(Chapter Two, part 1 of Crisis Consciousness in Contemporary Philosophy)

by András Gedö

The philosophical crisis is first of all expressed in the critical situations of the individual schools; the surface of intellectual life, however, does not always correspond to the general process of crisis taking place in the depths of bourgeois thinking. At the same time as bourgeois philosophy of the twenties staggered under the shock of the October Revolution, logical positivism and phenomenology (or what grew out of it, "fundamental ontology") very self-confidently asserted their influence and tackled (or, as they thought, liquidated) continually new problem areas. The general crisis of bourgeois philosophy, however, made itself felt in the quickly disappearing self-confidence of the succession of philosophical fashions, in the tottering of schools that yesterday seemed to have conquered the world. As a consequence, not only their results but also their approaches to problems and their very conception of the nature of philosophy appear questionable and fragile.

The crises of the schools and the corresponding changes in the prevailing trends partly obscured and partly brought out the second, deeper level of crisis, that hidden in the fundamental conceptions of the main currents of late-bourgeois philosophy itself, in the continuity and turns of its history. Changes in form give the appearance of completely new ideas, opposed to the schools in crisis, and remain dissociated from the main directions (if the crises of the schools threaten to compromise them), or to renew and return them to their original, authentic content (if the crises could be more or less separated from the fate of those main currents). Such changes, nonetheless, show up the deeper level of crisis insofar as the crisis situations in the individual schools give some insight into the content of the main currents and make possible the realization that the philosophical crisis is more profound than it originally seemed.

The third level of this crisis lies in the opposition and complementarity of positivism and life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie)

—two main currents of late-bourgeois thinking—reproduced in changes of form, temporary syntheses, and attempts to overcome each other. [1] Philosophical crisis consciousness seldom becomes aware that it moves in this vicious circle—and if it ever does, notes it as given—and neither the changes of form nor the provisional syntheses can break it. It ignores the fact that this situation originates in the socially determined decadent bourgeois consciousness in the imperialist epoch. Even where the forms change, the mutual conditioning and the supplementing of the prevailing trends remain; thus the situation continues in which positivism is merely to be "corrected" or connected to life philosophy (and vice versa), a situation in which, in the final analysis, one has only the choice of either. Thus the modifications and changes, recantations and new confessions never solve the philosophical crisis. "Lies the error firmly in the ground, like a foundation stone, / It is always built upon, never will it come to light." (Goethe/Schiller) If the foundation stone of error remains, although not unchanged but certainly constant, the fundamental structure of the philosophical crisis is reproduced—and thus also the vicious circle proclaiming the "end of philosophy" and the search for a new philosophy of "life" and "Being"—during the heyday as well as the shattering and downfall of the various schools.

Positivism and life philosophy underwent certain changes of form in the sixties. Differing from other schools, they appeared to break completely with the main currents although fact they represent them (such as critical rationalism represents positivism) or maintain the thought continuity of the history of the corresponding current (as hermeneutic ideal continues life philosophy), while at the same time laying one or another school open to criticism. The crisis of logical and linguistic positivism, today quite obvious, has existed in a latent form for some time now. Linguistic positivism was the product and symptom of the crisis of logical positivism, and thanks to its own limitations and its close links to logical positivism, carried the latter's burden with it. However, it also made apparent the frustrating effects of neopositivism which were veiled in logical positivism by the "philosophy of science" problematic and the philosophical-antiphilosophical interpretation of the natural sciences, mathematics, and formal logic.

It is an unavoidable antinomy of positivist "philosophies of science" that they are founded on some aspects arising out the dialectics of scientific reflection, while at the same time denying the idea of reflection and dialectics. Philosophically, they have no comprehension of dialectics in scientific reflection, which finally proves a trap for the positivist "philosophies of

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science." The history of logical empiricism shows the relation of positivism to the natural sciences, to mathematics, formal logic, etc., to be a factor in the philosophical crisis: insofar as positivism appears to identify itself with certain branches and directions of the individual sciences—in fact tending to reduce itself to their positivist interpretations—it proclaims the end of philosophy. However, the advance of scientific knowledge leads to a crisis of the positivist schools based on these individual sciences, and thus a change in the form of the positivist direction becomes necessary. The antiphilosophy of logical empiricism actually reflected the philosophical subject-matter of the natural sciences, mathematics, and formal logic (and a certain relevance of some elements in logical empiricism emerges from this fact); however, sooner or later, its antiphilosophical principles turn against precisely that scientific content which it claims to adequately express. It turned out that the antiphilosophical prohibitions also concern theoretical natural science: the demand for a logical-positivist "purity" of concepts implies also a ban on more general scientific theories. Heisenberg remembers Bohr commenting: "with such a ban, one could not understand the quantum theory." [2] The rejection of "metaphysics" also affected significant theoretical fields of the natural sciences, because, in view of the positivist interpretations and rejection of "metaphysics," "every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist" also in physics. [3] If, however, the philosophical content and problematic come to light in the dynamics of scientific cognition, their manifestation comes into obvious opposition to the antiphilosophical attitude, to the static positivist "philosophies of science." [4] Logical positivism exaggerated the epistemological relativity of the concepts, laws, theories of scientific cognition. This relativism, however, was linked to logical positivism's fixing certain elements of scientific cognition—such as logical formalization which, however, itself proved relative during the development of formal logic—into absolute norms; the fetishization of formalized language was contraposed to the content of theoretical natural science, and of physics. But "somewhere we must go from mathematized language over to normal language, if we want to say anything about nature," said Bohr at the beginning of the thirties. "And surely the latter is the task of natural science." [5]

