Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Thought Style and Thought Collective

Abstract

Within much of the current historiography, the relationship between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle is discussed in terms of a virtually one-sided relationship: a direct influence by Wittgenstein upon the circle (For a general overview of the most recent literature on Wittgenstein, including, in particular, his relation to the the Vienna Circle, see Frongia and McGuinness 1990; Drudis-Baldrich 1992; Baker 2003). In fact, this stereotypical approach seems confirmed in some of the self-portraits that have been offered by members of the circle (Frongia and McGuinness 1990, 17–26). Correspondingly, in the Circle’s manifesto (1929), its views were illustrated with the following dictum of Wittgenstein: “What can be said at all, can be said clearly” (The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (1929 manifesto) in Neurath 1973, 306; Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1922), 4.116). This quotation was meant to underscore their shared anti-metaphysical purpose. To be sure, the subsequent assertion that the scientific world conception knows “no unsolvable riddles” steered the Circle’s reception of Wittgenstein—at least that of its left wing around Hans Hahn, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath—in a direction that Wittgenstein must have abhorred, for his intention was not to mobilize a philosophical collective into an anti-metaphysical commando squad. Rather, as has now been clearly established, he wished to engage in a process of linguistic criticism and clarifying intellectual labor, morally and therapeutically oriented in the manner of Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and Arnold Schönberg (On Wittgenstein in his socio-cultural context see Janik and Toulmin 1973. For the most recent intellectual biographies see McGuinness 1988; Monk 1990. On analytic philosophy in the framework of Austrian intellectual history see K. R. Fischer 1991): a philosophical counterweight to both the mannerisms of literary supplements and the metaphysically idle elements of everyday language. These thinkers were concerned with a type of objectivity that was directed against any linguistic acrobatics and aimed at establishing the limits of that realm which can only be “shown” in language. Wittgenstein formulated this basic stance succinctly in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker: what was at stake here for him was the demarcation of ethics “from the inside,” against the realm of the verifiable propositions at work in the natural sciences (Wittgenstein to Ludwig von Ficker (Oct.–Nov. 1919) in Wittgenstein 1969, 35: “Namely, I wanted to write that my work consists of two portions: what is here available, and everything that I haven’t written. And it is precisely this second portion that is the important one. Namely, through my book the ethical is, as it were, delimited from within….”). What we have is thus a dualism of facts and values in an ideal, picture-theoretical linguistic framework. Its result was, for Wittgenstein, the emergence of the unsayable or ineffable as central categories in the realms of philosophy, religion, art, and literature. In contrast, in their focus on Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle concentrated almost entirely on the anti-metaphysical implications of the logical analysis of language for the realm of the sayable. It did so knowing it received a dose of mysticism in the bargain (a fact that Neurath, in particular, would note critically time and again). Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that in letters to his admirer Friedrich Waismann—the latter had been working fruitlessly on a popular version of the Tractatus since 1929—Wittgenstein offered an extremely negative opinion of the circle’s program (Mulder 1968, 389 ff).