As to the first of those add-ons: the fascists recognized the VC as enemies in part because many of them were Jews. Those who were Jews were non-observant, but fascistic anti-Semitism has never been concerned with religious beliefs or the observance of rituals. Jews are the Other for an anti-Semite as a bloodline, and that is enough.
There was something more to this enmity, though. It was precisely the VC admiration for science that drew the extra measure of hatred upon them. Science, to a fascist, has to be a malleable thing. Yes, when science produces valuable technology it is to be embraced (calling Dr. von Braun!). But an admiration for science taken as a constraint upon what reasonable people will believe? That was key to what held the VC together, but it was also something fascism has to reject. The romantic notion of German nationalism, the cult of the individual genius who can come to represent a nation because of some inner mystical bond, various occultist ideas thrown about as if they were science -- these aspects of the new movement to the north were deliberately anti-Enlightenment, anti-rational. The Nazis saw enemies of this aspect of their own ideology in the Vienna Circle, even amongst those (like Schlick) who were gentile and apolitical. And they weren't wrong in this.
Soon after Schlick's murder, an article in a weekly magazine in Vienna called Schonere Zukunft explained, in an airy pseudo-intellectual sort of way, why Schlick had it coming. The bullet that killed him, the anonymous writer said, was "not guided by the logic of some lunatic looking for a victim, but rather by the logic of a soul, deprived of its meaning of life." THAT is the occultism of Nazism speaking. And "Schonere Zukunft" means "better future," something of which that periodical was not an especially good harbinger.
So we can see that Nazism thought that positivism was an enemy. We can also see that they were very different. But we might also ask ourselves: isn't VC style positivism a very inadequate foe for Nazism, since it cannot consistently bring itself to say that the sentence "Nazism is evil" is even meaningful? Edmonds asks this. He goes around the mulberry bush for some paragraphs, in time saying: "the empiricists themselves saw no tension in their taking strong ethical and political positions while at the same time holding that these positions were no more 'true' than positions to which they ran contrary."
How can we make sense of this? I suppose we can think about instinct. Our mammalian instinct is to fight back when attacked, to look for the better of fight or flight when threatened. No conceptual baggage about truth has to attach to this. We just do. And there is no point feeling guilty (having a bad conscience as a logician) when these mammalian instincts are aroused.
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Tomorrow will be a bit of a homecoming for this blog. Because we may discover that thinking of the Vienna Circle also naturally leads our thoughts to ... truth, logic, Carnap, and William James.
Christopher, you ask, "isn't VC style positivism a very inadequate foe for Nazism, since it cannot consistently bring itself to say that the sentence "Nazism is evil" is even meaningful?" The answer you offer of our mammalian instinct to fight back makes sense. But I have additional answer, which may or may not make sense.
ReplyDeleteThe VC's view that moral assertions are meaningless is, from the VC's standpoint, meaningless, because it cannot be proved empirically. If it is meaningless, it doesn't affect our actions; we will continue to act as if moral assertions matter, even if we have concluded philosophically that they are meaningless.
I see a parallel in asserting that free will does not exist. People, like me, who believe that it does not exist (and is not even a meaningful concept) nevertheless act as if they make decisions throughout every day. Now, what shall I have for breakfast?
I think that I was mistaken to say that if a statement "is meaningless, if doesn't affect our actions." If we delete that language, I still believe that it's true that "we will continue to act as if moral assertions matter, even if we have concluded philosophically that they are meaningless." I just don't know why.
DeleteI posted the two above comments at 7:04 AM and 7:00 PM, ET, not 4:04 and 4:00.
DeleteI appreciate your points. I have struggled with meta-ethics at some length and even without the burden of trying to create a best-possible-elaboration of the views of people long dead, it is a minefield. I'm also glad you are following this series so diligently.
DeleteYour mentioning metaethics reminds me that philosophers would disagree among themselves whether, if statements that cannot be proved empirically are meaningless, it follows that the statement that such statements are meaningless is meaningless. Didn't Russell believe that we should treat statements, metastatements, metametastatements, and so forth independently; that is, not apply a statement from a lower level to a higher one. Or something like that; my memory of my long-ago readings on this subject are quite fuzzy.
DeleteYes, there was some ironic back-and-forth about this. Frege had a similar idea. Russell's "Barber paradox" smashed it. ("Arithmetic totters"). Then Russell and Whitehead created a set-theoretical hierarchy to banish the barber. As I've mentioned, Tarski, under their influence, created a similar hierarchy to banish a much older paradox, the Cretan liar. Godel's work, his "incompleteness" theory, brought back Russell's barber at the expense of both hierarchies. It shows that logical hierarchies are subject to tangles. I will say something about this next week, when I settle accounts with the Vienna Circle.
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