- Email: [email protected]
Fin de siècle Austrian thought and the rise of scientific philosophy
History of European Ideas 27 (2001) 307–315
Fin de sie`cle Austrian thought and the rise of scientific philosophy Dale Jacquette* Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-3601, USA
Abstract I consider three conditions to explain the emergence of scientific philosophy in Austrian thought at the turn of the century, concentrating on Vienna and Graz as distinct centers of philosophical development: (1) An outlook that seeks philosophical truth in sound reasoning, combined with a commitment to developing and practicing a methodology that is not essentially dependent on any particular culture’s literary–philosophical traditions; (2) The desire to transcend national boundaries in the pursuit of philosophical understanding, as manifested in international professional conferences, publications, and training of international students; and (3) Cultural infrastructure that sustains ambitious philosophical projects, including tangible assets like financial resources, established educational institutions and communication networks, but also less conspicuous elements, such as, among others, a political environment of open inquiry, a relatively free press, community support for the enhancement of learning, and participation in an international language of science. r 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Austro-Hungarian Empire; Brentano, Franz; Logical Positivism; neo-Kantianism; Philosophy; Science
1. The Austrian legacy The flowering of Austrian philosophy at the turn of the century is a frequently remarked phenomenon. Scholars have puzzled over the combination of factors that contributed to the unprecedented proliferation of influential philosophical schools at just this time and place. Why did Austria, and not only in Vienna, but in Graz, Innsbruck, Salzburg, and other major cities of the Austrian empire under the *Tel.: +1-814-865-7822. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Jacquette). 0191-6599/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 0 1 9 1 - 6 5 9 9 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 5 0 - X
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Habsburgs, Prague, Cracow, Budapest, and elsewhere, produce such an extraordinary variety of contributions to world philosophy? Johnston [1], in his landmark study, offers the matter of fact observation that: ‘‘It was in Austria and its successor states that many, perhaps even most, of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century emerged’’ (p. 1). When one compares the diminutive geographical portion of the globe occupied by the Austrian empire even during the height of its territorial expansion prior to World War I, this statement is nothing short of astonishing in assigning Austria such pride of place in the cultural milieu of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If we consider only the most notable philosophical personalities who either lived and worked in Austria and its possessions, or who were educated there and associated directly with the several schools of philosophy that emanated from Austria’s capital, it would be possible to fill a book just listing those Austrians who deserve to be counted as among the greatest minds of the modern era. As representative figures only might be mentioned: . Franz Brentano, Martin Buber, Rudolf Carnap, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Godel, Carl G. Hempel, Edmund Husserl, Otto Neurath, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then there are the countless additional philosophers and scientists, especially in the Englishspeaking philosophical community, who were guided in their own research strategies by the example of the Austrian academy, and with which traditions Austrian philosophy was in continual interaction, including Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Willard Van Orman Quine, and many others. The question naturally arises, first, why did Austrian philosophy blossom with such opulence, and what can we learn from its successes, if we hope in the future elsewhere to duplicate its contributions to the world’s intellectual heritage? As a sociological problem, the question why and how so much interesting innovative philosophy was done in Austria and its satellites at this time is comparable to the question why so much excellent painting was centered in 17th century Netherlands. This is, indeed, a comparison to which it will be useful to return. The answer, to whatever extent we can satisfy ourselves about such complex occurrences, may also turn out to be much the same, but will probably need to be formulated in terms of largescale cultural generalities. Such high-order principles should not be despised, even when they appear relatively uninformative, provided they are true, insightful, and pragmatically justified by their fruitful implications.
2. Distinctive features of the Austrian paradigm Weiler [2], in his valuable essay, remarks on the inescapable impression that there is something unique about Austrian philosophy, and the difficulty, which many commentators have lamented, in isolating elements that are distinctively Austrian in recent and contemporary philosophy. Weiler writes: I think there is something interesting and not a little intriguing in the phenomenon of that distinct philosophical style which emerged in Austria, without the benefit of a language of its own to give it natural distinctness. To be sure, language
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retains its primary importance and so what is common to Austrian philosophy and to the philosophy produced in other regions of the German-language space far exceeds its distinctive characteristics; the reason for this is, among other things, that the language-continuum made it possible for practitioners to move easily about in that continuum. Many of the most typical Austrians were just other Germans who happened to settle in Austria. And yet...there is something about Austrian philosophy that begs to be given special attention. (p. 31) Weiler takes a typical philosophical approach to the problem of explaining the nature and conditions for the emergence of Austrian philosophy. By this, I mean that he tries to account for what is distinctive about Austrian philosophy and why it gained the prominence it did in philosophical terms, appealing to a philosophical justification offering specific reasons which he projects were probably actually accepted by different thinkers in the unfolding of Austrian philosophy. He considers the following ‘suggestion’, as he calls it, a hypothesis, about the rise of Austrian thought, at the conclusion of his essay: Austrian philosophy emerged, as a reaction to romanticism, in that unique period of time when the inner tensions of the Austrian state began to be visible for all. This was the time not only of tension but also of immense cultural activity. Philosophy