PHILOSOPHY

OF
HISTORY AND CULTURE
Series Editor

M ichael K rausz, Bryn M aw r College

Advisory Board

Annette Baier (University of Pittsburgh), C ora D iamond (University

of V irginia), William D ray (University of Ottawa), Nancy F raser
(N orthw estern University), Patrick G ardiner (Magdalen College,
Oxford), Clifford G eertz (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton),
Ernest G ellner (K ing’s College, Cambridge), Peter H acker (St.
J o h n ’s College, Oxford), Rom H arre (Linacre College, Oxford),
B ernard H arrison (University of Sussex), M artha N ussbaum (Brown
University), Leon P ompa (University of Birmingham), Jo sep h R az
(Balliol College, Oxford), Amelie O ksenberg R orty (Radcliffe Col­
lege), Georg H enrik V on W right (University of Helsinki)

V O L U M E 11
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY

GEORG HENRIK VON WRIGHT

B1BUOTECA
Mauricio D. T. do Valle

' / 6 8 ' '

E.J. B R ILL
LEIDEN • NEW YORK • KOLN
1993
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W right, G. H . von (Georg Henrik), 1916-

T h e tree o f knowledge and other essays / by G eorg Henrik von
Wright.
p. cm .— (Philosophy o f history and culture, ISSN 0922-6001;
v. 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9004097643
1. Philosophy, M odern— 20th century. 2. Analysis (Philosophy)
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Wright, G eorg Henrik von:

T he tree o f knowledge and other essays / by G eorg Henrik von
W right. — Leiden; N ew York; Koln: Brill, 1993
(Philosophy o f history and culture; Vol. 11)
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 C O N T EN TS

In tro d u ctio n ....................................................................................... 1

PAR T O N E
LO G IC AND P H IL O SO PH Y
IN T H E T W E N T IE T H C EN TU R Y

I Logic and Philosophy in the Tw entieth C e n tu ry ....... 7

II Analytic Philosophy. A Historico-Critical S u rv ey ...... 25
III Musil and M ach ................................................................. 53
IV Eino K aila’s M onism ........................................................ 62
V W ittgenstein and the Tw entieth Century .................... 83
VI A Pilgrim’s P ro g ress.......................................................... 103
V II A Philosophical Logician’s Itinerary ............................. 114

PA R T T W O
T H E T R E E O F K N O W LED G E

V III The Tree of Knowledge ................................................... 127

Three M yths ................................................................... 127
'O f Good and Evil’ ........................................................ 132
T he Tragedy of the Fire-Bringer ............................... 136
In League with the Devil ............................................ 143
Knowledge as a Form of Life ..................................... 151
IX H um anism and the H umanities ..................................... 155
X Images of Science and Forms of Rationality .............. 172
XI D ante between Ulysses and F a u s t................................. 193
X II T he M yth of Progress ....................................................... 202
X III Science, Reason, and Value ............................................ 229

Index ................................................................................................... 249

 IN TRO D U CTIO N

My intellectual life has developed in two separate groves. They

stem ultimately from my own inclinations and tem peram ent. But
their course has also been influenced by two powerful personalities
who had a major share in the formation of my character. They were
Eino K aila and Ludwig W ittgenstein. O f them too a similar dual­
ism may be said to have been characteristic. The present collection
of essays is m eant to illustrate it. This makes the collection also a
sort of Intellectual Autobiography.
I began my academic studies in Helsingfors (Helsinki) in the
mid-1930’s. This was the heyday of logical positivism. In K aila I
had a brilliant and charism atic teacher. He had been an associate
member of the V ienna Circle and brought to Finland the circle's
new philosophy, including the new logic. The atm osphere which
I imbued during my first years as a student soon lost its exciting
novelty. But it had grounded in me a lasting deep respect for the
type of rational thought which had found its fullest expression in
the mathematics and physics of the centuries from Descartes to
Einstein. The revived study of logic, above all, promised to infuse
philosophy too with the same spirit of exact rationality and thereby
opened up new vistas for the development of my chosen subject.
The Russell of Principia Matkematica and the W ittgenstein of the
Tractatus were the two heroes in philosophy whom I learnt to
worship in my youth.
These early experiences set the tune for my later professional
work as a philosopher. In the course of time my views have
broadened and often changed, but their development never took
the form of a drastic break with my own past. The labels ‘philo­
sophical logic’ and ‘analytical philosophy* seem to me to fit my
contributions to the subject well— in spite of the critical stand
which I, with age, have come to take on many things which
habitually fall under them.
The essays in the first part of the book relate to this grove in my
intellectual development. In two of the papers I take a synoptic
view of the areas in the thought of the century, viz. logic and
analytic philosophy, where I have been working myself— and in
iwo others I give a more personal account of my itineraries through
2 IN TR O D U C TIO N