Absolutizing the relative character of the relation between the objectively real object and knowledge which, dissolved the concept of matter into the epistemological subjectivity of "sense data," could not in any way be made to coincide with the dialectics of natural science. The untenability of the idea of "sense data" became obvious in the changing relationship between

the objectively real object and knowledge in scientific development, in which the objective, material object is primary. When he abandoned his earlier "neutral monism," Russell came to the conclusion that the difference between consciousness and matter cannot be dissolved in the concept of the epistemologically neutral entities and their logical constructions and that there is a difference between knowledge and the known object: "This duality, after it has been banished from sensation; has to be somehow reintroduced." [6] It was a sign of conflict between positivism and natural science—and the crisis of the former—that some conceptions of "philosophy of science," which originated from logical positivism and had not broken with it, often imbibed elements foreign to it. [7] Logical positivism's "philosophy of science" again and again came into collision with the natural materialism of natural science—and of natural scientists. Feigl, himself once an exponent of the Vienna Circle, writes:

The majority of scholars are realists, usually in a quite unsophisticated way.... They take it for granted that the sciences have disclosed the existence of a variety of entities beyond the range of direct observability.... Most scientists . . ., together with an increasing number of philosophers of science, unhesitatingly ascribe reality to what is "referred to" by many highly inferential concepts of the sciences. More "tough-minded" philosophers of science (logical positivists, instrumentalists, operationalists), however, either repudiate such a realism as unjustified or find the notion of "independent reality" quite obscure, if not outright meaningless. [8]

However, he thinks that the "liberalization" of the principles of logical empiricism had freed it from the conflict described. Yet the lingering crisis of logical positivism is demonstrated by the fact that the conflict is expressed rather than solved by this "liberalization."

The latest crisis also came from the fact that gradually logical positivism proved incapable of realizing its own program: it could neither adhere to its principles nor give them up altogether, it was forced to tame its guiding ideas (its "verification principle," its concept of science which is entirely confined within the scope of "sense data" and its concept of a mathematics and logic conceived as completely analytical, its aim to eliminate "metaphysics," etc.), and always searched for a new refuge. The philosophical problems—pronounced as "metaphysical" and believed to be dead—have on the one hand been resurrected in neopositivist thinking itself, [9] a thinking based on "metaphysical" assumptions, [10] and, on the other, have arisen in the process of scientific cognition. What was begun in the

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twenties and renewed in the fifties as a neopositivist "revolution," [11] was nothing more than the embarrassing split between the topicality of philosophical problems and their neopositivist denial.

If one removes every term from philosophy which has no direct, definable meaning, does this purge—like every other—not give witness to a crisis? After one has put in order the apparently pure field of clear meanings, does not the surrounding subject-matter lead us to temptation? [12]

Here the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty means logical and linguistic positivism. This linguistic positivism caused him to make ordinary spoken language the subject of his "analysis," in order to drive out the ghost of "metaphysics"; in line with his first beginnings, he reduced himself to this method, completely rejecting philosophical problems, thus demonstrating in himself the crisis and deterioration of late-bourgeois philosophy. [13]

Linguistic positivism carried on logical positivism while at the same time disputing with it. Ryle was convinced that he had overcome all philosophical "isms" [14] (which was an illusion of positivism and at the same time, an illusion of his transcending it), and Urmson charged that positivism was impermissibly applied to linguistic "analysis." [15] Such fundamental ideas of logical positivism as the "dream" of an absolute and complete formalization, [16] the "Sense Datum Theory," [17] and the verification principle [18] were actually questioned. Nevertheless, this criticism carried out the program of positivism. Although Austin resisted the concept of "sense data," he also considered as misleading "the question, do we perceive material things or sense data," [19] and showed greater interest in "techniques" of "analysis" than in method. [20] Thus, the basic epistemological content of logical positivism remained, so that when linguistic analysis started delving into the problem of scientific knowledge, it usually directly reproduced the elements of logical positivism. Insofar as it went beyond this, however, it returned to psychologizing (in its behavioristic or Freudian form), which logical positivism thought it had overcome. By seeking to eliminate—or solve—the philosophical problems through analysis of ordinary language, it brought out the apologetic nature of positivism in the objective sense and on the level of philosophical abstractions: if the world of meaning in everyday language, in the "customary," "usual" content of terms, is set up as the standard for philosophy, then the surface of bourgeois consciousness is made the limit of philosophical knowledge. On the other hand, the philosophical problems in the "analysis" of ordinary language reappeared just as they did in the Carnap conception of logical positivism. [21]

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While the differences between the Oxford and Cambridge schools are exceedingly relative, these differences refer to the problem of philosophy and to philosophical problems. [22] The representatives of the Oxford school, dissatisfied with the "surgical" removal of "metaphysics," strove for a solution to philosophical problems, [23] and in this process the questions for which there is no room in the conceptual framework of linguistic analysis inevitably came to the fore. The contradictory and colorful world of meaning in the "customary," "usual" content of words also raises the problem of "naive realism"; thus, the philosophical analysis of ordinary language again gives rise to the question of the relationships among language, thinking, and (nonlinguistic) objective reality. In the philosophical investigation of language, Austin declared:

We are looking again not merely at words (or "meanings," whatever they may be), but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena. [24]

Hence Austin preferred "linguistic phenomenology"—although he considered the term too long—to "linguistic" or "analytic" philosophy or to "language analysis." The prohibition of linguistic positivism was maintained: philosophy must limit itself to the "analysis" of ordinary language and only thus could it gain contact with reality. In the history of the "analytical" school, however, the general validity of equating philosophical and language relations became questionable. [25] The representatives of linguistic "analysis" were unable to agree on the basic concepts of their teaching, [26] and the borders between the "analysts" and the "metaphysicians" were blurred, throwing strong doubt on the justification for the school of linguistic positivism: it turned out that the "analysts are in fact often studying the same old problems of metaphysics in their own way." [27]

In this crisis of linguistic positivism, life philosophy appears as the promised salvation, even from within the innermost circle of the linguistic analysis school. In the name of linguistic positivism, Waismann proclaimed "that philosophy is not a temple of knowledge, that in it there are neither suppositions nor affirmations, that it is something fundamentally different from these, namely, the clarification of thought." [28] According to Waismann, the end of philosophical knowledge is also the beginning of a philosophy which does not carry the feature of knowledge; essential and positive in philosophy is the "deeper insight" which "cannot be lodged in a theorem, and it can therefore not be demonstrated." [29]