in Austria at that time was not manned by revolutionaries and would not be oppositional. It could not be expressive since there was nothing rationally worthwhile to express. So, philosophy turned neutral, science-oriented, analytic, positivistic and, on the historical map, Aristotelian and Humean. Not idealist, not ideological and distinctively lacking in the Begeisterung so characteristic of much of German philosophy of the periodFphilosophy was Austrian at last. Whether Aristotelian or Humean, Austrian philosophy is typically philosophers’ philosophy. (p. 39) What Weiler means by ‘romanticism’ is a kind of anti-rationalism he identifies with dominant trends of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany. He agrees with other commentators who have insisted that this German inspiration never took root in the Austrian philosophical scene. Weiler sees the rise of Austrian philosophy primarily as a reaction against already established Germanic romantic thought; that is, in a certain sense, from a scientific perspective, as something negative. There is good evidence for this interpretation, but by itself it does not fully explain why Austrian philosophers reacted against German ‘romanticism’, instead of falling in line or being swept along with it. Still, at a superficial level, this rejection of German romanticism is precisely what happened in Austrian philosophy. Brentano [3], for example, a sterling example of Austrian thought in this period, is a German-born philosopher from a family that in its early history was originally of Italian extraction. After a brief period of lecturing at the Bayerische-JuliusMaximilians-Universit.at in Wurzburg, . Germany, Brentano migrated to Vienna, where he became an enormously popular and flamboyant lecturer at the university. He was finally driven into voluntary retirement after a bad faith agreement by the
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university to reinstate him after conscienciously resigning from the Catholic clergy in order to marry. Brentano made it his express purpose and philosophical mission to try to reverse the influence of German philosophy in Austria, and replace it by means of a scientific revolution that opposed Aristotle’s, David Hume’s, and John Stuart Mill’s empiricism to Kantian and post-Kantian transcendentalism, and especially to Hegelian dialectical idealism, the so-called ‘speculative science’, and the metaphysics of the Absolute. It is ironic in that sense but in other ways fitting that the Vienna Circle, even more rigorously scientific in its outlook than Brentano, was eventually broken up by the Nazi Anschluß or annexation of Austria in 1938, when Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich. It happened, as participants in that historical drama have frequently recounted, not, as might be thought, because the Vienna Circle had an especially high percentage of Jewish membersFas a matter of fact, the vast majority of its most prominent members were not JewishFbut because the Nazis, who had a romantic and decidedly unscientific conception of their political destiny, combined with equally unscientific and downright fallacious biological theories of racial genetics, rightly feared that their ideology would not have stood scrutiny against the critical analytic methods of logical positivism, which took cold, hard-headed mathematical physics rather than a bogus heroic biology as its dominant philosophical paradigm.
3. Toward an Austrian model of international philosophy I shall not pretend to canvass even the main theories of the evolution of Austrian philosophy that have been proposed. There is obviously much more to be said about these complex matters. An account that aspires to give a complete picture of Austrian philosophy, among other things, ought, for example, to explain the relation of Austrian philosophy to the equally impressive developments in Austrian music and the plastic arts, political events, and social movements generally at the time in Europe. Commentators have called attention to such factors as the unifying influences of Austria’s historic role in opposing the advance of Turkish expansion into the West in the 16th and 17th centuries, transforming Austria’s cultural identity in a very different way from that of the German principalities. Historians have also spoken of the political and economic sense of disadvantage that pervaded much of Austrian culture as Austria compared itself to Germany through much of their history. The Austrian inferiority complex has been hypothesized as a force motivating the desire on the part of Austrians to excel more conspicuously in their respective fields in order to gain notice within the German-speaking intellectual world. This fact, in turn, has been seen as having widespread repercussions in the rise of Austrian music, literature and the arts, as well as philosophy. Other historians of the Austrian philosophical renaissance have emphasized the diversity and mix of cultures in Austrian society as a result of its empire having extended over several centuries into Bohemia (Czechloslovakia), northern Italy, Hungary, and parts of Poland and the
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former Yugoslavia. Vienna as the political and cultural capital brought together many different influences, and it has sometimes been said that the sheer effort of accommodating so many peoples of distinctive ethnic backgrounds promoted nonsectarian kinds of intellectual development, caused them to look beyond their own borders and strive for a truly international philosophical methodology. This movement quite naturally took the form of a scientific analytic approach to the traditional topics of philosophy, even when the effect as in the early Wittgenstein was to argue that there are no genuine philosophical problems. There may well be something insightful in all of these theories that is not captured in any single one of them. As with the burgeoning of artistic talent in 17th century Holland, part of the explanation for the meteoric rise of Austrian philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th century is undoubtedly something as simple as the fact that success breeds success. If momentum is gained in these endeavors within a particular culture, that circumstance alone has a strong chance of attracting the talents especially of young persons in search of a promising direction in which to channel their energies. Those who grow up in such a culture and are immersed in popular appreciation and praise for this kind of activity, whether artistic or philosophical, who find it being described in attractive terms as an important and rewarding way in which to devote time and the effort needed to refine one’s skills, will naturally congregate in places where the activity is encouraged and the necessary apprenticeships can be served. The effectiveness of special geographic centers of research or artistic activity, no matter how modest in