those landscapes. There are also essays on some aspects of the

thought of K aila and W ittgenstein.
K aila expressly refused the label ‘analytic5 for- his work in phi­
losophy. To label W ittgenstein an ‘analytic philosopher’ not to say
a ‘logical positivist’ would be widely off the mark. But it would also
be quite wrong to think that W ittgenstein’s influence on logical
positivism and analytic philosophy had been due simply to a mis­
understanding. The two trends mentioned in philosophy have
something essential in common with his thinking, both in its early
and in its later phase.
But K aila as well as W ittgenstein also stood for something
different. This might be described as a ‘visionary’ rationality, ex­
pressive of a yearning for what in G erm an is called a Weltanschauung
and for understanding ‘the meaning of life’. This form of spiritual­
ity has found its perhaps highest manifestations in art and religion.
But one of its traditional outlets has surely been in philosophy—
from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and beyond.
From puberty on I had been strongly fascinated by this other
type of philosophy too. My interest was nourished, not only by
acquaintance with the great classics of the subject, but perhaps to
an even greater extent by my reading of fiction and poetry and of
history which had been the second main subject of my university
studies. To begin with, these interests of mine had a predom inantly
aesthetic and individualistic flavour. Political and social issues did
not much engage me as a young m an— although I could enjoy as a
spectator the panoram a which reading about them in books of
history presented. Concerns for ‘the state of the world’ did not
weigh heavily on me in my early years.
These interests of mine were difficult to cultivate in the climate of
the new ‘exactitude’ dem anded of philosophy by logic and the
advanced scientific thinking of the century. They found, in my case,
an outlet in writing of an essayistic nature w ithout either scholarly
of otherwise academic pretensions. Its aim was to clarify my
thoughts on subjects which I felt were im portant for me as a hum an
being rather than a professional academic. My prospective readers
I liked to think of as a circle of educated laymen and intellectuals of
a similar bent of mind and cultural background to my own. So it
has remained to the present day.
Fruits of my early occupations with the Weltanschauung aspects of
philosophy were in the first place four longish studies, consisting of
6-8 essays each. T heir subject m atters were: W erner Jaeg er’s
Paideia which had in Germ an the subtitle ‘Die Form ung des
griechischen M enschen’; the philosophies of history of Spengler
 IN TR O D U C TIO N 3

and Toynbee; Dostoyevsky’s novels; and Tolstoy’s frustrated efforts

to find his way to religion. T he only one of these studies which may
have some value beyond the pleasure which pastime reading
affords, is the one on Tolstoy. It is also the most personal of the
four. T he two great Russians have ever since continued to nourish
my thought.
The four studies were eventually collected in a book (in Swedish).
This was in the mid-1950’s. Its publication can be said to mark the
end of a period in my development. Soon after, a shift in my
interests took place. T he form of rational thought which I used to
regard as the highest in our culture was becoming increasingly
problematic because of the repercussions it had on life as a whole.
Scientific technology had, since the time of the first ‘industrial
revolution’, brought about great changes in the living conditions of
W estern man. This process was gradually leading to an integration
of the entire globe in a network of economic and political rela­
tionships. It also had a uniforming effect on the expectations and
ideals which men entertain about w hat constitutes ‘a good life’.
The ideals of progress through modernization had their sources in
the secularization of thought ultimately brought about by scien­
tific rationality. But were the effected changes in life-style, in the
longer run, more for the good than for the bad of man? In com bina­
tion with an explosive increase in world population they threatened
to impose a load on nature, i.e. the material basis of life, which
nature may not be able to sustain.
Doubts thus began to arise in me about those cultural values
which I had cherished since my youth. My first attem pt to articu­
late the doubts was the essay ‘The Tree of Knowledge’ which opens
the second part of this volume. In another paper from about the
same time, I gave them an ecological or environm entalist dim en­
sion related to a contrast between two attitudes to nature, viz. that
nature should be ‘followed’ and that it had to be ‘conquered’ or
‘subdued’. I associated the first with our Greek, the second with
our Judeo-C hristian cultural legacy. The paper would have been
called in English ‘N ature, M an, and the Scientific-Technological
Revolution’. It is not republished here. But its theme is echoed, a
quarter of a century later, in the two papers of this collection,
‘Images of Science’ and ‘Science, Reason, and V alue’.
My critical attitude to scientific rationality and its repercussions
on life reflected, particularly in its beginnings, not so much concern
about the future as curiosity about hum anity’s present station. I
know no better name for the intellectual efforts which this attitude
nourished than attempts at a diagnosis of our times. Similar ‘diagnostic’
4 IN TR O D U C TIO N

