Questions on Wittgenstein (Routledge Revivals)

Rudolf Haller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317686859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Wittgenstein, possibly the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, is often labelled a Neopositivist, a New-Kantian, even a Sceptic. Questions on Wittgenstein, first published in 1988, presents a selection of nine essays investigating a matter of vital philosophical importance: Wittgenstein's relationship to his Austrian predecessors and peers. The intention throughout is to determine the precise contours of Wittgenstein's own thought by situating it within its formative context.

Although it remains of particular interest to Anglo-Saxon philosophers, special familiarity with Austrian philosophy is required to appreciate the subtle and profound influence which this cultural and philosophical setting had on Wittgenstein's intellectual development. Professor Haller has spent his career exploring these themes, and is one of the foremost authorities on both Wittgenstein and contemporary Austrian philosophy.

Questions on Wittgenstein thus offers a unique insight into the twentieth-century tradition of Austrian philosophy, and its importance for Wittgenstein's thought.

1

Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy

Philosophical schools frequently arise in the emulation or imitation of a teacher whose power of conviction lies in his having asked new questions and often also in his having found or invented an adequate response to new methods of arguing. He succeeds in carrying over paradigm cases of such methods — to labour a theme of T.S. Kuhn — into the phase of normal science wherein their fundamental theoretical and methodological content will not be modified or called into question in any principal way. Modifications which manage to suggest themselves nonetheless are thereafter justified by appeal to the previously acknowledged authorities. And this is not so remarkable if one takes the view that from time immemorial mankind has found it easier to take on new ideas if these come to him in the guise of tradition, than in the awareness of a total break with existing forms of thought.

For this reason also philosophical currents deviating from familiar traditions, either by modifying them or even by seeking to bring them to an end, attempt to legitimate themselves through some tradition or other. And there is indeed a rational basis for this kind of search for historical justification, which may be seen in the empirical need for a cognitive tradition. Without such a tradition scientific research would be consigned to an eternally Sisyphean task, since it would repeatedly have to begin again from the start, with no recollection of its past.

The investigation of a school-tradition reduces in the end to the simple problem of giving a genetic account of a phenomenon of the history of ideas: ideas which determine present-day thinking. But let us turn from the question of historical legitimation back to the problem of our own time. Even if we are aware that no claims as to the truth of ideas can be derived from genetic considerations, still they occasionally help us to achieve a shift of the aspect in which thoughts, arguments and theories are experienced.

It is just such a shift of aspect that I treat in this present contribution to the history of the Brentano School, a movement which both initiated and defined the history of Austrian philosophy. It is against its background that one must understand the Vienna Circle, as I have already tried to show elsewhere.¹ That Wittgenstein is to be understood exclusively from this perspective, as some would argue (perhaps overstating their case), would yield a too one-sided picture of this great thinker. But that it is impossible to evaluate him adequately without this perspective seems to me of little doubt.

It is not my aim here however to investigate the genesis of Wittgenstein’s thought and the evolution of the Vienna Circle. I wish instead to defend two theses: first, that in the last 100 years there has taken place an independent development of a specifically Austrian philosophy, opposed to the philosophical currents of the remainder of the German-speaking world; and secondly that this development can sustain a genetic model which permits us to affirm an intrinsic homogeneity of Austrian philosophy up to the Vienna Circle and its descendants. In the treatment of such a topic a certain limitation is necessary, as also is a statement of the presupposition under which the thesis, which must naturally have the status of a hypothesis, is valid. This presupposition consists in the conviction that if they are to be influential and effective, philosophical ideas, like those of other disciplines, stand in need of institutionalisation. For many centuries the institutions of schools and universities formed the proper (most recently in fact the only) realm of historical influence, not only for this, the oldest of sciences, but indeed for practically all disciplines. It is only against this background that a continuous history of the republic of letters, whose geographical location is the totality of universities and their surrogates — academic chambers, editorial offices, salons — that an explanation of philosophical ideologies and of fashions in philosophical literature becomes possible. But then, precisely because institutions also act as a stabilising force, such that within them the winds of intellectual change blow less strongly than elsewhere, schools and higher institutes of learning not infrequently become the refuge of old and out-dated, petrified theories and traditions. What the obsolete and petrified taste of an established audience signifies for the daring and spirit of an artist protesting against traditional forms and contents, namely an icy lack of understanding or an angry resistance, is not infrequently proffered by the republic of scholars and by institutes of learning to completely ‘new’ scientific ideas and theories. The history of the arts, as of the sciences, is to a large extent nothing but a collection of examples of this relationship.