their beginnings, builds on itself and can eventually lead to dramatic new intellectual movements, as happened in the case of painting in Amsterdam and philosophy in Vienna. And, of course, we might add, without limit, monumental sculpture in 16th century Florence, drama in Elizabethan London, painting after another style in 19th and 20th century Paris and the French provinces, mathematical logic in Warsaw and Cracow between the two world wars and thereafter, cinema, blues and jazz in the United States, and on and on. My view is that this type of explanation might provide part of the solution to the phenomenon of Austrian philosophy. By itself, however, I maintain that the account, even when seen together with all of the relevant cultural factors, fighting the Turks and integrating multinationals and emerging as an empire in the shadow of Germany, and the like, the triumph of Austrian philosophy would not have taken place if the philosophical ideas underlying the cultural mechanisms at work were not good ideas, judged intrinsically worthy of serious pursuit by the best minds in that society. This is, obviously not something that can be duplicated at will. What is needed is evidently a critical mass of thinkers reaching powerful results in the right sort of intellectual context. The problems have to be there or must at least be such that when they are identified by a gifted philosopher they are recognized as such against a background of reflection that is prepared to appreciate their importance. The insights needed to suggest a fruitful solution leading on to further excellent work must also be present, and this is also by no means a matter of waving a magic wand. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle began to cluster around Einstein’s early discoveries, and the implications that Einstein’s successful methodology held
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forth for the philosophy of science, methodology, and epistemology, with further, as it turns out in this particular case, negative, implications for traditional metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and religious belief. That a scientific philosophical movement should have taken hold in Austria at precisely this historical juncture, riding the wave of new developments in physics which were also being made in Austria, is surely no accident. The idea that philosophers in Vienna should have fastened onto the shirt tails of one of the most respected scientists of the time is an attractive and rather poetic way of looking at these events. But I think it does not go deep enough to address the issues I have posed. For it leaves unanswered the more pressing questions, Why were Austrians in particular so influenced by Einstein’s scientific theories and methodology, and why did his way of doing science have such a powerful impact on Austrians who were by training and inclination professional philosophers? How did it happen that there began to collect a group of like-minded philosophers of science who were ready to hammer out the foundations of a radically new and distinctive philosophical school? I do not believe that historians of philosophy and cultural anthropologists will ever be able to do more than scratch the surface of this intellectual puzzle formulated in such general terms for a question of this magnitude. Moreover, we have thus far concentrated on only one strand of the complicated fabric of Austrian philosophy. We have not yet said anything substantive about another and in some ways complementary philosophical movement inaugurated by Brentano and his followers. Here we must include for consideration among others such notable figures as Alexius Meinong, Kazimierz Twardowski, Anton Marty, Christian von Ehrenfels, Carl Stumpf, and Edmund Husserl, for a start. Brentano is generally credited with having revived the medieval concept of the intentionality of thought, which, in different formulations supported the advance of phenomenology, including Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology, and Gegenstandstheorie as the theory of intended objects, including nonexistent objects. There is a curious twist to the later history of Austrian philosophy as it was to unfold. The verificationist criterion of meaning in the vanguard of the Vienna Circle’s advocacy of logical positivism militates against phenomenology and intentionalist philosophy of mind, on the grounds that introspection, although experiential and in that loose and popular sense empirical, is not publicly confirmable or discomfirmable in the manner of ordinary science, and hence disfavored by at least those adherents of positivist methods as they were soon to be embodied in scientific behavioristic and cognitive psychology. Brentano nevertheless understood his philosophical project as scientific. He directly challenges the post-Kantian philosophical establishment of his day already in the fourth thesis of publicly defended Habilitationsschrift, where he states that the true method of philosophy is nothing other than that of natural science: ‘Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est’. He titles his principal work of 1874, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, where he argues that psychological phenomena can be distinguished from physical phenomena by virtue of the intentionality or object-directedness of the psychological, observing that
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psychological states are always about something, or directed toward an intended object. As Brentano famously says: Every psychic phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called intentional (also indeed mental) in-existence of an object, and which we, although not with an entirely unambiguous expression, will call the relation to a content, the direction toward an object (by which here a reality is not understood), or an immanent objectivity. Every [psychic phenomenon] contains something as an object within itself, though not every one in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something acknowledged or rejected, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on. (p. 115; my translation with emphases added). Whatever the explanation of the upsurge of logical positivism, we cannot adequately understand the flourishing of Brentano’s intentional philosophy and phenomenology in Austria in the same terms as that of the Vienna Circle. Phenomenology and intentionalist philosophical psychology are not scientific in a sense that most logical positivists would recognize, because they are not public, but involve what Brentano refers to as inner perception, innere Wahrnehmung. No one to my knowledge, moreover, has ever suggested that the same forces could have shaped Brentano’s philosophy as Einstein’s theory of relativity. The positivists, as a matter of fact, or at least many of their later heirs, would be more likely to interpret phenomenology and intentionalist philosophy of