Sunday, February 4, 2018

“Exact Thinking in Demented Times” by Karl Sigmund

This book is a history of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who met regularly every Thursday evening in a private, by-invitation-only, seminar at the University of Vienna, followed by drinks and more debating late into the night at a neighborhood coffeehouse. Together, the members of the Vienna Circle originated and molded the idea of logical positivism, while having the ambitious goal of unifying all human knowledge into one grand discipline. Their program was anti-metaphysical and anti-theological to its core. The Circle’s manifesto stated, “the scientific worldview is characterized not so much by theses of its own, but rather by its basic attitude, its points of view, its direction of research…. In science there are no ‘depths’; instead, there is surface everywhere. All experience forms a complex network, which cannot always be surveyed in its totality and which often can only be grasped in parts. Everything is accessible to Man; and Man is the measure of all things…. The scientific worldview serves life, and life embraces it.”

The Vienna Circle was formed in 1924 by philosopher Moritz Schlick, mathematician Hans Hahn, and sociologist Otto Neurath. The Circle hammered away at the tension between science and metaphysical philosophy. “Clarification of the traditional philosophical problems sometimes leads to their unmasking as pseudo-problems, and other times converts them into empirical problems, which can thereby be subjected to the methods of experimental science. The task of philosophical work lies in this type of clarification of problems and statements, rather than in the crafting of special ‘philosophical’ statements.” The intellectual milieu in Vienna during the inter-war years was vibrant. Scholars from all over the Empire, as well as Germany, and the rest of Europe strove to get chairs at the University of Vienna. 

One particular inspiration for the Vienna Circle was Ernst Mach. He wrote, “all of science tries to replace or economize experience by mental models, since models are easier to deal with than experiences, and can even replace them in some situations…. By recognizing science’s fundamentally economical nature, we rid science of all mysticism…. [However,] we should not confuse the foundations of the real world with the intellectual props that serve to evoke that world on the stage of our thoughts.” Mach was an anti-Kantian. He did not believe in the “Thing-in-Itself”. For him, there was no independent object absent of our sensations. The whole world was made up of sensory perceptions. The physicist Mach was to have a great debate with the mathematician Ludwig Boltzmann on whether atoms existed. Mach was skeptical, as atoms, in his day, could not be seen, detected, or experienced. Boltzmann was less of a radical empiricist. He stated, “what the brain is to man, mathematics is to science…. No equation ever represents any phenomenon with absolute precision. Each equation is an idealization, stressing commonalities and neglecting differences, and therefore going beyond experience.” Despite his best efforts, he was also a closet metaphysician. “Metaphysics appears to exert an irresistible charm on the human mind, and this temptation, despite all our vain attempts to lift the veil, has not lost any of its intensity. It seems impossible to squelch our inborn urge to philosophize.” Anguished to the end, he would hang himself from a window pane while on vacation. Hertz retorted, “science has progressed almost more through deciding what to ignore than through deciding what to study.” Albert Einstein’s breakthroughs in physics, particularly his special and general theories of relativity, his principle of equivalence, and his discovery that light consists of particles, David Hilbert’s mathematics, particularly his extrication of geometry from the human physical world, and Bertrand Russell’s new logic, particularly his paradoxes, were all vital inspirations for the Circle.

One motto of the early Vienna Circle was that facts should replace human intuitions when they disagreed. As such, in math, Hahn’s work on infinite dimensions was a step in that direction. In philosophy, Schlick pronounced, “after thus sentencing theoretical philosophy to death, life itself urged me to delve into the most important part of practical wisdom, the study of man and the human condition, something I had always maintained belonged to science rather than philosophy.” The philosopher Schlick became one of Einstein’s proteges and popularizers, writing a book on spacetime, which expounded Einstein’s combination of gravity with geometry.

Ludwig von Wittgenstein was to fundamentally change the direction of the Vienna Circle, although he never attended a single meeting. The Circle became enamored with the analysis of language. Two times in a row the Circle read aloud and analyzed every word in Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” line by line, first under the suggestion of Kurt Reidemeister, then under Rudolf Carnap. Carnap was insistent that all philosophy had to be distilled by the new logic being espoused by Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein. “If philosophy is willing to follow the path of science (in the strictest sense), then it will not be able to do so without this thoroughly efficient instrument for clarifying concepts and cleaning up problematic situations.” The Circle adopted Wittgenstein’s phrase from the “Tractatus” as its own shibboleth, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Wittgenstein, himself, felt that “philosophy is the discipline that deals with all those propositions that are assumed to be true without proof by the various sciences.” His book’s aim was to “draw a limit to thinking, or rather- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think on both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense.” Wittgenstein was always a bit of a riddle, even to himself. He goes on about the nature of philosophy, “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy, thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” But then he continues, “the inexpressible is contained- unexpressed- in the expressed…. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” What are we to make of all of this contradiction? Wittgenstein tries to square the circle. “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” Despite the cryptic phrasing, or perhaps because of it, the “Tractatus” was a huge hit within the Circle. Hahn stated, “logic therefore does not say anything about the world; it only has to do with the way in which I talk about the world.” Schlick added, “logical conclusions express nothing about real facts. They are merely rules for using our signs.” Neurath, however, thought that Wittgenstein was all bunk and his words all smelled distinctly of metaphysics.

