Vienna Circle Quotes

Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.

Philosophy is the disease of which it should be the cure !

And Sisi was struck by the Heine quote she had circled that morning, on her trip back to Vienna: Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.

Morality, Schlick was convinced, is not tied to self-denial: “It does not come dressed in a nun’s habit.” Quite the contrary: “Moral behavior springs from pleasure and pain; if one acts nobly, it is because one enjoys doing so…. Values are not dictated from above, but lie within; it is human nature to be good.

It is really unjust to the Vienna governmental circles to reproach them with having instigated a war which might have been prevented. The war was bound to come. Perhaps it might have been postponed for a year or two at the most. But it had always been the misfortune of German as well as Austrian diplomats that they endeavoured to put off the inevitable day of reckoning, with the result that they were finally compelled to deliver their blow at a most inopportune moment.

What was it Dante wrote, about the pope who abdicated his throne to become a contemplative and yet is condemned to one of the lowest circles of hell? Something about being punished for having turned his back on a great opportunity to do good in the world…. And ever since the prince’s shocking death, Vienna had been in almost imperceptible decline—a decline of mood rather than matter. But with no liberal face left in the Hofburg to stare them down, the Judenfressers grew louder year by year.

This term serves to contrast our worldview with philosophy in its usual sense, as a doctrine about the world that claims to stand side by side with the scientific disciplines, or possibly even above them. In our opinion, anything that can be sensibly said at all is a proposition of science, and doing philosophy just means examining critically the propositions of science to check whether they are or are not pseudo-propositions (that is, whether they really have the clarity and significance ascribed to them by the practitioners of the science in question); and it means, further, exposing as pseudo-propositions those propositions that lay claim to another type, and a higher degree, of significance than the propositions of science.

In 1906, the year after Einstein’s annus mirabilis, Kurt Gödel was born in the city of Brno (now in the Czech Republic). Kurt was both an inquisitive child—his parents and brother gave him the nickname der Herr Warum, “Mr. Why?”—and a nervous one. At the age of five, he seems to have suffered a mild anxiety neurosis. At eight, he had a terrifying bout of rheumatic fever, which left him with the lifelong conviction that his heart had been fatally damaged. Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians. In the philosophical world of 1920s Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city’s rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, their reluctant guru, the members of the Vienna Circle regarded mathematics as a game played with symbols, a more intricate version of chess. What made a proposition like “2 + 2 = 4” true, they held, was not that it correctly described some abstract world of numbers but that it could be derived in a logical system according to certain rules.

I was still in the Gymnasium when this short pamphlet, penetrating as a steel shaft, appeared; but I can still remember the general astonishment and annoyance of the bourgeois Jewish circles of Vienna. What has happened, they said angrily, to this otherwise intelligent, witty and cultivated writer? What foolishness is this that he has thought up and writes about? Why should we go to Palestine? Our language is German and not Hebrew, and beautiful Austria is our homeland. Are we not well off under the good Emperor Franz Josef? Do we not make a decent living, and is our position not secure? Are we not equal subjects, inhabitants and loyal citizens of our beloved Vienna? Do we not live in a progressive era in which in a few decades all sectarian prejudices will be abolished? Why does he, who speaks as a Jew and who wishes to help Judaism, place arguments in the hands of our worst enemies and attempt to separate us, when every day brings us more closely and intimately into the German world?

Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.

The Vienna Circle was empiricist and phenomenalist, Popper was a critical rationalist.

On the whole, their message to their students remained steady: that science was good and metaphysics was bad. As Neurath put it to Feigl in 1938, “what we have in common will remain; as products of their time, the differences will fade.

One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was,” said Popper. His philosophy was “empty verbiage put together in statements which are absolutely empty.”19 On this even Carnap—not Popper’s biggest fan—concurred.

Analytic philosophy has gone in various directions that the Circle would not approve. But the self-identifying merits of analytic philosophy are its meticulous attention to logic and language and the pursuit of clarity, the contempt for grandiosity, and the calling-out of nonsense. There is a suspicion of arguments that rely on “feel” or “intuition” over substance. The Circle was not unique in promoting these intellectual virtues, but they helped foster a climate in which they are now so much taken for granted that they are virtually invisible. In that sense, success of the Circle ideas lies in their apparent absence.