mind as a holdover of philosophical idealism, especially as it came to be defined in Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology. Nevertheless, there are salient preoccupations in Austrian philosophy that cut across the distinctions between Brentanian intentionalism and the Vienna Circle’s verificationism. A complete and more particularly uncontroversial list would be too great a challenge to provide. We should nevertheless not overlook such commonalities as an intuitive acceptance in general terms of empirical methods; naive realism of a roughly Aristotelian sort, in some cases, as in the philosophy of Ernst Mach, amounting to an outright sensationalism or phenomenalism; an interest in states of affairs as truth-makers; a tendency that goes along with empiricism and a scientific world outlook to reject abstract entities in favor of a nominalistic or at least an individualistic or reistic ontology; a profound discomfort with transcendentalism, coupled with a preference for some type of pragmatism, and a commitment to rigor in philosophical methodology in various forms, including but limited only to the narrowly scientific. Rather than speculating further about the causes of philosophy’s growth in fin de sie`cle Austria, I shall conclude instead by offering reflections on certain definite features of its development that seem to provide a salutary model for the advancement of an international research program in contemporary philosophy. I propose to identify three salient conditions that have sustained internationalism in Austrian philosophy during this period, from the two centers of intense activity in the Austrian intellectual landscape which I have already introducedFlogical positivism and phenomenology in the tradition of Brentano’s intentionalist
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philosophical psychology. I have deliberately chosen two such diverse strains of Austrian philosophy because I want to make sure that I am not merely abstracting features that are peculiar to one particular Austrian way of doing philosophy, and because I want to emphasize that the qualities I will single out for discussion do not restrict the range of philosophical activity that can be sponsored under the cultural conditions that I want to advocate. The elements for cultivating a global philosophical movement that I discern from the lessons of phenomenology and logical positivism in Austria include: (1) A broadly ‘scientific’ outlook that seeks philosophical truth in sound reasoning, combined with a commitment to developing and practicing a methodology that is not essentially dependent on any particular culture’s literary traditions; (2) The desire to transcend national boundaries in the pursuit of philosophical understanding, as manifested in international professional conferences, publications, and training of international teachers and students of diverse backgrounds; and (3) A cultural infrastructure that sustains ambitious philosophical projects, including tangible assets like financial resources, established educational institutions and communication networks, but also less obvious elements, such as a political environment of open inquiry, a free press, community support for the enhancement of learning, participation in an international language of science, and related indigenous amenities that are not simply available as commodities for purchase. All of these features were differently realized by philosophers in Vienna, Graz, and the other philosophical centers of the Austrian empire. We can see this with exceptional clarity in the case of the positivists in Vienna, who attracted students from all over the world, sponsored several philosophical journals, one of which is still being published today, and evidently had sufficient resources for professional meetings and related research purposes. In Graz, similarly, Brentano’s student Alexius Meinong, who became Professor Ordinarius of philosophy, also founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology in Austria, that emerged as a center for active study of philosophy and psychology. Meinong’s students were engaged in many different aspects of investigation of issues connected with phenomenological philosophy and the theory of objects or Gegenstandstheorie, working in logic, psychology, epistemology, and value theory, including ethics and aesthetics, and in many other areas, like the spokes radiating from the hub of a wheel, with Meinong and ultimately Brentano at the center. The Graz school, through Meinong and his student collaborators, edited many collections of original research based on the assumptions of Meinong’s object theory, and integrated scientific investigations in psychology with philosophy and phenomenology. I close, then, on a cautionary note by emphasizing that I have been trying to articulate necessary, but obviously not sufficient, conditions for the successful evolution of an international research program, whether in philosophy, the humanities or social sciences generally, or even in the natural sciences. What cannot be provided out of whole cloth regardless of a society’s material resources are the valuable ideas and thinkers willing to explore them that must be present for individuals to achieve greatness in science or philosophy. Nor am I idealizing the situation in Austria, which I recognize to have had many disadvantages, especially
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because of political and ecclesiastical factors. Still, it is obvious that consciously or otherwise the Austrians at this time were doing something right. World cultures and governments have the choice today as much as at any time in the past to encourage and nurture philosophical and scientific research of international significance within their borders, or to ignore the requirements of free inquiry, and thereby diminish the competitiveness of their native intellectual treasures in the international marketplace of ideas.1
Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for supporting this and related research projects during my sabbatical leave from The Pennsylvania State University as visiting research fellow at the Franz Brentano Forschung, BayerischeJulius-Maximilians-Universit.at-Wurzburg, . Germany, in 2000–2001.
References [1] W.M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972. [2] G. Weiler, In search of what is Austrian in Austrian philosophy, in: J.C. Nyiri (Ed.), Von Bolzano zu . . Wittgenstein: Zur Tradition der osterreichischen Philosophie, Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, Vienna, 1986. [3] F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Duncker und Humblot, Leipzig, 1874.
1 A version of this essay was presented at a conference on ‘Approaching a New Millennium: Lessons From the Past, Prospects for the Future’, International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), Seventh International Conference, Bergen, Norway, August 14–18, 2000.