So much for presuppositions. As far as limitation is concerned, I shall, in what follows, limit myself only to certain especially important philosophers, without thereby wishing to deny that others could have been included besides those here mentioned, nor to suggest that only ‘important’ philosophers may have historical influences which are worthy of discussion.

The birth of Austrian philosophy can be seen to lie in the appearance of the Psychology from an empirical standpoint in the year 1874. In the same year its author, Franz Brentano (1838–1917), nephew of the romantic poet Clemens, and elder brother of the famous economist and politician Lujo Brentano, was called to the University of Vienna. In what respect can the Psychology from an empirical standpoint be conceived as signifying the terminus a quo of an independently Austrian development of philosophy? In what respect can a philosopher who attaches himself to Aristotle and recognises himself as his first master serve as forefather to champions of neopositivism who were to inscribe upon their banner the call of death to metaphysics? Can Brentano really belong here to the same extent as, say, the early positivist Ernst Mach? In the answer to this question we can anticipate a significant contribution to the solution of the problem in hand.² And the answer is at bottom a simple one, for Brentano’s philosophical programme was announced already in the fourth thesis of his Habilitation (1866): ‘Veraphilosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis esl’ (‘The true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences’). This involves a two-fold claim: first, that the separation of an empirical and a transcendental method proposed by Kant was to be revoked, in favour of the former; and secondly that with the bringing to end of the methodological separation, as for example within the hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey onward, scientific standards — in the strict sense of the natural sciences — should at all events be retained.

In Psychology from an empirical standpoint the epistemological foundation of an empirical psychology is laid down. In particular, a criterion is sought which would fix the distinction between psychical and physical. This criterion is that of intentionality. It asserts that we never conceive, judge, love or hate without conceiving something, judging something, loving or hating something. In short, that all psychical goings on are directed towards objects and that in their possession of this property psychical acts are distinguished from everything physical. In the words of Chish- olm, a contemporary interpreter of Brentano, ‘we can desire or think about horses that don’t exist, but we can ride on only those that do’.³ In other words, whilst intentional objects do not imply existent objects, intentional acts, like propositional attitudes, do imply intentional objects. Accordingly Brentano modifies also the traditional classification of the psychical acts of thinking, feeling, and willing, and proposes instead presentation and judgement as two fundamentally separate types of thinking, whilst the emotional acts of feeling and willing are not fundamentally distinguished from each other to the same extent, and are indeed conceived together in a single class of emotional acts. What distinguishes the methodology of Brentano and makes it capable of further development is the ‘research rule’ (F. Hillebrand), or — as one would say today — the ‘research programme’ (I. Lakatos), which underlies it. The injunctions commanded by this rule fall essentially into three: first, discipline; secondly, to carry out one’s research empirically and thus to conceive also the evidence of inner perception as a basic kind of fact-perception; thus, it is a consequence of this rule, according to the later Brentano, that the only mode of existence is that of real things. Thirdly the research rule enjoins the application of critical and analytical methods to language as a means of discovering and removing fictions and pseudo-problems from philosophy.

Granted that the Kantian tradition of speculative philosophy, too, was concerned to proceed scientifically, and granted also that Kant himself, like his successors, wished to warrant experience in that they investigated the conditions of its possibility, still there are two essential differences which can be made out from even a superficial comparison of the two traditions. Kant’s Copernican Revolution — that is, the derivation of the laws of nature from the laws of human understanding, of a transcendental subject — was a philosophical revolution which was not undergone by Austrian philosophers. Austrian philosophy is largely characterised indeed, in opposition to all transcendental and idealistic tendencies, by its realistic line.