This linguistic positivism largely remained the philosophy of

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the philosophers in English-speaking countries. An empirical-positivist attitude composed of elements from various types of positivism won the day for both political and everyday use, but it did not completely take in the subtle and detailed pedantry of linguistic analysis or the growingly complicated philosophy of logical positivism. [30] Reformulation or reexamination of the starting points and basic ideas were considered unnecessary. Linguistic positivism was at first shattered and its long dominant forms brought into open crisis for reasons that were not inherently philosophical (although these played a role and contradictions between philosophy and reality or scientific cognition were often transposed into seemingly philosophical reasons), but through social impulses: both logical and linguistic positivism proved inadequate under the changed conditions of ideological class struggle. [31]

Linguistic and logical positivism did not lose their influence, however; in fact, there were times and places when they gained new strength (such as in the intellectual life of West Germany after the height of the student movement had ebbed away, when they were used as an antipode to the "critical theory" of the Frankfurt School). The tendency to crisis is also visible in the open defense of positivism: it defends and affirms, not so much particular schools of logical or linguistic positivism, but positivism itself and proudly refers to its "now more than 150 years of development". [32] This apology, while proclaiming positivism to be the redeeming "liberation from dogma," [33] must take note of its decompositions, which it tries to convert into arguments in its favor. According to Kamitz, who tries to assert positivism against the Marxists, the "critical analyses" of the positivists themselves "gradually led to new formulation, I refinements, limitations or extensions, yes, in some cases, even to complete relinquishment of positivist principles, and thus to steady progress in and restructure of positivism." [34] He points out that among those advocating positivism there is a tendency to give up the "antimetaphysics" principle; [35] even such an orthodox speaker for neopositivism as Ayer advocates opening up to "physical realism," to the "ontological" fashion. [36] However, these eclectic efforts only added "metaphysical" or "ontological" elements to existing logical or linguistic positivism. Decisive modifications, tendencies to change and dissolve the form, can be perceived in two branches of linguistic positivism, above all in the thinking of Strawson and Quine. Here, the acceptance and introduction of "metaphysics" or "ontology" no longer take the form of a latent revision within the continuity of neopositivism; in Strawson's writing, since the fifties, "metaphysics" no longer sidles in through the back door, but appears

openly and polemically. [37] Quine argues against the "two dogmas of empiricism" (against the differentiation between analytical and synthetic truths, and against the reductionism, which makes direct experience absolute), [38] and derives his theses of "ontological commitment" and "ontological relativity" from Dewey's "naturalism." [39] Both Stawson's and Quine's work indicate changes in the form of positivism, although neither of them breaks away from the fundamental attitude of linguistic analysis enough to give birth to a relatively new form of positivism. Their ideas more or less loosen up the framework of linguistic or logical positivism, but merge with the maintenance of some of its essential elements.

Polemicizing against Carnap, Strawson argues the justification of the existence of philosophical problems; according to him, the description of the function of language is insufficient. Linguistic positivism, however, still partly burdens Strawson's conception: "the actual use of linguistic expressions remains his [the philosopher's] sole and essential point of contact with reality." [40] The acceptance of the idea of a reality which is independent of consciousness distinguishes Strawson from the orthodox subjectivist version of positivism; moreover, the category of objective reality is limited because he reduces the possibility of philosophical activity to investigation of ordinary language. [41] His "descriptive metaphysics" can produce only the reunification of "linguistic analysis" with a positivist realism such as that of Moore. This "descriptive metaphysics" modifies the previous form of positivism by admitting the existence of single material objects and persons, but hardly goes beyond its limitations. [42] This positivism, corrected and verbally negated, is charged with tensions: the idea that the existence of philosophical problems is justified does not coincide with the dogma of analysis, according to which philosophical problems emerge from the misuse of language [43]—and Strawson is willing to maintain both the idea that philosophy has justification and the dogma of analysis. However, insofar as the idea of a consciousness independent of reality comes to the foreground of his thinking, the partial modification of positivism is changed into a criticism. In his commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, he writes:

Once transcendental idealism has been laid, aside, there is no obstacle to accepting Nature or the world-whole itself—empirically unconditioned existence, all-embracing reality—as the object of such an attitude. How could inquiring human reason find a more appropriate object for its admiring and humbly emulative devotion than that which is at once the inexhaustible topic of its

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questions and the source of its endlessly provisional answers? [44]

While logical positivism (and the extreme version of linguistic positivism) did not openly advocate subjective idealism, during its heyday it thought it was eliminating philosophy by identifying it completely with "metaphysics" and then declaring both to be pointless. The attempts to change the forms of positivism are ambiguous, because such changes can come about only through real criticism of some of its elements—and their apparent total rejection—together with the acceptance of some ideas which are foreign to chemically pure positivism. (But what is an ambiguity in the conceptual process opens up several possibilities to the individual thinker: the crisis of neopositivism makes it possible not only to change its form, but to refute it altogether. Occasionally, both tendencies exist in the individual conceptual process of philosophers.) Usually, modified positivism returns to versions in which the subjectivism is not very obvious, and which are related to life philosophy. This explains the new fashion of pragmatism in places where it was little known before.

Neither Quine, who refers to "naturalist" pragmatism, nor Strawson doubts "the existence of the real world of things, which is independent of language and with which language deals." [45] Yet Quine also accepts the basic idea of linguistic philosophy: philosophy should concentrate on investigating language, otherwise it is confronted with invincible difficulties. [46] The stress here is on the continuity between the, "ontological" work of the philosopher and the activity of the scientist—the philosophical categories, according to Quine, differ from the terms of the specific sciences only through their "breadth," and even the "semantic ascent," he says, is not an exclusive privilege of philosophy. [47] This continuity, however, and thus also the character and determination of philosophy, in the final analysis receive a positivist meaning. [48] The problem then arises: What are the common elements between objects and the knowledge about them? [49] According to the relativistic starting point of pragmatism, the epistemological status of physical objects is doubtful.

Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. [50]

The rejection of the empiricist dogmas and the critique of the "sense data" philosophy here imply a modification of positivism in which the reintroduction of "ontology" is linked with the psychologization of epistemology. Instead of making the sense data, the observation, the immediate experience, absolute, this reformed positivism makes the theory in a certain sense absolute: the sense data were once seen as something quite separate from reality, now theory is transfigured in the same way: this fetish proves just as untenable as the sense data. Theory is put on a pedestal, but this pedestal is built on sand: according to modified positivism, the epistemological status of scientific theory is just much myth as are the legends about the gods' deeds, only it is more useful and congenial for scientific thinking. Quine's philosophy tends to renew positivism; his views suffering from the limitations of linguistic philosophy (the problematic of society is mentioned only where Quine delves into the social nature of language) and the nebulous character of his questions kept his influence relatively limited.

"Critical rationalism" is the most distinct shift in positivism, especially as it appears in Karl Popper's philosophy, and it goes far beyond philosophy. Popper did not need to throw off the ballast of "linguistic" analysis; he never had such tendencies. Critical rationalism does not merely temper linguistic philosophy, but rejects it; it even declares opposition to all positivism. Popper claimed that he had been fighting "all forms of positivism" since 1930.

I am as far from positivism as one can get. . . . Moreover, my criticism of positivism was astonishingly successful. After many years it was largely accepted by the surviving members of the Vienna Circle so that the historian of philosophy John Passmore was able to write: "Positivism is as dead as a philosophical movement can be." [51]

Here, the real (although necessarily inconsistent and limited) critique of earlier forms of positivism is used to legitimate apparent total rejection. Popper's intertwining of apparent and real critique leads to modifications which compensate the partial and enforced epistemological withdrawal with the extension of a positivist philosophy of society and history. The thought content of critical rationalism did not emerge in the last fifteen years (Popper's philosophical work has a history of over forty years), but its content changed during this period. A new aspect of the present-day philosophical situation is that critical rationalism has become an influential school and one of the dominating philosophies in the international bourgeois intellectual world. This philosophy had its origin in a landscape which was shaped by the social upheavals during and after the October revolution,

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and from the beginning opposed Marxism. [52] The starting points for its polemics it took from the questions raised by logical positivism. Popper, too, was willing to draw the "demarcation line" between science and "metaphysics"; he, too, concentrated on the relation between experience and theory and eliminated the problem of the relation between reality and knowledge. While its proposed solutions differed from the then-dominant form of logical positivism, they were still bound to and characterized by it, even where they opposed it. Popper recognized early on that the verification principle of logical positivism, that is, linking the meaning of statements to a rejection of "metaphysics," would have fatal philosophical consequences:

This radicalism destroys natural science together with metaphysics: natural laws, too, cannot be logically derived from statements of observation (induction problem!); if Wittgenstein's criteria of meaning were consistently applied, they, too, would be nothing more than "meaningless pseudopropositions," than "metaphysics." [53]

There is no doubt that the introduction of the falsification principle has tempered the empiricist character of current positivism; however, where it went beyond empiricism, it merely reestablished Kantianism, and insofar as the falsification principle was a moderated and limited transcription of the verification criterion, it remained bound to empiricism. The relative and conditioned self-movement of theory in the process of a knowledge that reflects reality was transfigured, it appeared in absolute and undetermined autonomy; the idea of reflecting reality was pushed out of positivist thinking. Its fetishization degraded rather than upheld scientific theory even in the early form of critical rationalism: "Science does not rest upon rock bottom. The bold structure of its theory rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base." [54] Theory had to pay for its claim to absolute and undetermined autonomy with a loss of the possibility of truth.

While logical positivism reduced science to the subjectivity of sense data, the subjectivity of theory was the beginning and end of the concept of science in critical rationalism. This view was epistemologically less consistent, and in its "antimetaphysical" attitude less radical than logical empiricism; it hovered between empiricism and Kant's apriorism, and expressed the generally idealist content of positivism radically and apodictically. Popper wrote:

Our science is not knowledge (episteme): it can never claim to have attained truth, or even a substitute for it, such as

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probability. Yet science has more than mere biological survival value. It is not only a useful instrument. Although it can attain neither truth nor probability, the striving for knowledge and the search for truth are still the strongest motives of scientific discovery. We do not know: we can only guess. And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. [55]

This attitude prevailed in the history of critical rationalism, where the critique of "metaphysics" was emphasized for a long time. The ambiguities in Popper's main early work, Logik der Forschung, left open the possibility that this version of positivism—while flirting with biologizing pragmatism—did not completely exclude the idea of objective reality, but, like the principles of positivism, based this reality in the final analysis on the irrational considerations of life philosophy.

Logical positivism proved incapable of developing a philosophical view of society and history. Neurath tried to outline the "scientific content of history and national economy" from the viewpoint of the "physicalism" of the Vienna Circle; [56] but even in the history of logical positivism, this attempt remained an incidental episode. The philosophical idea, the "physicalism," was soon abandoned; on the other hand, Neurath's views on society were so extremely mechanistic, and said so little about the philosophical problems of social events (and their cognition), that they could not act as an alternative either to the neo-Kantian positivism or to life philosophy. In a certain respect, however, Neurath anticipated the positivist view of history that followed, not because he, who tended to the then current social reformist ideology, prophesied (even demanded) an abstract and nebulous "revolution," but because he linked the desired social change with "social technicians" and viewed the function and cognition of society in accordance with a technological model. [57]