Fin de sie`cle Austrian thought and the rise of scientific philosophy Dale Jacquette* Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-3601, USA
Abstract I consider three conditions to explain the emergence of scientific philosophy in Austrian thought at the turn of the century, concentrating on Vienna and Graz as distinct centers of philosophical development: (1) An outlook that seeks philosophical truth in sound reasoning, combined with a commitment to developing and practicing a methodology that is not essentially dependent on any particular culture’s literary–philosophical traditions; (2) The desire to transcend national boundaries in the pursuit of philosophical understanding, as manifested in international professional conferences, publications, and training of international students; and (3) Cultural infrastructure that sustains ambitious philosophical projects, including tangible assets like financial resources, established educational institutions and communication networks, but also less conspicuous elements, such as, among others, a political environment of open inquiry, a relatively free press, community support for the enhancement of learning, and participation in an international language of science. r 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Austro-Hungarian Empire; Brentano, Franz; Logical Positivism; neo-Kantianism; Philosophy; Science
1. The Austrian legacy The flowering of Austrian philosophy at the turn of the century is a frequently remarked phenomenon. Scholars have puzzled over the combination of factors that contributed to the unprecedented proliferation of influential philosophical schools at just this time and place. Why did Austria, and not only in Vienna, but in Graz, Innsbruck, Salzburg, and other major cities of the Austrian empire under the *Tel.: +1-814-865-7822. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Jacquette). 0191-6599/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 0 1 9 1 - 6 5 9 9 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 5 0 - X
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Habsburgs, Prague, Cracow, Budapest, and elsewhere, produce such an extraordinary variety of contributions to world philosophy? Johnston [1], in his landmark study, offers the matter of fact observation that: ‘‘It was in Austria and its successor states that many, perhaps even most, of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century emerged’’ (p. 1). When one compares the diminutive geographical portion of the globe occupied by the Austrian empire even during the height of its territorial expansion prior to World War I, this statement is nothing short of astonishing in assigning Austria such pride of place in the cultural milieu of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If we consider only the most notable philosophical personalities who either lived and worked in Austria and its possessions, or who were educated there and associated directly with the several schools of philosophy that emanated from Austria’s capital, it would be possible to fill a book just listing those Austrians who deserve to be counted as among the greatest minds of the modern era. As representative figures only might be mentioned: . Franz Brentano, Martin Buber, Rudolf Carnap, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Godel, Carl G. Hempel, Edmund Husserl, Otto Neurath, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then there are the countless additional philosophers and scientists, especially in the Englishspeaking philosophical community, who were guided in their own research strategies by the example of the Austrian academy, and with which traditions Austrian philosophy was in continual interaction, including Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Willard Van Orman Quine, and many others. The question naturally arises, first, why did Austrian philosophy blossom with such opulence, and what can we learn from its successes, if we hope in the future elsewhere to duplicate its contributions to the world’s intellectual heritage? As a sociological problem, the question why and how so much interesting innovative philosophy was done in Austria and its satellites at this time is comparable to the question why so much excellent painting was centered in 17th century Netherlands. This is, indeed, a comparison to which it will be useful to return. The answer, to whatever extent we can satisfy ourselves about such complex occurrences, may also turn out to be much the same, but will probably need to be formulated in terms of largescale cultural generalities. Such high-order principles should not be despised, even when they appear relatively uninformative, provided they are true, insightful, and pragmatically justified by their fruitful implications.
2. Distinctive features of the Austrian paradigm Weiler [2], in his valuable essay, remarks on the inescapable impression that there is something unique about Austrian philosophy, and the difficulty, which many commentators have lamented, in isolating elements that are distinctively Austrian in recent and contemporary philosophy. Weiler writes: I think there is something interesting and not a little intriguing in the phenomenon of that distinct philosophical style which emerged in Austria, without the benefit of a language of its own to give it natural distinctness. To be sure, language
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retains its primary importance and so what is common to Austrian philosophy and to the philosophy produced in other regions of the German-language space far exceeds its distinctive characteristics; the reason for this is, among other things, that the language-continuum made it possible for practitioners to move easily about in that continuum. Many of the most typical Austrians were just other Germans who happened to settle in Austria. And yet...there is something about Austrian philosophy that begs to be given special attention. (p. 31) Weiler takes a typical philosophical approach to the problem of explaining the nature and conditions for the emergence of Austrian philosophy. By this, I mean that he tries to account for what is distinctive about Austrian philosophy and why it gained the prominence it did in philosophical terms, appealing to a philosophical justification offering specific reasons which he projects were probably actually accepted by different thinkers in the unfolding of Austrian philosophy. He considers the following ‘suggestion’, as he calls it, a hypothesis, about the rise of Austrian thought, at the conclusion of his essay: Austrian philosophy emerged, as a reaction to romanticism, in that unique period of time when the inner tensions of the Austrian state began to be visible for all. This was the time not only of tension but also of immense cultural activity. Philosophy in Austria at that time was not manned by revolutionaries and would not be oppositional. It could not