In 1929, the Vienna Circle finally published its own manifesto, “The Scientific Worldview.” It was a rejection of all things metaphysical and theological. It stated that only results based on experimentations and logical analysis were to be accepted as truth. Its goal was to tackle the problems at the foundations of mathematics, physics, geometry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences and to integrate them into one core discipline. Later Schlick emphasized, “philosophy is not a set of statements. It is not a science. But what is it then? We see in philosophy not a system of knowledge, but a system of actions: philosophy is that activity through which the meaning of statements is revealed or determined. Through philosophy, statements are explained; through science they are verified. The latter is concerned with the truth of the statements, while the former is concerned with what they actually mean…. The method of science is observation and experiment, combined with calculation and inference; through this method one establishes the set of true propositions about the real world. The method of the philosopher, by contrast, is reflection; the philosopher looks upon the given statements, observations, and calculations, and explains what they mean. To do philosophy is not to give a list of true propositions. It is, rather, an art- an activity leading to clarity.” Hahn separated philosophies turned towards the world, such as Epicurus and Hume, with philosophies turned away from the world, such as Kant and Plato. “The English, after all, are known as a nation of shopkeepers. And it is surely no accident that one and the same nation gave the world both democracy, on the one hand, and the rebirth of a philosophy turned toward the world, on the other; nor is it an accident that the same land that saw the beheading of a king also witnessed the execution of metaphysics.” Questions such as “Is the external world real?” are not genuine problems, but pseudo-problems, for they cannot be answered conclusively. According to Carnap, “everything that is beyond the factual must be considered meaningless” because according to the manifesto, “the scientific worldview knows no unsolvable riddles.”

As the years past, the Vienna Circle became more publicly known and its membership grew more diverse, although still having to be specially invited to join. Kurt Godel was a mathematician universally recognized as brilliant and insane. Einstein considered him his only true peer. Godel solved Hilbert’s riddle that “there exist true mathematical statements that cannot be derived by formal means from a set of axioms.” Godel’s proof of incompleteness claimed, “if mathematics is consistent, then the statement “mathematics is consistent” is precisely one of those weird Godelian propositions that are true but cannot be proved!” Karl Popper was never invited into the Vienna Circle but was a friendly antagonist, sparring and clarifying the views of the Circle because his views were greatly similar. He viewed induction as a flawed method because no matter the amount of experimentation, it could never lead to a general law. He stated, “my view implied that scientific theories, if they are not falsified, forever remain hypotheses or conjectures. This consideration led to a theory in which scientific progress turned out not to consist in the accumulation of observations, but in the overthrow of less good theories and their replacement by better ones- in particular, by theories of greater content.” The mathematician Karl Menger  advanced the ideas of dimension theory, while in his spare time editing his father, Carl’s, posthumous book, clarifying his invention of marginal utility theory. The economist Franz Alt invented the concept of a utility function and contributed to the burgeoning field of computer science. Abraham Wald founded the field of statistical sequential analysis and started to sketch out the concept of general equilibrium in economic systems. Oskar Morgenstern invented game theory along with John von Neumann, a friend of many in the Vienna Circle.

Already tottering from years of domestic authoritarian rule, the Vienna Circle finally broke up after the Anschluss. A few members had already left Austria, sensing which way the fascist winds were blowing. After the German invasion, even those members who were not themselves Jews were branded as friends of Jews and lost their University positions as well. Some emigrated to England or America and continued their correspondence as best they could. Godel had to take the trans-Siberian railroad across Russia, before setting sail to America from Japan. Neurath hopped on a stolen Dutch naval schooner to cross the heavily mined English Channel. The lucky ones found professorships in the Allied countries. The historian of physics Gerald Holton coined the phrase, “from the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square.” In fact, many were not so fortunate. The more junior members of the Circle often could not get teaching visas to flee abroad and many died in the concentration camps, committed suicide, or lived out their days in poverty, stripped of all ability to earn a living teaching in the Reich.

After World War II, there was a feeble effort to resurrect the Vienna Circle, but most of its members were dead or refused to return to Vienna from teaching posts in the West. The Vienna Circle petered out with a whimper. A few members even recanted their positivist worldview. Godel, ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, wrote to his mother after the war, “the world and everything in it has a reason and meaning, and actually a good and indubitable meaning. This immediately implies that our existence on Earth, since it has by itself at best a very doubtful meaning, must be a means for another existence…. For we understand neither why this world exists, nor why it is constituted just as it is, nor why we are in it, nor why we were born in just these and no other circumstances. Why then should we fancy that we know one thing for sure, that there is no other world, and that we never were nor ever will be in another?” He was certifiably insane, but that sounds like metaphysics to me.

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