activities are known from many quarters in contemporary philos­

ophy, for example Hegelian-M arxist dialectics, the pardy M arxist
inspired Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and French struc­
turalism and post-structuralism . In the orbit of Anglo-American
cultural influence this type of thought has been much less
prominent,— and it seems intrinsically uncongenial to typically
analytic philosophy. My own position is certainly not tied to any
of the currents mentioned in w hat is sometimes misleading called
‘Continental philosophy’. It would be an understatem ent to say
that I am not acquainted with them, but an overstatem ent to call
me much influenced by any of them. As was also earlier the case,
the inspiration for my thinking has mainly come from literature
and history, and from accum ulated experience and impressions of
‘the world around m e’. This self-characterization partly accounts
for the fact that I have never tried to offer a theory about how the
phenom ena which were the objects of my thinking should be ex­
plained or interpreted. But perhaps one could speak of a method
which I have been using. It might be sketchily described as follows:
I focus on certain traits and trends which seem to me prom inent
and peculiar to our time. Then I subm it for consideration how
these traits have developed through history and which are the
forces under whose im pact the trends have acquired their present
strength. (It is here that science-based technology in combination
with a certain view of the m an-nature relationship enter the pic­
ture.) And, finally, I try to project the trends on to w hat I have
sometimes called "the screen of the future’ on the assumption that they
continue unbroken. From a study of the picture which appears on the
screen one may draw various evaluative conclusions and contem­
plate alternative futuristic scenarios consequent upon changes in
the present trends. But my faith is not strong in the possibilities of
changing the trends relying on the ‘m anagerial rationality’ which
was largely responsible for their coming into existence. For this,
forces are needed which I cannot fathom with my intellect.
In a sense, therefore, exploring the second grove in my intellec­
tual life has made me a critic of the form of rationality which has
been my moving force in the first grove. This has established a
relationship between the two groves which was initially missing. It
cannot, however, be said to have fused them into a uniform way of
doing philosophy. But perhaps my critique of the times has also
taught me a lesson of wholesome self-criticism.

August 1992 Georg Henrik von W right

 PART ONE

LO G IC AND P H IL O SO PH Y
IN T H E T W E N T IE T H C EN TU R Y
 I

LO G IC AND P H IL O SO PH Y
IN T H E T W E N T IE T H C EN TU R Y

In what follows I try to evaluate the place of logic in the philosophy

of our century. The attem pt is necessarily subjective. Its outcome
may be different depending upon w hether the evaluator is prim ar­
ily a logician or prim arily a philosopher. I think of myself as a
philosopher who, over a period of almost sixty years, has at close
quarters been watching and also, to some extent, participating in
the development of logic.
As I see things, the most distinctive feature of 20th century
philosophy has been the revival of logic and the fermenting role
which this has played in the overall development of the subject.
The revival dates from the turn of the century. Its entrance on the
philosophical stage was heralded by movements which had their
original centres at Cam bridge and in Vienna, and which later fused
and broadened to the m ultibranched current of thought known as
analytical philosophy. As the century is approaching its end we can
notice, I think, signs of decline in the influence of logic on develop­
ments in philosophy.
O ur era was not the first in history which saw logic rise to
prominence in philosophy. In the orbit of W estern civilization this
has happened at least twice before. First it happened in Ancient
Greece, in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. T he second great epoch of
logical culture was in the Christian M iddle Ages. This was con­
nected with the rediscovery of Aristotle mediated by the Arabs, and
it lasted, roughly, from the middle of the 12th to the middle of the
14th century.
In between the peaks logic ‘hibernated’. Its latest winter sleep
lasted nearly half a millennium— from the mid-fourteenth to the
mid-nineteenth century. In this period, there were also logicians of
great ability and power. The greatest of them was Leibniz. But his
influence as a logician on the philosophic climate of the time was
small. It was not until the beginning of our century, when Louis
8 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

C outurat published his La logique de Leibniz and a num ber of un­

edited fragments that Leibniz the logician was discovered.
Logic in the state of hibernation was respected for its past
achievements, but not thought capable of significant further de­
velopment. This attitude is epitomized in K an t’s well known dictum
that logic after Aristotle ‘keinen Schritt vorwarts hat tun konnen,
und also allem Ansehen nach geschlossen und vollendet zu sein
scheintV

W hat we nowadays commonly understand by ‘logic’ was not al­

ways referred to with that name.
Although the word derives from a Greek root, Aristotle did not
use it for w hat we think of as his works in logic. Initially, they had
no common label at all. The name for them, Organon (‘instrum ent’)
dates from the first century B.C.. The Stoics used, with some
consistency, the term dialectics for what we would call logical study.
This term was transm itted to the M iddle Ages through the Latin
tradition of late Antiquity. O ne of the earliest works which signal­
izes the revival of logic is A belard’s Dialectica. The same author,
however, also used the nam e io g ica’ which then became current
during the Golden Age of Scholasticism— only to yield ground once
more to the rival ‘dialectica’ in the period of the Renaissance.
Later, also the nam e ‘O rganon’ was revived.2 In German writings
of the 18th and 19th centuries the terms ‘V ernunfts-’ and ‘Wissen-
schaftslehre’ were largely used.3
For the rehabilitation of the name ‘logic’ the once influential
Logique ou Vart de penser (1662), also known as the Logic of Port
Royal, appears to have been of decisive importance. This revival,
however, was concurrent with a deprecation of the medieval tradi­
tion and with efforts to create something more in tune with the
emerging new science of nature. The logic of Port Royal is not ‘logic’
in our sense. It is more like what we would call ‘methodology’, an ‘aid
to thinking’ as the title says.
K ant, who thought Aristotelian logic incapable of development,