be expressive since there was nothing rationally worthwhile to express. So, philosophy turned neutral, science-oriented, analytic, positivistic and, on the historical map, Aristotelian and Humean. Not idealist, not ideological and distinctively lacking in the Begeisterung so characteristic of much of German philosophy of the periodFphilosophy was Austrian at last. Whether Aristotelian or Humean, Austrian philosophy is typically philosophers’ philosophy. (p. 39) What Weiler means by ‘romanticism’ is a kind of anti-rationalism he identifies with dominant trends of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany. He agrees with other commentators who have insisted that this German inspiration never took root in the Austrian philosophical scene. Weiler sees the rise of Austrian philosophy primarily as a reaction against already established Germanic romantic thought; that is, in a certain sense, from a scientific perspective, as something negative. There is good evidence for this interpretation, but by itself it does not fully explain why Austrian philosophers reacted against German ‘romanticism’, instead of falling in line or being swept along with it. Still, at a superficial level, this rejection of German romanticism is precisely what happened in Austrian philosophy. Brentano [3], for example, a sterling example of Austrian thought in this period, is a German-born philosopher from a family that in its early history was originally of Italian extraction. After a brief period of lecturing at the Bayerische-JuliusMaximilians-Universit.at in Wurzburg, . Germany, Brentano migrated to Vienna, where he became an enormously popular and flamboyant lecturer at the university. He was finally driven into voluntary retirement after a bad faith agreement by the
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university to reinstate him after conscienciously resigning from the Catholic clergy in order to marry. Brentano made it his express purpose and philosophical mission to try to reverse the influence of German philosophy in Austria, and replace it by means of a scientific revolution that opposed Aristotle’s, David Hume’s, and John Stuart Mill’s empiricism to Kantian and post-Kantian transcendentalism, and especially to Hegelian dialectical idealism, the so-called ‘speculative science’, and the metaphysics of the Absolute. It is ironic in that sense but in other ways fitting that the Vienna Circle, even more rigorously scientific in its outlook than Brentano, was eventually broken up by the Nazi Anschluß or annexation of Austria in 1938, when Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich. It happened, as participants in that historical drama have frequently recounted, not, as might be thought, because the Vienna Circle had an especially high percentage of Jewish membersFas a matter of fact, the vast majority of its most prominent members were not JewishFbut because the Nazis, who had a romantic and decidedly unscientific conception of their political destiny, combined with equally unscientific and downright fallacious biological theories of racial genetics, rightly feared that their ideology would not have stood scrutiny against the critical analytic methods of logical positivism, which took cold, hard-headed mathematical physics rather than a bogus heroic biology as its dominant philosophical paradigm.
3. Toward an Austrian model of international philosophy I shall not pretend to canvass even the main theories of the evolution of Austrian philosophy that have been proposed. There is obviously much more to be said about these complex matters. An account that aspires to give a complete picture of Austrian philosophy, among other things, ought, for example, to explain the relation of Austrian philosophy to the equally impressive developments in Austrian music and the plastic arts, political events, and social movements generally at the time in Europe. Commentators have called attention to such factors as the unifying influences of Austria’s historic role in opposing the advance of Turkish expansion into the West in the 16th and 17th centuries, transforming Austria’s cultural identity in a very different way from that of the German principalities. Historians have also spoken of the political and economic sense of disadvantage that pervaded much of Austrian culture as Austria compared itself to Germany through much of their history. The Austrian inferiority complex has been hypothesized as a force motivating the desire on the part of Austrians to excel more conspicuously in their respective fields in order to gain notice within the German-speaking intellectual world. This fact, in turn, has been seen as having widespread repercussions in the rise of Austrian music, literature and the arts, as well as philosophy. Other historians of the Austrian philosophical renaissance have emphasized the diversity and mix of cultures in Austrian society as a result of its empire having extended over several centuries into Bohemia (Czechloslovakia), northern Italy, Hungary, and parts of Poland and the
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former Yugoslavia. Vienna as the political and cultural capital brought together many different influences, and it has sometimes been said that the sheer effort of accommodating so many peoples of distinctive ethnic backgrounds promoted nonsectarian kinds of intellectual development, caused them to look beyond their own borders and strive for a truly international philosophical methodology. This movement quite naturally took the form of a scientific analytic approach to the traditional topics of philosophy, even when the effect as in the early Wittgenstein was to argue that there are no genuine philosophical problems. There may well be something insightful in all of these theories that is not captured in any single one of them. As with the burgeoning of artistic talent in 17th century Holland, part of the explanation for the meteoric rise of Austrian philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th century is undoubtedly something as simple as the fact that success breeds success. If momentum is gained in these endeavors within a particular culture, that circumstance alone has a strong chance of attracting the talents especially of young persons in search of a promising direction in which to channel their energies. Those who grow up in such a culture and are immersed in popular appreciation and praise for this kind of activity, whether artistic or philosophical, who find it being described in attractive terms as an important and rewarding way in which to devote time and the effort needed to refine one’s skills, will naturally congregate in places where the activity is encouraged and the necessary apprenticeships can be served. The effectiveness of special geographic centers of research or artistic activity, no matter how modest in their beginnings, builds on itself and can eventually lead to dramatic