This realism had already before the appearance of descriptive psychology attained an influence in the Austria of that time, in the form of Herbartianism and above all in the logical realism of the great Bernard Bolzano. Both Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) and Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) had been able to exert, through their students and especially in the mark which they made upon the method of teaching philosophy, a lasting influence upon the formation of the philosophical consciousness of the Austrian school. Herbart had inferred his realist theory of a world of subject-independent atoms from the impossibility of any coherent idealistic alternative, and had perceived the property of objecthood as inhering in concepts, which for him formed the exclusive objects of knowledge. But for Herbart who, like Bolzano, saw himself as belonging to the pre-Kantian tradition of Leibniz, these objects of knowledge must first be legitimised through critical analyses.

In the same way Bolzano, the important theorist and Vormärz social revolutionary thinker, presents his thought as standing in sharp opposition to Kant and the German idealists. He reveals his realism not only in that the does not interpret the opposition between the sensible and intelligible world in a subjective idealist way and in that he could regard time and space ‘by no means as forms of our sensibility’, but above all in his having laid the groundwork of logical realism. This is presented in his Theory of science (1837) which puts forward a conception of ideas and propositions in themselves resting on an account of meaning as an object independent of thought and speech, something which merits Bolzano’s title as grandfather of the modern foundation of logic.⁴ The modern conception of logical objects as this burst forth, on the one hand in the work of Gottlob Frege, the most important logician of recent times and, on the other hand, in the triumph over psychologism in logic achieved in Edmund Husserl’s Logical investigations (1900), is to be found in full clarity in Bolzano’s writings.

Thus it is not at all surprising that the work of this great thinker should have received a great deal of attention in the Brentano School, their appreciation of it having been further facilitated through Robert Zimmermann, a student of Bolzano who also taught in Vienna.

This will suffice as to the first of the essential differences. The second, as already stated, is a matter of methodology, since neither the method of ‘transcendental reductions’, nor that of ‘synthetic constructions’ gained admittance within the tradition of Austrian philosophy. Much more have investigations there been guided by the so-called inductive method of the natural sciences and by the methods of analysis and criticism of language. Thus while Kant and those who have followed in his wake seem largely to have ignored the problem of language, the philosophers of the Brentano School have, like the English empiricists (and indeed under their influence, particularly that of J.S. Mill), brought the necessity of an investigation of linguistic conditions into the very centre of their interests.

Brentano began, as we have stated, with the work of Aristotle. The modes of thought of linguistic analysis had been known and indeed familiar to him ever since his dissertation On the manifold sense of being in Aristotle. And of course the same line is revealed also in his concern with the works of J.S. Mill (1806–1873), whose Logic had an effect upon the philosophical community of the nineteenth century to an extent which even today has still not been adequately investigated. Whilst the idealistic philosophies influential in Germany had to infer the existence of a problem of language — the problem of the constitutive function of language for thought and for social interaction — largely from the pamphlets of their opponents, Austrian philosophy had, from the very beginning, been characterised, if not always by a tendency towards the analysis of language, still by an orientation towards its criticism.

After this short characterisation of its differences from the Kantian tradition it seems now to be appropriate to follow the historical currents which mark the rapid establishment of Brentano’s students in the universities of the old monarchy. Thus Anton Marty (1847–1914), the important philosopher of language, was called first of all to the newly-founded University of Czernowitz (1875) and subsequently to Prague (1880), where he remained until his death. Thomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) was likewise called ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy
• 2. Was Wittgenstein a Neopositivist?
• 3. Was Wittgenstein a Neo-Kantian?
• 4. Philosophy and the Critique of Language: Wittgenstein and Mauthner
• 5. Was Wittgenstein Influenced by Spengler?
• 6. What do Wittgenstein and Weininger have in Common?
• 7. Was Wittgenstein a Sceptic? or On the Differences Between Two 'Battle Cries'
• 8. The Common Behaviour of Mankind
• 9. Form of Life or Forms of Life? A Note on N. Garver's 'The Form of Life in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations'
• Bibliography
• Index