A positivist philosophical conception of society and history which would be suitable to present conditions can only be founded on ideas which do not lock scientific knowledge into the narrow confines of empirical cognition and a contentless logical-mathematical theory, on ideas which go beyond the application of philosophical "analysis" to the theme of historical cognition, [58] that is, on ideas which do not reduce either reality or knowledge to "sense data," but which are prepared to accept elements of life philosophy and objective-idealist elements in general. Critical rationalism poses such a revised positivist epistemology in social and historical theory, while its keynote is the open and aggressive criticism of Marxism and communism. [59] One

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of the reasons that Popper's philosophy has such a big influence on the whole of bourgeois thinking—and on the rival schools within bourgeois ideology—is that his modified positivism takes into account the necessity for state-monopoly regulation (and also one of the results of the scientific and technological revolution, namely, the increasing social effects of theoretical knowledge), and because it both guarantees and sets the limitations for the possibilities of "social technology." It is from this viewpoint that critical rationalism is contraposed to "historicism," the idea that laws govern the historical movement of society, the idea of possibility of knowledge and of revolutionary transformation of the social totality. The modification and apparent overcoming of positivism are indispensable for this critical rationalist view of society and history, a view which brings out its positivist essence and its class apologetics.

During and after elaboration of this conception of history and society, the differences between Popper's philosophy and other versions of positivism became clearer. Changes also took place within critical rationalism: the criticism of Berkeley's or Mach's subjective idealism became stronger, [60] but the idea that critical rationalism is based "on an irrational faith" [61] was a recurring keynote. While the separation of science from "metaphysics" remained, and finding the borderline between them was still the cardinal problem, the critique of "metaphysics" abated and philosophy was accepted as justified. [62] In the new edition of his Logik der Forschung Popper maintained:

there is at least one philosophical problem in which all thinking men are interested. It is the problem of cosmology: the problem of understanding the world—including ourselves, and our knowledge, as part of the world. All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy as well as of science lies solely in the contributions which they have made to it. [63]

Since then, this "cosmological-ontological" striving has increased. According to Popper, critical rationalism is the school which—in contrast to almost all other current philosophies—can reestablish the relation of philosophy to reality, can expose what he called the huge scandal of philosophy and make up for it. "Nowadays one feels the need to apologize for dealing with philosophy at all. Perhaps with the exception of a few Marxists, most specialized philosophers seem to have lost all link to reality," said Popper, who continued to insist on his anti-Marxism and repeated Hochmuth's remark: the Marxists have only interpreted Marxism in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. Popper wrote:

In my opinion, the biggest scandal of philosophy is that

while around us nature—and not only nature—is being ruined, the philosophers continue to talk—sometimes intelligently and sometimes not—about whether this world exists. They practise scholasticism and delve into linguistic problems such as whether there is a difference between "being" and "existence." [64]

Popper's acceptance of objective reality is, however, on the one hand positivistically questionable—he says that realism is both unprovable and irrefutable—and on the other hand interwoven with motifs of objective idealism: the objectivity of knowledge and its objectivization, its separation from the knowing subject are interpreted in such a way that the "objective spirit" is placed "ontologically" as an independent world, is equated as existing in its epistemological dignity with the "physical world" and with the "world of consciousness" as a "third world." This "ontological" view of the objectivity of knowledge saves positivist dogma from having to state the unattainability of truth and subordinates Tarski's philosophically hypostatized semantic concept of truth under the revived Kantian principle; it rejects epistemologically the objectivity of knowledge, but at the same time dissolves the epistemological difference between objective reality and objective knowledge. In Popper's view, people produce theories in the same way as as bees produce honey. [65] The biological approach to epistemology has come to play a more marked role in Popper's philosophical views on theoretical knowledge: critical rationalism claims to be the adequate philosophy for the theoretical development of biology and thus lends an evolutionary appearance to its ahistorical and antihistoricist epistemology. [66]

With some advocates of critical rationalism (such as Topitsch, who leads an antimetaphysical. campaign) the ties to positivism are so obvious that the desired antipositivism of critical rationalism steps into the background. The adherents of this school, however, usually stress the alleged break with positivism and differences from the earlier forms: according to Agassi, "the antimetaphysical tradition is outdated"; [67] Hans Albert claims that critical rationalism represents a "realism which quite 'naively' assumes the lawful structure of reality and seeks to investigate these laws"; [68] Albert nevertheless considers one of the merits of critical rationalism to be that it radicalized Kant's criticism. [69] He points to the change in critical rationalism: following Popper, he downplays "all border problems" [70] (that is, the alleged separation between science and metaphysics).

The antinomies within critical rationalism are more obvious in the sharp philosophical controversies in West Germany than in

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England where Popper lived. In West Germany, the representatives of this school feel bound to prove continually that they oppose positivism. [71] However, their place in the philosophical spectrum clearly shows up the positivist essence of critical rationalism. In West German intellectual life, linguistic positivism was not able to gain a foothold and logical positivism has less influence than in England. Hence, the differences between critical rationalism and earlier versions of positivism are less visible, but in the debates, critical rationalism acts as the positivist pole. Also manifest is the contradiction between the claim of critical rationalism to be a total philosophy, and its view on critical reason, on its own philosophical content; critical rationalism advocates a critical reason which "has no claims to totality, neither in the theoretical nor in the practical field, neither for the explanation nor for the organization of social life." [72] Critical rationalism appears to give a reassuring answer to the embarrassing question put by all schools of contemporary bourgeois philosophy: "What do we need philosophy for?" [73] The idea of rationality, with which critical rationalism claims to go beyond positivism to set up a philosophy of the "technological age," is simply "methodical and regulative," in other words, it remains a part of positivism, but at the same time accepts the primary nature of a "creative spark" which is considered "a-rational"; [74] Albert even views critical rationalism as the "model for a way of life." [75] The elements borrowed from life philosophy, realism, and objective idealism limit and modify its positivist features but do not eliminate them [76] (critical rationalism continues to fight materialist dialectics with the argumentation of positivism). Critical rationalism tries to reestablish the philosophies of "life" and "being" within the frame of a modified and—compared to other bourgeois streams—open positivism; it does not overcome but reproduces the basic formular of the crisis of late-bourgeois philosophy.