new intellectual movements, as happened in the case of painting in Amsterdam and philosophy in Vienna. And, of course, we might add, without limit, monumental sculpture in 16th century Florence, drama in Elizabethan London, painting after another style in 19th and 20th century Paris and the French provinces, mathematical logic in Warsaw and Cracow between the two world wars and thereafter, cinema, blues and jazz in the United States, and on and on. My view is that this type of explanation might provide part of the solution to the phenomenon of Austrian philosophy. By itself, however, I maintain that the account, even when seen together with all of the relevant cultural factors, fighting the Turks and integrating multinationals and emerging as an empire in the shadow of Germany, and the like, the triumph of Austrian philosophy would not have taken place if the philosophical ideas underlying the cultural mechanisms at work were not good ideas, judged intrinsically worthy of serious pursuit by the best minds in that society. This is, obviously not something that can be duplicated at will. What is needed is evidently a critical mass of thinkers reaching powerful results in the right sort of intellectual context. The problems have to be there or must at least be such that when they are identified by a gifted philosopher they are recognized as such against a background of reflection that is prepared to appreciate their importance. The insights needed to suggest a fruitful solution leading on to further excellent work must also be present, and this is also by no means a matter of waving a magic wand. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle began to cluster around Einstein’s early discoveries, and the implications that Einstein’s successful methodology held
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forth for the philosophy of science, methodology, and epistemology, with further, as it turns out in this particular case, negative, implications for traditional metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and religious belief. That a scientific philosophical movement should have taken hold in Austria at precisely this historical juncture, riding the wave of new developments in physics which were also being made in Austria, is surely no accident. The idea that philosophers in Vienna should have fastened onto the shirt tails of one of the most respected scientists of the time is an attractive and rather poetic way of looking at these events. But I think it does not go deep enough to address the issues I have posed. For it leaves unanswered the more pressing questions, Why were Austrians in particular so influenced by Einstein’s scientific theories and methodology, and why did his way of doing science have such a powerful impact on Austrians who were by training and inclination professional philosophers? How did it happen that there began to collect a group of like-minded philosophers of science who were ready to hammer out the foundations of a radically new and distinctive philosophical school? I do not believe that historians of philosophy and cultural anthropologists will ever be able to do more than scratch the surface of this intellectual puzzle formulated in such general terms for a question of this magnitude. Moreover, we have thus far concentrated on only one strand of the complicated fabric of Austrian philosophy. We have not yet said anything substantive about another and in some ways complementary philosophical movement inaugurated by Brentano and his followers. Here we must include for consideration among others such notable figures as Alexius Meinong, Kazimierz Twardowski, Anton Marty, Christian von Ehrenfels, Carl Stumpf, and Edmund Husserl, for a start. Brentano is generally credited with having revived the medieval concept of the intentionality of thought, which, in different formulations supported the advance of phenomenology, including Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology, and Gegenstandstheorie as the theory of intended objects, including nonexistent objects. There is a curious twist to the later history of Austrian philosophy as it was to unfold. The verificationist criterion of meaning in the vanguard of the Vienna Circle’s advocacy of logical positivism militates against phenomenology and intentionalist philosophy of mind, on the grounds that introspection, although experiential and in that loose and popular sense empirical, is not publicly confirmable or discomfirmable in the manner of ordinary science, and hence disfavored by at least those adherents of positivist methods as they were soon to be embodied in scientific behavioristic and cognitive psychology. Brentano nevertheless understood his philosophical project as scientific. He directly challenges the post-Kantian philosophical establishment of his day already in the fourth thesis of publicly defended Habilitationsschrift, where he states that the true method of philosophy is nothing other than that of natural science: ‘Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est’. He titles his principal work of 1874, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, where he argues that psychological phenomena can be distinguished from physical phenomena by virtue of the intentionality or object-directedness of the psychological, observing that
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psychological states are always about something, or directed toward an intended object. As Brentano famously says: Every psychic phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called intentional (also indeed mental) in-existence of an object, and which we, although not with an entirely unambiguous expression, will call the relation to a content, the direction toward an object (by which here a reality is not understood), or an immanent objectivity. Every [psychic phenomenon] contains something as an object within itself, though not every one in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something acknowledged or rejected, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on. (p. 115; my translation with emphases added). Whatever the explanation of the upsurge of logical positivism, we cannot adequately understand the flourishing of Brentano’s intentional philosophy and phenomenology in Austria in the same terms as that of the Vienna Circle. Phenomenology and intentionalist philosophical psychology are not scientific in a sense that most logical positivists would recognize, because they are not public, but involve what Brentano refers to as inner perception, innere Wahrnehmung. No one to my knowledge, moreover, has ever suggested that the same forces could have shaped Brentano’s philosophy as Einstein’s theory of relativity. The positivists, as a matter of fact, or at least many of their later heirs, would be more likely to interpret phenomenology and intentionalist philosophy of mind as a holdover of philosophical