As if he wanted to give the Vienna Circle one last fatal blow, Wittgenstein announced on the occasion of another session: I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the amazement that something exists. Astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer. All that we can say can a priori only be nonsense. Still we run up against the limits of language.8

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school.

Mauritius,

The only overt sign of disaffection following the collapse at Stalingrad came from a small group of Munich students, known as the White Rose. Their ideas spread to other students in Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart and Vienna. On 18 February, after a campaign of leaflets and slogans painted on walls calling for the overthrow of Nazism, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were arrested after scattering more handbills at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. Tortured by the Gestapo, then sentenced to death by Roland Freisler at a special session of the People’s Court in Munich, brother and sister were beheaded. A number of other members of their circle, including the professor of philosophy, Kurt Huber, suffered similar fates.

Although he was barely four years older than Gödel, Menger had become a sort of mentor to Gödel, and an almost fatherly friend. When he returned to Vienna, he and Gödel slowly drifted away from the Vienna Circle. To their taste, it had taken on too much of the flavor of Wittgenstein and of Neurath; there was too much of a cult about the former, and too much politics in the latter.

Despite such significant departures from the antimetaphysical and ahistorical heritage of the Vienna Circle, it still cannot be said that philosophers of science have yet brought to bear the full weight of the implications of metaphysics or historicity for science.

Thus not only Schlick was surprised by the manifesto’s content, but others were as well. For instance, Karl Menger, after reading the manifesto, made it clear that he did not wish to be identified as a member of the Vienna Circle, but only as someone “associated with the Circle.” As a matter of fact, the brochure’s authors had taken pains to distinguish between Circle members and mere “associates.” After Menger’s expression of reticence, other members of the Circle, including Kurt Gödel and Viktor Kraft, also asked to be downgraded.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica’s own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

The Scientific Worldview meant to make things as clear as possible, since that is the purpose of any manifesto. And indeed, as a summary of the Vienna Circle, the text is still unsurpassed. In just a few pages it neatly described the group’s historical background and its highest mission—a collective crusade against all metaphysical and theological doctrines. Only the results of experimentation and logical analysis were admitted—nothing else. The manifesto listed the names of the Circle’s members, and the problems to be tackled: namely the foundations of mathematics, physics, geometry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences. An encyclopedia could not have done better.

and

Philosophies turned away from the world were not to Hahn’s taste. According to him, however, they could still be found in the systems of German idealism—and how could it be otherwise? The Germans are known, after all, as the nation of thinkers and poets. But a new day is slowly breaking, and the liberation is coming from the same land that gave birth to political liberation—namely, England: the English, after all, are known as the 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. Yet the weapons of a philosophy that is turned toward the world are not the executioner’s sword and axe—it is not as bloodthirsty a beast as that—though its weapons are sharp enough. And today I want to talk about one of these weapons—namely, Occam’s razor.

To make matters even worse, Schlick had the cheek to write an essay called “The Meaning of Life.” He even gave a simple answer to the question. The meaning of life does not reside in a higher purpose, but can be expressed in just one word, said Moritz Schlick: “The meaning of life is youth.

And this led Schlick to formulate a succinct moral principle: “Sei glücksbereit! ” or, rendered literally in English, “Be ready for happiness!” The spirit of the remark, however, is perhaps more accurately caught by the less compact phrase “Always be ready to give happiness a chance!

Popper wrote that it ought to be seen as a mark of respect that he had devoted most of his first book to criticizing the Vienna Circle. “The Vienna Circle,” he added, by way of obituary, “was an admirable institution. Indeed, it was a unique seminar of philosophers working in close cooperation with first-rate mathematicians and scientists. Its dissolution was a most serious loss.” It was a body blow not only to philosophy but also, it might be added, to the town of Vienna.