1 K ant, Kritik der reinen Vemunft, p. 7. (Pagination o f the second edition, 1787.)
2 M ost notably with Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620); later also with
Lambert’s Neucs Organon (1764); and once again with W illiam VVheweirs Novum
Organon Renovatum (1858).
* T hus, for exam ple, by Bolzano whose Wissenschajtslehre (1837) is one o f the
early precursors o f logic in its modern form.
 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY 9

wanted to renew the subject by creating what he called a transcen­

dental logic. This was to deal with ‘the origin, scope, and objective
validity’ of a priori or ‘purely rational’ knowledge.4 And Hegel who,
it is said,5 more than anybody else is responsible for the final
establishment of the term ‘logic’, says in so many words that the
time has come when the conceptions previously associated with the
subject ‘should completely vanish and the position of this science
(sc. logic) be utterly changed5.6
Hegel was not entirely unsuccessful in his reformist zeal. W hat
has since been known as Hegelian or dialectical logic has had a
foothold in philosophy up to the present day. But it is not this which
I had in mind when extolling the role of logic in contemporary
philosophic culture. Far from it!
It is characteristic of the terminological vacillations that when
the true logica rediviva entered the philosophic stage in the early
decades of our century, it too wanted to appear under a nam e of its
own. C outurat proposed for it the neologism logistique;7 in Germ an
it became Logistik. T he idea was to emphasize, not only its novelty,
but also its difference both from the corrupted logic of the im­
mediately preceding centuries and from the Aristotelian and the
Scholastic traditions thought obsolete.8 It was in this ‘spirit of
m odernity5 that I, for example, was trained in logic as a young
student. T h at the term ‘logistic5 never acquired wide currency in
English is probably due to the fact th at the plural form of the word
already had an established use with a different connotation in this
language.9 Instead, the attributes ‘m athem atical5 and ‘symbolic’
were long used to distinguish the new logic from its ancestral forms.

4 K ant, op. cit., p. 78.

5 Heinrich Scholz, Geschichte der Logik, p. 12. Junker und D unnhaupt, Berlin
1931.
6 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, T eil I, p. 36: ‘Allein— sind iiberhaupt die Vor-
stellungen au f denen der Begriff der Logik bisher beruhte, teils bereits unterge-
gangen, teils ist es Zeit, dass sie vollends verschwinden, dass der Standpunkt
dieser W issenschaft hoher gefasst werde und dass sie eine vollig veranderte G estalt
gew inne.’ (Q uoted from Werkausgabe, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am M ain
1969.)
7 Sec the article ‘Logistique* in Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la
philosophic.
8 W hitehead, in his Foreword to Q u in e’s early work A System ojLogistic (1934),
wrote: ‘In the m odem developm ent o f Logic, the traditional Aristotelian Logic
takes its place as a simplification o f the problem presented by the subject. In this
there is an analogy to arithmetic o f primitive tribes compared to m odem
m athem atics.’
9 Cf. comm ents on the term ‘logistic* in C .I. Lewis, .4 Survey o f Symbolic Logic
(1918), p. 3ff. Dover Publications, N ew York 1960.
10 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

In view of the confusion in terminology and multiplicity of trad i­

tions, it is necessary to say a few words about w hat I— and I believe
most of us modem s— understand by logic.
K ant appears to have been the first to use the term ‘formal’ for
logic in the tradition of Aristotle and the School.10 Logic studies the
structural aspects of the ratiocinative processes we call argum ent,
inference, or proof. It lays down rules forjudging the correctness of
the transition from premisses to conclusions— not rules forjudging
the truth of the premisses and conclusions themselves. This gives to
logic its formal character— and it was with a view to it that both
K ant and Hegel complained of the subject’s ‘barrenness5 and lack
of content.
T he ‘content’ of formal logical study are concepts, one could say.
Logic studies them, not in their external relation to the world, but
in their internal relationships of coherence or its opposite. This is
w hat we call ‘conceptual analysis’. In the simplest cases it takes the
form of Aristotelian definitions through specific differences within
proximate genera. In more complex and interesting cases it consists
of the construction of conceptual networks or ‘fields’, the structural
properties of which give meaning to the entities involved. Form al­
ized axiomatic systems are examples of such constructs. H ilbert
apdy called them ‘implicit definitions’.
T he study of inference and of meaning relations between con­
cepts are the two main pursuits of the discipline of logic. Some
would perhaps wish to separate the two aspects more sharply from
one another and distinguish them as ‘formal logic’ and ‘conceptual
analysis' respectively. Both attitudes can be justified. The fact re­
mains that it is the close alliance of the two aspects which has given
to philosophy in our century its strong ‘logical colouring’.