idealism, especially as it came to be defined in Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology. Nevertheless, there are salient preoccupations in Austrian philosophy that cut across the distinctions between Brentanian intentionalism and the Vienna Circle’s verificationism. A complete and more particularly uncontroversial list would be too great a challenge to provide. We should nevertheless not overlook such commonalities as an intuitive acceptance in general terms of empirical methods; naive realism of a roughly Aristotelian sort, in some cases, as in the philosophy of Ernst Mach, amounting to an outright sensationalism or phenomenalism; an interest in states of affairs as truth-makers; a tendency that goes along with empiricism and a scientific world outlook to reject abstract entities in favor of a nominalistic or at least an individualistic or reistic ontology; a profound discomfort with transcendentalism, coupled with a preference for some type of pragmatism, and a commitment to rigor in philosophical methodology in various forms, including but limited only to the narrowly scientific. Rather than speculating further about the causes of philosophy’s growth in fin de sie`cle Austria, I shall conclude instead by offering reflections on certain definite features of its development that seem to provide a salutary model for the advancement of an international research program in contemporary philosophy. I propose to identify three salient conditions that have sustained internationalism in Austrian philosophy during this period, from the two centers of intense activity in the Austrian intellectual landscape which I have already introducedFlogical positivism and phenomenology in the tradition of Brentano’s intentionalist
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philosophical psychology. I have deliberately chosen two such diverse strains of Austrian philosophy because I want to make sure that I am not merely abstracting features that are peculiar to one particular Austrian way of doing philosophy, and because I want to emphasize that the qualities I will single out for discussion do not restrict the range of philosophical activity that can be sponsored under the cultural conditions that I want to advocate. The elements for cultivating a global philosophical movement that I discern from the lessons of phenomenology and logical positivism in Austria include: (1) A broadly ‘scientific’ outlook that seeks philosophical truth in sound reasoning, combined with a commitment to developing and practicing a methodology that is not essentially dependent on any particular culture’s literary traditions; (2) The desire to transcend national boundaries in the pursuit of philosophical understanding, as manifested in international professional conferences, publications, and training of international teachers and students of diverse backgrounds; and (3) A cultural infrastructure that sustains ambitious philosophical projects, including tangible assets like financial resources, established educational institutions and communication networks, but also less obvious elements, such as a political environment of open inquiry, a free press, community support for the enhancement of learning, participation in an international language of science, and related indigenous amenities that are not simply available as commodities for purchase. All of these features were differently realized by philosophers in Vienna, Graz, and the other philosophical centers of the Austrian empire. We can see this with exceptional clarity in the case of the positivists in Vienna, who attracted students from all over the world, sponsored several philosophical journals, one of which is still being published today, and evidently had sufficient resources for professional meetings and related research purposes. In Graz, similarly, Brentano’s student Alexius Meinong, who became Professor Ordinarius of philosophy, also founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology in Austria, that emerged as a center for active study of philosophy and psychology. Meinong’s students were engaged in many different aspects of investigation of issues connected with phenomenological philosophy and the theory of objects or Gegenstandstheorie, working in logic, psychology, epistemology, and value theory, including ethics and aesthetics, and in many other areas, like the spokes radiating from the hub of a wheel, with Meinong and ultimately Brentano at the center. The Graz school, through Meinong and his student collaborators, edited many collections of original research based on the assumptions of Meinong’s object theory, and integrated scientific investigations in psychology with philosophy and phenomenology. I close, then, on a cautionary note by emphasizing that I have been trying to articulate necessary, but obviously not sufficient, conditions for the successful evolution of an international research program, whether in philosophy, the humanities or social sciences generally, or even in the natural sciences. What cannot be provided out of whole cloth regardless of a society’s material resources are the valuable ideas and thinkers willing to explore them that must be present for individuals to achieve greatness in science or philosophy. Nor am I idealizing the situation in Austria, which I recognize to have had many disadvantages, especially
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because of political and ecclesiastical factors. Still, it is obvious that consciously or otherwise the Austrians at this time were doing something right. World cultures and governments have the choice today as much as at any time in the past to encourage and nurture philosophical and scientific research of international significance within their borders, or to ignore the requirements of free inquiry, and thereby diminish the competitiveness of their native intellectual treasures in the international marketplace of ideas.1
Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for supporting this and related research projects during my sabbatical leave from The Pennsylvania State University as visiting research fellow at the Franz Brentano Forschung, BayerischeJulius-Maximilians-Universit.at-Wurzburg, . Germany, in 2000–2001.
References [1] W.M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972. [2] G. Weiler, In search of what is Austrian in Austrian philosophy, in: J.C. Nyiri (Ed.), Von Bolzano zu . . Wittgenstein: Zur Tradition der osterreichischen Philosophie, Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, Vienna, 1986. [3] F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Duncker und Humblot, Leipzig, 1874.
1 A version of this essay was presented at a conference on ‘Approaching a New Millennium: Lessons From the Past, Prospects for the Future’, International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), Seventh International Conference, Bergen, Norway, August 14–18, 2000.