Definitions are dogmas; only the conclusions drawn from them can afford us any new insight

37 The state forbids an individual to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing, but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. —Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death

In a way, Schoenberg's journey resembles that of Theodor Herzi, the progenitor of political Zionism, whose early attacks on self-satisfied assimilated urban Jews could be mistaken for anti-Semitic diatribes. The scholar Alexander Ringer has argued that Schoenberg's atonality may have been an oblique affirmation of his Jewishness. In this reading, it is a kind of musical Zion, a promised land in whose dusty desert climate the Jewish composer could escape the ill-concealed hatred of bourgeois Europe. Schoenberg would prove uncannily alert to the murderousness of Nazi anti-Semitism. In 1934, he predicted that Hitler was planning "no more and no less than the extermination of all Jews!" Such thoughts were presumably not on his mind circa 1907 and 1908, yet to be Jewish in Vienna was to live under a vague but growing threat. Anti-semitism was shifting from a religious to a racial basis, meaning that a conversion to Catholicism or Protestantism no longer sufficed to solve one's Jewish problem. Rights and freedoms were being picked off one by one. Jews were expelled from student societies, boycotts instituted. There were beatings in the streets. Rabble-rousers spouted messages of hate. Hitler himself was somewhere in the background, trying to make his way as an artist, building a cathedral of resentment in his mind. As the historian Steven Beller writes, Jews were "at the center of culture but the edge of society." Mahler ruled musical Vienna; at the same time, Jewish men never felt safe walking the streets at night. All told, a Freudian host of urges, emotions, and ideas circled Schoenberg as he put his fateful chords on paper. He endured violent disorder in his private life; he felt ostracized by a museum-like concert culture; he experienced the alienation of being a Jew in Vienna; he sensed a historical tendency from consonance to dissonance; he felt disgust for a tonal system grown sickly. But the very multiplicity of possible explanations points up something that cannot be explained. There was no "necessity" driving atonality; no irreversible current of history made it happen. It was one man's leap into the unknown. It became a movement when two equally gifted composers jumped in behind him.

In a way, Schoenberg's journey resembles that of Theodor Herzi, the progenitor of political Zionism, whose early attacks on self-satisfied assimilated urban Jews could be mistaken for anti-Semitic diatribes. The scholar Alexander Ringer has argued that Schoenberg's atonality may have been an oblique affirmation of his Jewishness. In this reading, it is a kind of musical Zion, a promised land in whose dusty desert climate the Jewish composer could escape the ill-concealed hatred of bourgeois Europe. Schoenberg would prove uncannily alert to the murderousness of Nazi antisemitism. In 1934, he predicted that Hitler was planning "no more and no less than the extermination of all Jews!" Such thoughts were presumably not on his mind circa 1907 and 1908, yet to be Jewish in Vienna was to live under a vague but growing threat. Antisemitism was shifting from a religious to a racial basis, meaning that a conversion to Catholicism or Protestantism no longer sufficed to solve one's Jewish problem. Rights and freedoms were being picked off one by one. Jews were expelled from student societies, boycotts instituted. There were beatings in the streets. Rabble-rousers spouted messages of hate. Hitler himself was somewhere in the background, trying to make his way as an artist, building a cathedral of resentment in his mind. As the historian Steven Beller writes, Jews were "at the center of culture but the edge of society." Mahler ruled musical Vienna; at the same time, Jewish men never felt safe walking the streets at night. All told, a Freudian host of urges, emotions, and ideas circled Schoenberg as he put his fateful chords on paper. He endured violent disorder in his private life; he felt ostracized by a museum-like concert culture; he experienced the alienation of being a Jew in Vienna; he sensed a historical tendency from consonance to dissonance; he felt disgust for a tonal system grown sickly. But the very multiplicity of possible explanations points up something that cannot be explained. There was no "necessity" driving atonality; no irreversible current of history made it happen. It was one man's leap into the unknown. It became a movement when two equally gifted composers jumped in behind him.

In general, a manner of thinking that is unaware of itself and that is at home in the things cannot be refuted by describing the phenomena. The physicist’s atoms will always seem more real than the historical and qualitative picture of the world; the physico-chemical processes more real than organic forms; empiricism’s psychic atoms more real than perceived phenomena; and the intellectual atoms (namely, the Vienna Circle’s ‘significations’) more real than consciousness, so long as one seeks to construct the picture of this world, life, perception, or mind, rather than recognizing the experience we have of them as the immediate source and as the final authority of our knowledge.