W hen one of the many subdivisions of philosophy— be it m eta­

physics or ethics or logic— assumes distinctive prominence, this is
usually connected with some other characteristic features of the
cultural physiognomy of the time. This holds also for the three
epochs in W estern culture when the study of logic excelled.
In the history of philosophy, the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.

10 Scholz, op. cit., p. 14. Kant, op. cit., p. 76ff.

 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY 11

succeeded the period usually nam ed after the Sophists. This had
been an era of childish delight in the newly discovered power of
wards (the X,6yoi) in the uses and misuses of arguments for settling
disputes in courts or in the market. T he challenge to reflect criti­
cally on these early eruptions of untam ed rationality gave rise to
the tradition in philosophy known as Socratic and, within it, to the
more specialized study of the forms of thought we call logic. This
was also the time of the first attem pts to systematize knowledge of
mathematics— as witness Eudoxos’ doctrine of proportions and the
pre-Euclidean efforts to axiomatize the elements of geometry.
The cultural setting in which medieval Scholasticism flourished
was very different. M athem atics and the study of nature were in
low waters. The rational efforts of the time were turned toward
elucidating and interpreting the logos of the Christian scriptures. In
its deteriorated forms this activity acquired a reputation for hair­
splitting. But it should be remembered that the ‘hairs’ split were
concepts and that their ‘splitting’, when skilfully done, was concep­
tual analysis of an acuteness which rivals the best achievements of
our century.
W ith the calamities which befell Europe in the 14th century, the
intellectual culture of the Christian M iddle Ages also declined.
Gradually, a new picture of the world and of m an’s place in it took
shape. It was based on the study of natural phenom ena and the use
of mathem atical tools for theorizing about them. Scholasticism fell
in disrepute, and on logic dawned the half-millennial slumber to
which we have already alluded.
W hat was the cause for the revival of logic in the late 19th
century? O ne might see it in the fact that W estern science had by
then reached a m aturity which made it ripe to reflect critically on
its own rational foundations. The organ of the new scientific world-
picture being mathematics, it was but natural that the reflexion
should start with people who were themselves prim arily m athe­
maticians like the two founding fathers of modern logic: Boole and
Frege.
Their respective approaches to the subject, however, were rather
different.11 Boole, like his contemporary' Augustus de M organ, was
concerned with the application of mathem atical tools to traditional
logic. Their trend was continued, among others, by Peirce and

11 T he difference is interestingly reflected in the titles of the works with which

they embarked on their respective tasks. Boole’s was called The Mathematical
Analysis o f Logic, Being an Essay towards a Calculus o f Deductive Reasoning. Frege’s
pioneering work had the title Begriffsschrift, tine der arithmetiscken nachgebitdete For-
melsprache des reinen Denkens.
12 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Schroder. Frege’s objective was different. He wanted to secure for

mathematics a foundation in pure logic. To this end he had not
only to revive but also to reshape it.

The revitalization of logic thus took its origin from foundation

research in mathematics.
The line first taken by Frege and then continued by Russell was,
however, but one of a number. In the light of later developments,
Frege’s and Russell’s approach is perhaps better characterized as
an attem pt to give to m athematics a set-theoretic foundation rather
than to derive m athematics from a basis in pure logic. C antor’s
figure looms heavily in the background of the logicists’ efforts.
A nother approach to the foundation problems was H ilbert’s
conception of mathematics as a family of axiomatized formal cal­
culi to be investigated for consistency, completeness, independence,
and other ‘perfection properties’ in a meta-mathematics. H ilbert’s
program is in certain ways a revival of Leibniz’s conception of a
calculus ratiocinator, operating within a characteristica universalis.
A third venture into the foundations of mathematics, finally, was
Brouwer’s intuitionism. It had forerunners in K ronecker’s con­
structivism and the ‘sem i-intuitionism’ of Borel and Poincare.
Brouwer’s view of the role of logic was very different both from that
of Frege and Russell and from that of H ilbert.12 The bitter polemics
between ‘intuitionists’ and ‘formalists’ bear witness to this. By
raising doubts about one of the cornerstones of traditional logic,
viz. the Law of Excluded Third (or M iddle), Brouwer and his
followers were also pioneers of what is nowadays known as Deviant
or N on-Standard or Non-Classical Logic(s).
Logicism, formalism, and intuitionism were the three main
schools which, rivals among themselves, dom inated the stage d u r­
ing what I propose to call ‘the heroic age’ in the reborn study of
logic. It lasted about half a century, from Frege’s Begriffsschrift
(1879) and Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) to the appearance of the
first volume of H ilbert’s and Bernay’s m onum ental Grundlagen der
Mathematik in 1934. As one who was brought up in the afterm ath of
this era, I cannot but look back on it with a certain am ount of
nostalgia. It came to an end in a dram atic climax. I shall shortly

12 A contemporary account o f the state of foundation research in m athem atics,

still very worth reading is A. H eyting’s Mathematische Grundlagmforschung, ln-
tuitionismus, Beweistheorie, Julius Springer, Berlin 1934.
 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY 13

return to this. But first, we must take a look at the more im mediate
repercussions on philosophy which the new logic had had.

