wider socio-historical context I do not, however, want to prepare a qualitative reassessment of these exertions. The point I want to make does not depend on whether they were right or wrong. A rather different question emerges concerning the methodological status of such reactionary thinking vis à vis the unrelenting scientific optimism characteristic of the founders of the Vienna Circle. Granted their enlightened aims and due account taken of the harm that was done by the fascists it still seems obvious that there was a case against them. General sympathy for avant-garde movements should not blind one towards the fact that their programmatic pronouncements are quite often considerably more daring than far-sighted. It is a historical fact that when the anti-metaphysical slogans were finally scrutinized (i) a process of revision was started leaving little of the original doctrine intact and (ii) the critics of ,,neopositivism'' commanded unassailable, doctrinaire academic positions themselves. What are we to make of this? With a view towards the current crisis of the scientific paradigm attacks on the Viennese traditionalists have a curious ring of belatedness themselves. Consequently it is not the opposition against naive attempts to turn philosophy into a quasi-scientific enterprise that should be singled out as ill-conceived any more than the general Euro-centrism exhibited by the intelligencia. Recent developments within analytic philosophy itself have made the limitations of scientific dogmatism abundantly clear and at the present time a massive influx of hermeneutics, deconstruction, transcendental philosophy and old-fashioned metaphysics into American mainstream philosophy testifies to the vitality of those formerly discarded approaches. Tough-minded positivists and soft-spoken humanists are not the proverbial opponents any longer. The crux of the matter, it seems to me, rather is the complete disability of the Viennese traditionalists to work out an original account of what was going on around them or, failing that, at least to notice the amazingly radical and farreaching process of learning analytic philosophy was embarking upon.
Returning Heintel's
patronizing remarks on Wittgenstein it might be claimed that his tragedy
consisted in not being able to realize the extent to which his criticism of
logical empiricism was hopelessly lagging behind the self-criticism exerted
within the analytic movement itself. Just as the later Wittgenstein was his own
severest critic nobody from the outside could match the accuracy of Quine's
attacks on Carnap's system or the force of the demolition of the myth of
ever-progressive data-collecting in an homogeneous scientific enterprise by
N.R.Hanson, P.Feyerabend and Th.Kuhn.
More than a decade before philosophers in
Vienna were publically deploring the ,,undifferentiated disjunction of
empiricism and metaphysics...as soon as problems of fundamental philosophy are
raised ...''
Quine had announced ,,a blurring of the supposed boundary between
speculative metaphysics and natural science .... And in a paper of 1965
P.Feyerabend (who actually had participated in some of Heintel's classes) even
seemed to adopt his argument about empiricism being a particularly naive
metaphysics. ,,There are still attempts made to arrest progress and establish a
doctrine. What has changed is the denomination of the defenders of such
doctrines. They were priests, or ,school philosophers' a few decades ago. Today
they call themselves ,philosophers of science', or ,logical
empiricists'.'' ,,A
science that is free from all metaphysics is on the way to becoming a dogmatic
metaphysical system.''
Most importantly, however, the restriction to just two
kinds of sentences (analytic, synthetic) against which the Kantian doctrine of
synthetic a priori sentences was constantly evoked by the traditionalists was
undergoing a major revision without their noticing it. ,, ... it becomes folly to
seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on
experience, and analytic statements, which hold come what
may.'' Insofar as this
distinction is a cornerstone of empiricism it is no exaggeration to claim that
it was deconstructing itself long before its opponents tried to dissemble it by
inadequate means.
A certain minimal amount of knowledge about the ongoing
process of revision and dissent within analytic philosophy was of course
unavoidable. But characteristically this was never regarded as an opportunity
to enter into a dialogue with representatives of those new currents.
Grotesquely misjudging the situation E.Heintel spends pages of his book in
reviewing E.Gellner's Words and Things (London
1959)
not even mentioning
philosophers like E.Anscombe, P.Geach, P.Strawson or Ch.Taylor. The whole
analytic movement was considered a monolithic block which could never possibly
overcome the frightful limitations it started with. Anxiety looms large behind
this facade of intransigence but in relating it to the actual political
situation it becomes clear that it was a consequence of the shaky identity the
traditionalists were constructing for their followers. Seeing Quine declare war
on ,,ontological slums'' blinded them towards taking notice of what was in fact
going on across the atlantic. Given the way the discussion developed there I do
not consider it a irredeemable mistake to have started from very narrow-minded
assumptions about the opposing side. How one finally arrives at the stage of
scepticism concerning the promises of science makes all the difference. Only on
the authority of having confronted the challenge of scientific thinking claims
about its limitations can be trusted and this is where the reaction against the
Vienna Circle in Vienna failed. Merely quoting anti-scientism and pointing to
holistic convictions (as if Othmar Spann were the only holist there ever was)
is an insufficient rhetorical ploy. The significance of Viennese reactionary
philosophy consists in introducing a note of historical ambivalence into this
all too clear-cut dualism.
According to R.Rorty ,,fruitful metaphilosophical
chaos''
reigns after ,,the notion of analytic philosophy as a quasi-science''
has
been put to rest. Faced with such provocative assessments Continental and
Anglo-American orthodoxy likewise appear in a new light. From the point of view
I am advocating here their main difference consists in analytic philosophy
having gotten rid of their dummies quite early whereas Heintel was well into
the sixties complaining about ,,analytical and formalistic excesses''.
Sadly,
because of this self-imposed quarantine the traditionalists were in no position
to make proper use of W.Sellars' remark ,,Philosophy without the history of
philosophy is, if not blind, at least dumb''.
The crucial asymmetry by means of
which analytical philosophy distinguishes itself from the traditionalists even
at the stage of its present softening up is very well elucidated by this dictum
as compared to the complete ignorance of formal logic representatives of the
opposing camp keep up to the present day. Following up on R.Rorty's hint we can
take W.Sellars' influential paper ,,Philosophy and the Scientific Image
of Man''
as an example. Remember it was written in the early sixties when the alleged
positivism of Anglo-American philosophy was an insurmountable obstacle against
its affirmative evaluation by academic philosophers in most of Germany and
Austria. ,,Man is essentially that being which conceives of
itself in terms of
the image which the perennial philosophy refines and endorses.
Conceiving of philosophy as
search for the ,,unity of the reflective
vision''
sounds very much like L.Gabriel's pronouncement
,,philosophy ... takes the world as a whole as the
object of its exertions ... Its authentic legitimation arises from the
universalism of its objective-transobjective horizon. Compare this to
W.Sellars famous phrase characterizing the aims of philosophy: ,, ... to
understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together
in the broadest possible sense of the term'' and you can get a notion of the
enormous distortion perpetrated by Gabriel and Heintel. Sellar's comments serve
as a reminder ... if one was needed ... that philosophia
perennis never was the
property of a group of defensive ideologues. But there is an additional message
here. Verbal similarity in programmatic utterances should not be taken as a
dependable indicator of actual performance which leads over to the final
section attempting to evaluate the situation arising after the Viennese
traditionalists faded into obscurity starting from the early seventies.