NOTES

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Chapter Two: The Contemporary Crisis in Bourgeois Philosophy

1. Neo-Thomism presents an apparent, although not genuine, alternative to philosophical crisis consciousness. Its fate is tied to the political, ideological, and institutional crisis of the Catholic church. On the connection of this crisis with philo-

sophical interpretations of theology, see Robert Steigerwald, Marxism-Religion-Gegenwart, series Zur Kritik der bürgerlichen Ideologie, ed. Manfred Buhr, vol. 32 (Berlin, 1973). [—> main text]

2. W. Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze: Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (Munich, 1969), p. 283. Bohr's philosophical views were at one time also influenced by positivist ideas. [—> main text]

3. A. Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York, 1959), p. 342. [—> main text]

4. Heisenberg's argumentation is philosophically disputable; it points, however, to this tendency. He says that for elementary particles, which are "the last fundamental structures of matter, the attempt to formulate the natural laws determining these basic structures can start only from very general suppositions, where it is difficult to decide whether they are statements about the empirical behavior of the world, about forms of our thinking, or about the language with which we try to grasp the world. Thus they will be those fundamental assumptions which have always been part of the most important subjects of philosophical discussions." (W. Heisenberg "Grundlegende Voraussetzungen in der Physik der Elementarteilchen," in Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag Festschrift, ed. G. Neske, [Pfullingen, 1959], p. 291.) The older Heisenberg inclined toward Plato's conception of ideas; according to him, the false philosophical suppositions in physics stem from Democritus. See W. Heisenberg, "Was ist ein Elementarteilchen?" Die Naturwissenschaften, 63, No. 1 (1976). [—> main text]

5. Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, p. 183. [—> main text]

6. B. Russell, My Philosophical Development (London, 1959) , p. 139. [—> main text]

7. Hempel, like the older Carnap, considers the concept of the "unobservable" Seiende indispensable. (C. G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science [Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1966], pp. 74ff.) [—> main text]

8. H. Feigl, "Philosophy of Science," in Humanist Scholarship in America, ed. R. Schlatter (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.,, 1964), p. 530. For a recent discussion of the inadequacy of the concept of science in logical positivism, see also F. Suppe, "The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories," and S. Toulmin, "The Structure of Scientific Theories," in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. F. Suppe (Urbana, 1974). [—> main text]

9. F. Kaufmann stated in his summary of the history of logical positivism, with some self-irony, that the philosophical questions that logical positivism had declared to be pseudoproblems had not been eliminated, but continued to exist in logical positivism; Russell (during his positivist period) followed in Hume's footsteps, Poincaré took on a version of Kantianism, Wittgenstein was close to Russell, Carnap followed Poincaré. "Thus one might be tempted to conclude: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The philosophical problems of the old have not disappeared; they are only dressed in a new garb." (F. Kaufmann, "Basic Issues in Logical Positivism," in Philosophic Thought in France and the United States, ed. M. Farber [Albany, N. Y., 1968], pp. 574f.) [—> main text]

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10. G. Bergmann, "Logical Positivism, Language and the Reconstruction of Metaphysics," in The Linguistic Turn; G. Bergmann, The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism (New York, 1954). [—> main text]

11. A. J. Ayer et al., Revolution in Philosophy (London, 1956). [—> main text]

12. M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris, 1960), p. 198. [—> main text]

13. See the severe critique of the philosophy of ordinary language by the late Bertrand Russell, for example in his "Philosophical Analysis," Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, 12, No. 1 (1958). [—> main text]

14. G. Ryle, "Taking Sides in Philosophy," in Collected Essays, 1929-1968, Vol. II. of Collected Papers (London, 1971), pp. 153ff. [—> main text]

15. J. 0. Urmson, "The History of Philosophical Analysis," in The Linguistic Turn, pp. 284-93. [—> main text]

16. G. Ryle, "Ordinary Language," in Collected Essays, pp. 316f. See also Carnap's defence of logical positivism: "Intellectual Autobiography," in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill., 1963), p. 44. [—> main text]

17. See G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York, 1952), pp. 210ff., and J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, ed. by G. J. Warnock (Oxford, 1963). [—> main text]

18. G. Ryle, "The Verification Principle," in Collected Essays, pp. 287ff. [—> main text]

19. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, p. 4. [—> main text]

20. La philosophie analytique (Paris, 1962), p. 348. [—> main text]

21. L. Krauth, Die Philosophie Carnaps (Vienna 1970), p. 190. While Carnap believed also during the last phase of his work that "the crux of our earlier criticism of metaphysics remains," he added: "But in another respect our position has changed. Namely, some things that I used to reject as metaphysics, I would today see as a preliminary stage to science, for example the philosophy of the pre-Socratics." However, Carnap admitted in the same statement that philosophy is indispensable in and for the current specialized sciences, that it does not dissolve in them and that the philosophical problem of the categories cannot be ignored. "But even if we assume that the specialized scientist—with or without division of labor—takes over the basic problems of foundations in the particular field, there is still something left that probably needs to be called philosophy, namely, the problems of foundations of science that refer to very general concepts such as causality, time and space, which are used in many of the individual sciences. There, a field of foundations would remain, a field of foundations of science as a whole." (R. Carnap, "Andere Seiten der Philosophie: Aus einem Gespräch mit Willy Hochkeppel," in Club Voltaire: Jahrbuch für kritische Aufklärung, ed. G. Szczesny [Munich, 1967], III, 368ff.) [—> main text]

22. Urmson, "The History of Philosophical Analysis." [—> main text]

23. See also Ryle's comments in La philosophie analytique, p. 29. [—> main text]

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24. J. L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses," in Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1962), p. 130. [—> main text]

25. S. Hampshire, "Are All Philosophical Questions Questions of Language?" in The Linguistic Turn, pp. 292ff. [—> main text]

