Last night, I finished reading David Edmond’s book, the one subtitled The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, to which he gave the more sensational title, The Murder of Professor Schlick. Moritz Schlick was in his forties when he became the first leader of the vanguard movement later known as the Vienna Circle. He wasn’t murdered for that reason. The shooter was just an obsessed, crazy former student. It’s an occupational hazard.

Edmond’s book is really quite good, putting together the philosophic markers of this group, the political history they endured in common – and lastly the academic resettlements each had to make separately as stateless refugees from Vienna when the Nazis took the city.

As philosophers, they looked to identify truths as incontestable and free of human bias as could be found. For this reason, they urged that claims to truth or validity be restricted to those directly confirmable by sense experience or else those that followed from their premises consistently. By keeping speech and belief within these simple constraints, they hoped that nonsense could in future be expunged from the practice of philosophy.

It all seemed quite promising. What could go wrong? Well, the two great constraints left out all that we have reason to believe about the past. History fell out of meaningfulness. Also, all those features of the physical world that are too small to be perceived with our senses. Also probabilities. And of course judgments of character – in fact, most of the nuanced complexities of human experience. So much for the constraint that confined the truth-seeker to sense experience.

On the logical side, young Kurt Gödel gave a paper showing, as his colleague Rudolf Carnap noted, some “problems with the proof of consistency.” It was “his incompleteness finding” … “that whatever axioms were posited as the foundation blocks of mathematics, there would inevitably be some truths within mathematics that could not be proved.” 

These provisional frustrations paved the way for discoveries of other kinds and more fruitful ways of conceiving the work of the sciences. If foundational certainties had to be given up, clarity was not on that account lost.

There was one view on which they all agreed to the end of their days. Karl Popper (tangentially connected to the Circle) put it this way: “One has to read [German philosopher Martin Heidegger] … in the original to see what a swindler he was.” 

“Swindler” or no, Heidegger belonged to a current or lineage in philosophy whose aims and landscape were of quite a different kind. It had to do with a quality of mind or character for which the term “honesty” falls short. It gets the name of “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) and involves knowing how to avoid living at second-hand, how to escape a merely conventional life, how to get real, how to be solitary, how to face the boundaries of one’s existence, how to live deeply in awareness of one’s own eventual death.

Okay, fair enough. I’m not against any of that. But somewhere along what Heidegger called the solitary woodpaths of his life, in 1933 he joined the Nazi party, became Rector of the University of Freiburg, and removed the professorial status from Edmund Husserl, the philosopher (incidentally Jewish) who had been his mentor and secured Heidegger’s position as Husserl’s successor at Freiburg. By the way, the Nazism was sincere, not merely opportunistic. It was not diminished or discouraged by Hitler’s World War II defeat – as Heidegger’s posthumously published Black Notebooks (1931-1970) have revealed. Years after one of his students fled Germany, the former student recalled Heidegger entering the classroom door to announce, “Today class dismissed! The Fuhrer has spoken. Truth will not be the same for a thousand years!”

What shall we make of these all-too-broad contrasts, the Vienna Circle Certitudes on the one side, Heideggerian Authenticity on the other? After all, I too believe by experience that “authenticity” is not an empty or meaningless word – even though it’s unlikely to be captured by the scientific criteria so prized in the Vienna Circle. Life does present challenges that call for intuitive leaps and risks. There are even missteps that need to be lived through. Prudence – even intellectual prudence – can be overdone.

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That said, Heidegger’s betrayal of Husserl, his mentor and benefactor, is without precedent in the whole history of philosophy. Had philosophy got off to a start like that – instead of in the atmosphere of honor in which Plato held Socrates as his teacher, and Aristotle held Plato (though he differed from his teacher) – it would have sunk beneath the willed forgetfulness that covers ignominy.

What I honor in the young men and women of the Vienna Circle was their willingness to put their principles to the test of argument and to acknowledge refutation when it occurred. In this they followed the Socratic principle laid down in Athens long ago: 

Better to lose the argument

but win the truth –

than win the argument

but lose the truth.

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