In earlier days it used to be said that logic studies ‘the laws of

thought’. This had been the title of Boole’s magnum opus. But it was
also said that logic was not concerned with (the laws of) psycho­
logical thought processes. So what aspect of thought did logic study
then? One could answer: the articulation o f thought in language. Lan­
guage is, so to speak, the raw material with which logic works. (The
Greek logos means, ambiguously, both speech and ratiocination.) A
time when logic holds a place in the foreground of philosophy is
also one in whose intellectual culture language is bound to be
prominent.
This is eminently true of the Golden Age of logic in antiquity.
The Sophist movement had been an outburst of exuberant delight
in the discovery of language as logosy i.e. as an instrum ent of
argument, persuasion, and proof. T he disciplines of logic and of
gram m ar were the twin offsprings of this attitude.
The logic of the School, too, has been described as a Sprachlogik or
logic of language.13 An excessive interest in the linguistic leg-
pulling known as ‘sophism ata’ seems to have been a contributory
cause of the disrepute into which Scholasticism fell in its later days.
The ‘linguistic turn’,14 which philosophy has taken in our cen­
tury, has become commonplace. So much so that one may feel
tempted to view logic as one offshoot among many of the study of
language, other branches being theoretical linguistics, com puter
science, and the study of artificial intelligence and information
processing. But this would be a distortion of the historical perspec­
tive. Unlike what was the case with the Ancients, with whom logic
grew out of an interest in language, it was the revival of logic which,
with us, made language central to philosophy. Here Frege’s work
became a seminal influence. But it is noteworthy that Frege the
philosopher of language was ‘discovered’ very much later than
Frege the philosopher of logic. This renaissance of Frege’s influence
and of Fregean studies took place only with ‘the turn to sem antics’
in logic in the mid-century.
13 The term presum ably first used by M artin Grabm ann in his renowned work
Geschichte der scholastischen Methode I—II, Freiburg i B. 1909-1911.
14 The phrase borrowed from the title o f Richard Rorty’s book The Linguistic
Turn, Chicago 1967. Rorty attributes the invention o f die phrase to Gustav
Bergmann.
14 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

H ilbert’s concern with the language fragments we call calculi did

not much influence developments in the philosophy of language.15
Nor did Brouwer’s work do this directly. But Brouwer’s attack on
formalism is, interestingly, also a critique of lahguage as an ar­
ticulation of the intuitions underlying m athem atical thinking. W ith
his thoughts on the limits of language as well as with some other
ideas of his, Brouwer is a precursor of the philosopher who, more
than anybody else, has contributed to making language a m ajor
concern of contem porary thinking.

Even though W ittgenstein never adhered to the logicist position in

the philosophy of m athematics, he stands in the Tractatus firmly on
the shoulders of Frege and Russell. T he place of this book in the
picture we are here drawing is peculiar.
It would be quite wrong to think of W ittgenstein’s contribution
to logic as limited to the discovery of the truth-table method for
propositional logic and the conception of logical truths as truth-
functional tautologies. (The truth-table idea has a long tradition
going back way before W ittgenstein.)
Foremostly, Tractatus is an inquiry into the possibility of lan­
guage. How can signs mean? T he answer W ittgenstein gave was his
picture theory about the isomorphic reflection of the configurations
of things in the world, in the configurations of names (words) in the
sentence. The essence of language is the essence of the world— their
common logical form. This, however, is veiled by the gram m atical
surface structure of actual speech. The logical deep structure of
language is a postulated ideal which shows itself in meaningful
discourse but which, since presupposed, cannot be itself described
in language.
If we abstract from the peculiarities, not to say eccentricities, of
the picture theory and the mysticism of the saying-showing distinc­
tion, the Tractatus view of logic reflects w hat I think are common
and deep-rooted conceptions of the nature of logical form, neces­
sity, and truth. Indirect confirmation of this may be seen in the

