OPINION:
EXACT THINKING IN DEMENTED TIMES: THE VIENNA CIRCLE AND THE EPIC QUEST FOR THE FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE
By Karl Sigmund
Basic Books, $32, 449 pages
Much of intellectual life seems to operate within — and sometimes run around in — circles. In “Exact Thinking in Demented Times,” Viennese-based professor Karl Sigmund, himself a pioneer of evolutionary game theory, tells the story of the influential group of 20th century philosophers and savants who launched the movement or school of thought known as logical positivism. It is no coincidence that it found its home in post-World War I Vienna and came to be called the Vienna Circle.
As capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna had been one of the cultural and intellectual hubs of European civilization. Even after the collapse and partition of the empire, with Austria shorn of most of its population and territory and reduced to a German-speaking mini-republic next door to a much larger, more powerful Germany, its capital city retained much of its intellectual luster. Vienna in the 1920s, by sheer force of momentum and residual prestige, was like a living brain deprived of a living body.
For many Europeans, especially those on the losing side, World War I casualties were not limited to the battlefield. In the case of Austria-Hungary, all the old certainties and traditions that had held together imperial subjects of Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Polish and other extractions, including a large and intellectually influential Jewish community, were erased overnight in post-World War I Vienna. What had seemed a permanent reality to most had proven illusory, a long, pleasant dream ending in nightmare.
The old realities were gone. What would they be replaced with? And how would one measure the validity of a new set of truths? For the Vienna Circle the answer was jettisoning metaphysics — a broad-based approach to philosophically explaining the world around us, as originated by Aristotle — in favor of a rigorous and exclusive application of empiricism, the testing and measuring of everything, as defined by Merriam-Webster, “relying on experience or observation alone, often without due regard for system and theory.”
While this approach might be well-suited to the narrow pursuit of technical knowledge in a laboratory, it is severely limited as a method for explaining the murky, intermingled complexities of human nature and human society in its political, cultural, moral, spiritual and economic manifestations. Defining — much less distinguishing between — the good, the bad and the ugly becomes problematical at best when the only tool you have at your disposal is logical positivism. God and faith, love and hate, sanity and madness are all beyond its measuring. The Vienna Circle favored too broad an application of too narrow a form of logic.
Small wonder, then, that Hans Hahn, one of its luminaries, admitted that, “If we were to open the window so that passersby could hear us, we would wind up either in jail or in the looney bin.” Still, as scholar Douglas Hofstadter claims — a trifle hyperbolically — in his preface to “Exact Thinking in Demented Times,” “There is no doubt that the Vienna Circle was an assemblage of some of the most impressive human beings ever to have walked the planet, and Karl Sigmund’s book tells its story, and their stories, in a gripping and eloquent fashion.”
But even Mr. Hofstadter’s fulsome preface illustrates the restrictive nature of the Vienna Circle’s approach to thought and expression. When he declares that it “was practically his destiny” for Karl Sigmund to write this book, and shortly afterwards uses the expression, “God knows what else,” he is employing terminology and using traditional references — to “destiny” and to “God” — that would be conceptually verboten to the stricter adherents of the circle.
The best and brightest of its members and proteges tended to be less dogmatic and truer to both traditional humanism and plain common sense. My personal favorite from Sigmund’s impressive cast of characters is Karl Popper (1902 -1994), whose masterful “The Open Society and It’s Enemies” made the case — in the political sphere for free societies with a vigorous theoretical competition in ideas ranging from socialism and social democracy to libertarianism and non-authoritarian conservatism.
He also recognized the need for reasonable limits in applying abstract principles. One that too many of today’s university administrators have lost sight of is Popper’s warning that, “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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