26. R. Rorty, "Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy," in The Linguistic Turn, p. 25. [—> main text]

27. R. Hare, "Philosophical Discoveries," in The Linguistic Turn, p. 206. [—> main text]

28. F. Waismann, The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, ed. R. Harre (London, 1965), p. 8. [—> main text]

29. F. Waismann, "How I See Philosophy," in Contemporary British Philosophy, Third Series (London, 1956), p. 470. [—> main text]

30. At the end of the fifties, Ayer complained that after the Second World War, instead of an "uncompromising positivism" of logical analysis "an approach to philosophy emerged which is empirical in the political sense, the sense in which Burke was a champion of empiricism. Generalizations are distrusted, particular examples are multiplied and carefully dissected.... Common sense reigns as a constitutional, if not an absolute, monarch, philosophical theories are put to the touchstone of the way in which words are actually used. The metaphysician is treated no longer as a criminal but as a patient: there may be good reasons why he says the strange things he does." (Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer [Glencoe, Ill., 1959], p. 8.) [—> main text]

31. Logical positivism and the philosophy of ordinary language do without philosophy, P. A. Schilpp wrote more than fifteen years ago. As regards social and political themes, positivism claims that "philosophy has no wisdom in these areas." (P. A. Schilpp, "The Abdication of Philosophy," Kant-Studien, 51, No. 4 [1959-1960], 482ff.) M. J. Adler wrote that analytical and linguistic philosophy does not go into primary problems, that while philosophy is seeking answers about that which is happening in the world, the analysts and linguists "restrict themselves to the plane of second-order questions—to the tasks of analyzing and clarifying the ways in which we think and speak and claim to know about that which happens in the world or what people should do and seek." According to Adler, philosophy's withdrawal from the field of first-order questions diminishes its educational and cultural importance to a point where it ceases to be anything more than a professional occupation, of interest only to highly skilled specialists. (Adler, The Conditions of Philosophy, pp. 63ff.) The objections to neopositivist antiphilosophy are heterogeneous: Schilpp charged that neopositivism as a philosophical current remains indifferent toward the dangers of a thermonuclear war, while M. J. Adler stressed, from his conservative viewpoint, that present bourgeois philosophy was insufficiently "constructive." [—> main text]

32. B. Juhos, "Formen des Positivismus," Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, 2 (1971), 28. [—> main text]

33. R. Kamitz, Positivismus, Befreiung vom Dogma (Munich, 1973). [—> main text]

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34. Ibid., p. 7. [—> main text]

35. "All 'positivist' argumentation against metaphysics is pointless. All metaphysical counter-argumentation is wrong." In this universal negative relativism the acceptance of the "metaphysics" of life philosophy comes to the fore insofar as scientific knowledge remains within the competence of logical positivism and the "foundation" for both science and nonscientific spheres is left to "metaphysics." "As again it is not possible to find a recognizable difference between metaphysical and nonmetaphysical insights, it must be said that all science is metaphysically founded. The expression 'metaphysics' can no doubt be avoided, but this does not actually change anything.... One can reject metaphysics, but then must not want to have a say anywhere." (W. Stegmüller, Metaphysik, Skepsis, Wissenschaft [West Berlin, 1969], pp. 452-54.) [—> main text]

36. A. J. Ayer, Metaphysics and Common Sense (London, 1968), pp. 60ff. See also Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy (London, 1973), pp. 89ff., and his reflections on changes in his philosophical attitudes in B. Magee, Modern British Philosophy (London, 1971), pp. 55ff. [—> main text]

37. P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London, 1959). See also Strawson's comments in Magee, Modern British Philosophy, pp. 116ff. [—> main text]

38. W. v. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Logico-Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 20ff. Quine and Strawson are hardly identical; on the difference see J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, 1966), pp. 531ff. On Strawson and Quine's dispute about the question of the relation between analytical and synthetic statements, see also: P. F. Strawson and H. P. Grice, " In Defence of a Dogma," in Problems in the Philosophy of Language, ed. T. M. Olshewsky (New York, 1969), pp. 417ff. [—> main text]

39. W. v. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), p. 26. [—> main text]

40. P. F. Strawson, "Carnap's Views on Constructed Systems Versus Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy," in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill., 1963), p. 518; P. F. Strawson, "Analyse, science et metaphysique," in La philosophie analytique, p. 118. See also Strawson on the older Wittgenstein: "Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations'," in his Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London, 1974), pp. 133ff. [—> main text]

41. "Analyse, science et metaphysique," p. 125. [—> main text]

42. "The metaphysician need pay no special attention to physical science, which Strawson scarcely mentions, for whatever would be of interest to him in the thinking of scientists can be as readily detected in the most commonplace thoughts of the most commonplace 'man in the street.' Nor is it the metaphysician's task to modify or correct the structure of commonplace thinking, any more than it is the ordinary language philosopher's task to correct commonplace idioms. Descriptive

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metaphysics, in Wittgenstein's phrase, 'leaves everything as it is."' (J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, pp. 517f.) [—> main text]

43. "Analyse, science et. metaphysique," p. 134. [—> main text]

44. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London, 1966), p. 230. [—> main text]

45. W. v. O. Quine, "La mythe de la signification," in La philosophie analytique, p. 140. See also W. v. O. Quine, Set Theory and its Logic (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 329. [—> main text]

46. La philosophie analytique, p. 342f. [—> main text]

47. W. v. O. Quine, Word and Object (New York, 1960), p. 271ff. "Given physical objects in general, the natural scientist is the man to decide about wombats and unicorns. Given classes or whatever other broad realm of objects the mathematician needs, it is for the mathematician to say whether in particular there are any given prime numbers or any cubic numbers that are sums of pairs of cubic numbers. On the other hand it is scrutiny of this uncritical acceptance of the realm of physical objects itself, or of classes, etc., that devolves upon ontology. Here is the task of making explicit what has been tacit, and precise what had been vague; of exposing and resolving paradoxes, smoothing kinks, looping off vestigial growth, clearing ontological slums." (Ibid., p. 275.) And the setting of "ontological relativity" remains caught up in a positivist attitude that fetishizes theory: "What makes sense is to say not what the objects of a theory are, absolutely speaking, but how one theory of objects is interpretable or reinterpretable in another." (Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 50.) Cf. R. Geuss, "Quine und die Unbestimmtheit der Ontologien," Neue Hefte für Philosophie, No. 8 (Gottingen, 1975). [—> main text]