15 I would conjecture, however, that W ittgenstein’s notion o f ‘language game*

and his ideas from the early 1930*s o f language as calculus have a remote source o f
inspiration in the influence o f Hilbertian formalism on the discussions about logic
and the philosophy o f m athem atics am ong members o f the V ienna Circle. Cf.
Ludwig Wittgenstein und dtr Wiener Kreis. Gesprdche, aufgezeichnet von Friedrich Wais-
mann. Aus dem N achlass herausgegeben von B.F. M cG uinness. In: Ludwig Wittgen­
stein, Schriften 3, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am M ain 1967.
 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY 15

coolness, and even hostility, with which logicians and m athem ati­
cians, until recently, have received the partly devastating criticism
to which W ittgenstein later subm itted, not only his own earlier
views of logic, but foundation research in general.
The ‘metaphysics of logic’— as I would like to call it—of the
Tractatus has survived and, moreover, experienced revivals in more
recent times. I am thinking of developments in linguistic theory
and in the partly computer-inspired philosophy of mind repre­
sented by cognitive science and the study of artificial intelligence.
The ‘never-never language’16 which W ittgenstein had postulated
in order to explain how language, as we have it, is possible, has
been resurrected in equally speculative ideas about innate gram ­
matical structures or about an ineffable language of thought (‘men-
talese5), deemed necessary for explaining the child’s ability to
assimilate with the language community where it belongs. Chom s­
ky’s revived grammaire universelle or ‘Cartesian linguistics’ is another
‘crystalline structure’ of the kind W ittgenstein in the Tractatus had
postulated for logic.17
For these reasons alone, I think that W ittgenstein’s criticism has
a message worthy of attention also for contem porary philosophy of
language and philosophy of mind. The similarity between the
Tractatus views and these latter day phenom ena has not escaped
notice.18 But it has, so far, hardly been deservedly evaluated from a
critical point of view.19 T he present situation in cognitive and
linguistic research offers interesting parallels to the search for
‘foundations’ which earlier in the century made logic central to the
philosophy of m athematics, and which reached what I would call
its self-defeating climax in W ittgenstein’s Tractatus.

‘Every philosophical problem ’, Russell wrote on the eve of the First

World W ar, ‘when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and
purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or

16 T he phrase was invented by the late Professor M ax Black. See his A Compan­
ion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 11. Cambridge University Press, Cam bridge 1964.
17 W ittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953), § 107: ‘Die Kristallen-
reinheit de Logik hatte sich mir ja nicht ergeben, sondern sie war eine Forderung.’
18 See R .M . M cD onough, The Argument o f the 'Tractatus1. Its Relevance to Contem­
porary Theories of Logic, Language, Mind, and Philosophical Truth. State U niversity o f
New York Press, Albany, N .Y . 1986. Particularly pp. 172-183.
19 T he best attem pt known to me o f such critical evaluation is that o f Norman
M alcolm . See in particular his book Nothing is Hidden, Wittgenstein’s Criticism o f His
Early Thought, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986.
16 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

else to be— logical.’20 But he also said that the type of philosophy he
was advocating and which had ‘crept into philosophy through the
critical scrutiny of m athem atics’ had ‘not as yet many whole­
hearted adherents’.21 In this respect a great change was brought
about in the post-war decades by the movement known as logical
positivism, stem m ing from the activities of the W iener Kreis
and some kindred groups of science-oriented philosophers and
philosophy-oriented scientists in Central Europe. O ne saw a new
era dawning in the intellectual history of man when philosophy too,
at long last, had attained den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft.
According to an influential formulation by Carnap, philosophy was to
become the logical syntax of the language of science. This was an extreme
position and was in origin associated with views, inherited from earlier
positivist and sensualist philosophy, of how a logical constitution of
reality, a logischer Aufbau der Welt, was to be accomplished.
It is nowadays commonplace to declare logical positivism dead
and gone. It should be remembered, however, that the movement
was conquered and superseded largely thanks to self-criticism gen­
erated in its own circle. This combination of self-destruction
with self-development is perhaps unique in the history of thought.
At least I know no com parable case. As a result, a narrow concep­
tion of philosophy as the logic of science gradually gave place to a
conception of it as logical analysis of all forms of discourse. For a
ju st assessment of logical positivism, it is necessary to see the
movement as the fountain-head which eventually grew into the
broad current of analytic philosophy with its multifarious bifurca­
tions. No one would deny that this has been a m ainstream — I
should even say the mainstream — of philosophy in our century. It is
in these facts about its origins: first with foundation research in
mathematics, and then with the extension of the use of logical tools
to the conceptual analysis of scientific and, eventually, also every­
day language, that 1 found my claim that logic has been the
distinctive hallmark of philosophy in our era.

W hat I called the heroic age in the history of modern logic came to
an end in the 1930’s. The turn to a new era22 was marked by two

