On the Vienna Circle: Two of Eight

Edmonds repeatedly discusses the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the Vienna Circle in philosophy and Austro-Marxism in politics. You might call it ... some sort of waltz.

But let us begin with Mach.

Ernst Mach was a scientist and philosopher who flourished circa 1900. As a philosopher, he believed that sense perception is the paradigm of all knowledge and that scientific laws, mathematics, and the postulation of unseen entities like magnetic fields, are all simply ways of describing and predicting sense perception. This notion, which came to be called "empirio-criticism," would in time have a great influence on the Vienna Circle.

Aside from geography and chronology, Austro-Marxism would seem unrelated to empirio-criticism. The former was an ideology closely associated with Bruno Bauer, the head of Austria's Social Democratic Workers' Party from 1918 to 1934. In '34, as fascists tightened their control in Austria (though at this time they were fascists who looked more south than north for role models -- more to Mussolini than to Hitler) the fascists outlawed the SDAP and Bauer went into exile.

What was distinctive about Austro-Marxism as a form of Marxism (and as distinct from, let us say, Leninism)? Well, first, there is the fact that Bauer was no enthusiast of LARGE FONT REVOLUTIONS. He once wrote, "It is not the great geological catastrophe that has reshaped the world; no, it is the small revolutions in the imperceptible, in the atoms that can no longer be studied even with a microscope, that change the world, that produce the force that then in one day is released in a geological catastrophe. The small, the imperceptible, what we call detail work, that is the truly revolutionary." This imperceptible revolution sounds like gradualism to many, it sounds like -- as we might say today -- "community organizing" as a safe haven for the class struggle.

While Bauer was formulating that idea, beginning in the years right after the first world war, the years of revolution and then civil war in Russia, a Russian Bolshevik intellectual named Alexander Bogdanov learned of and picked up on Mach's empirio-criticism. Mach's philosophy became political -- Bogdanov sought to show that it brings us to dialectical materialism, I.e. Marxism.

Bogdanov was a political rival (within the Bolshevik party) of one Vladimir Lenin. And one day it was Lenin who retired to his attic office and got his pen moving at Mach two speed to produce a refutation of empirio-criticism. The book isn't especially an astute one, but throughout the life of the Soviet Union party intellectuals dutifully pretended it was brilliant. Lenin won his power struggle with Bogdanov, became the undisputed head of the Bolsheviks, and the ideas of empirio-criticism as I briefly described it above became, for such intellectuals, anathema.

The dispute is over whether science has to be understood as going farther than describing (or even predicting) sense data, whether it has to be understood as explaining them in a deeper sense. "No," whispered Mach. "That is right, No!" enthused Bogdanov. "Yes, you dummies, it MUST go further!" said Lenin. So far as I can tell, Bauer had no opinion about this. But Bauer's Austro-Marxism, with its gradualism as to revolution, became associated with anti-Leninism within Marxist circles. And THAT came to mean friendship with Mach's views, which the Vienna Circle inherited and which Lenin despised.

One of the points in the Edmonds book that was new to me was the overlap of Austro-Marxism and VC. I had the naive idea that, since 'positivism' generally teaches the senselessness of statements about what ought to be the case or how one ought to act, the logical positivists would have been generally apolitical. It seems they were not.

But ... doesn't that inference seem a reasonable one? Is any political program (however "imperceptible" its proposed revolutionary steps) compatible with the notion that meaningful statements only address verifiable facts? I hope to come back to this point before my humble series of VC posts is complete.

Tomorrow, though, we bring Sigmund Freud into this discussion. What fun!

A Story About Coleridge

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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