[48. Note 48 missing from original text.] [—> main text]

49. Problems in the Philosophy of Science, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Amsterdam, 1968), pp. 161ff. [—> main text]

50. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, p. 44. [—> main text]

51. Grossner, Verfall der Philosophie, pp. 284f. [—> main text]

52. According to Popper's autobiography, his main problem was "to distinguish between science and pseudo-science." He sought criteria for the main assumption of his philosophical work, that Marxism is a pseudoscience. A decisive factor for the "problem of drawing a line" was that "following the collapse of the Austrian Empire, there had been a revolution in Austria; the air was full of revolutionary slogans, ideas, and new and often wild ideas." (K. R. Popper, "Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report," in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium, ed. C. A. Mace [London, 1957], pp. 155ff.) See also Popper's autobiographical reflections in: Grossner, Verfall der Philosophie, pp. 278f., and in K. Popper, "Intellectual Autobiography," in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, Ill., 1974), I, 23. [—> main text].

53. K.. Popper, "Ein Kriterium des empirischen Charakters theoretischer Systeme," Erkenntnis, 3 (1932-1933), 427. [—> main text]

54. K..R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1959), p. iii. [—> main text]

55. Ibid., p. 278. [—> main text]

56. O. Neurath, Empirische Soziologie: Der wissenschaftliche Gehalt der Geschichte und Nationalökonomie (Vienna, 1931). [—> main text]

57. Ibid., pp. 91ff. [—> main text]

58. On the connection between the "analytical" philosophy of history and the view taken by critical rationalism, see A. C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965). The attempts to find a hint of bourgeois social theory in the late philosophy of Wittgenstein (see Sprachanalyse und Soziologie: Die sozialwissenschaftliche Relevanz von Wittgenstein's Sprachphilosophie, ed. R. Wiggershaus [Frankfurt/Main, 1975]) largely link up with the life philosophy in Wittgenstein's thinking and tend, instead of accepting the positivistic overcoming of philosophy, toward reestablishing it demonstratively. (P. Winch, The Idea of Social Science [London, 1958].) [—> main text]

59. K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London, 1947), and The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957). [—> main text]

60. K. R. Popper, "'A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein," in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London, 1963), pp. 166ff. [—> main text]

61. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 357. [—> main text]

62. See the essays in Conjectures and Refutations in particular "The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science," "On the Status of Science and Metaphysics," and "The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics." [—> main text]

63. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 15. [—> main text]

64. K. R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford, 1972), pp. 32-33. Ibid., p. 286. [—> main text]

65. Ibid., p. 286. [—> main text]

66. Critical rationalism exercises a certain influence on some philosophical interpretations in the theoretical development of biology that confounds and relativizes epistemological realism with idealistic and antidialectical notions. Cf. J. Monod, Pref., La logique de la découverte scientifique by K. R. Popper (Paris, 1973); K. Lorenz, Die Rückseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens (Munich, 1973). [—> main text]

67. J. Agassi, "Scientific Problems and Their Roots in Metaphysics," in The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy: In Honor of Karl R. Popper, ed. M. Bunge (New York, 1964), pp. 192f. [—> main text]

68. H. Albert, Konstruktion und Kritik: Aufsätze zur Philosophic des kritischen Rationalismus (Hamburg, 1972), p. 365. [—> main text]

69. Ibid., pp. 18f. [—> main text]

70. In Grossner, Verfall der Philosophie, p. 191. [—> main text]

71. H. Albert, Traktat über kritische Vernunfit (Tübingen, 1969), p. x. [—> main text]

72. H . Albert, "Plädoyerfür einenkritischen Rationalismus," in Das 198. Jahrzehnt: Eine Team-Prognose für 1970 bis 1980, ed. C. Grossner et al. (Hamburg, 1969), p. 293. [—> main text]

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73. See H. Lenk, Philosophie im technologischen Zeitalter (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 9ff., and Wozu Philosophie? Eine Einfuhrung in Frage und Antwort (Munich, 1974). [—> main text]

74. Lenk, Philosophie im technologischen Zeitalter, p. 34. [—> main text]

75. "The rationality model of criticism is the draft of a way of life, of a social practice, and therefore has ethical, and beyond this, political significance." (H. Albert, Traktat über kritische Vernunft, p. 41, and Konstruktion und Kritik p. 220.) Helmut Spinner objects to Hans Albert's view of critical rationalism as the draft of a way of life on the basis of the same critical rationalism (Pluralismus als Erkenntnismodell [Frankfurt/ Main, 1974].) [—> main text]

76. Other changes in positivism occur on the level of attitude, of thought fragments, and negations that do not develop into philosophical theory. The positivist attitude is reproduced—and changed—through upheavals in theories and methods in the natural sciences. Positivist tendencies in line with such trends in scientific knowledge emerge in which empirical experience becomes detached from theory, or theory becomes independent, or in which attention is concentrated on form, structure, or function. Positivism attempts to replace philosophy verbally by the natural sciences or reduce it to them, but in actual fact this reduction is a philosophical interpretation of these sciences. [—> main text]

SOURCE: Gedö, András. Crisis Consciousness in Contemporary Philosophy. Translated by Salomea Genin; edited by Doris Grieser Marquit. Minneapolis: Marxist Educational Press, 1982. (Studies in Marxism; v. 11) [Original German edition: Philosophie der Krise. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1978.] Chapter Two, part one, pp. 20-34, plus endnotes (208-215).

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