20 Russell, Our Knowledge o f the External World, As a Field fo r Scientific Method in

Philosophy (1914), p. 42. Q uoted from the edition by Allen & Unwin, London,
1949.
21 Russell, op. ciL, p. 14.
22 On this turn and its rcpercussions on foundation research in mathematics,
 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY 17

events, themselves of ‘heroic’ magnitude. The one was Godel’s

discovery of the incompleteness properties of formalized calculi; the
second Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. T here is, moreover, an
intrinsic connection between the two achievements.23
Godel’s incompleteness theorem had serious repercussions on
the formalist program of axiomatization, consistency proof, and
decidability. It set limits to the idea, ultimately of Leibnizian
origin, of the formalization of all ratiocinative thought in syntactic
structures and of reasoning as a jeu de characteres, a game of signs
ignoring their meaning. The related achievement of Tarski m eant a
transcendence of the syntactic point of view and its supplem enta­
tion by a semantic one. Therewith it made the relation of language
structure to language meaning am enable to exact treatm ent. T he
immensely fertile field of model theory is an outgrowth of this
opening up of the semantic dimension of logic. For its further
investigation, Tarski’s later work was also of decisive, seminal
importance. His pioneering role is in no way minimized by the fact
that, seen in the perspective of history, basic ideas in model theory
go back to the earlier work of Skolem and Lowenheim.
Godel’s im pact on the formalist program, although devastating
for the more ambitious, philosophic aspirations of the H ilbert
school, also greatly furthered its less am bitious aims. Proof-theory
crystallized in the arithm etization of m etam athem atics and in the
theory of com putable and recursive functions.
Something similar happened to the line in logic stemming from
Frege and Russell and continued through the 1930’s, most con­
spicuously in the work of the young Quine. The antinomies turned
out to be a more serious stumbling block than it had seemed after
the early efforts of Russell’s to conquer the difficulties which had
threatened to wreck Frege’s system. The semantic antinomies, like
the Liar, required extensions beyond type-theory which in none of
their suggested forms can be said to have gained universal recogni­
tion. The sought for basis of m athematics in pure logic gradually
took the shape of a foundation in set-theory. Set-theory, being itself
a controversial branch of mathematics, gave prominence to another
challenge, viz. that of clarifying the axiomatic and conceptual
foundations of C antor’s paradise. Even though the difficulties
which the logicist approach encountered can be said to have ruined

see the excellent account by Andrzej M ostowski, Thirty Years o f Foundation Studies,
Lectures on the Development o f Mathematical Logic and the Study o f the Foundations o f
Mathematics in 1930-1964. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1966.
23 Tarski, ‘Der Wahrheitsbegrijf in den formalisierten Sprachen\ Studia Philosophica /,
1935. Postscript (N achwort), p. 404f.
18 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

the original aspirations of its initiators, this heir to their program

remains, in my opinion, the philosophically most challenging
aspect of foundation research in m athem atics today. Not surpri­
singly Godel, the perhaps most philosophic-minded m athem atical
logician of the century, devoted his later efforts mainly to work in
this area.
The third mainstream in the early foundation research, in­
tuitionism, also changed its course. In 1930 Heyting codified, in a
formal system, the logical rules which were thought acceptable
from the intuitionist point of view. Thereby he created an instru­
ment which has turned out to be very useful in the m athem atical
study of proof, and thus for vindicating that p art of H ilbert’s
program which remained unaffected by Godel’s discoveries. In
view o f the acrimony which once em bittered the fight between
formalists and intuitionists and not least the relations between the
founders of the two schools,24 their reconciliation in the later de­
velopments of proof-theoretic study may even appear a little ironic.
Brouwer himself was of the opinion that no system of formal
rules can encompass the entire range of m athem atically sound
intuitions. He could therefore not attach great im portance to Heyt-
ing’s achievement. O f GodePs results he is reported to have said
that their gist had been obvious to him long before Godel presented
his proofs.25
In his rebuttal of the idea th at logic could provide a foundation
for mathematics, Brouwer can be said to anticipate the attitude of
the later W ittgenstein. W ittgenstein also shared the constructivist
leanings of the intuitionists and their critical reflection on some
basic principles of classical logic.
The change of climate in logic after the 1930’s I would describe
as a ‘disenchantm ent’ (Entzauberung) in M ax W eber’s sense. W hen
the grand dream s and visions of the formalist, intuitionist, and
logicist schools had lost their philosophic fascination, w hat
remained and grew out of them was sober, solid science. T he dis­
cipline which had been the mother of the new logic, viz. mathematics,
took back its offspring to its sheltered home.
The homecoming did not fail to raise suspicions am ong the
settled members of the family, however. Early in the century,
Poincare had objected to the logisticiens, that they pretended to give

24 Cf. H eyting, op. cit., p. 53f. Also D . van D alen, ‘T he War o f the Frogs and
the M ice, or the Crisis o f the Mathematische Annalen' The Mathematical Intelligence 12,
1990.
25 H ao W ang, Reflections on Kurt Godel, p. 57 and p. 88. T h e M IT Press;
Cam bridge, M ass. 1987.
 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY 19

‘wings* (ailes) to m athematics but had in fact provided it only with

a ‘hand-rail’ (lisiere) and, moreover, not a very reliable one.26 O n
my first encounter with Tarski a few years after the war, Tarski told
me of the difficulties and frustrations he had experienced trying to
make m athem atical logic respected in the mathem atics departm ent
at Berkeley. I recall something similar from the mathem atical
establishment in my own country in the form of complaints that
some of the most promising students had left the subject and
migrated to philosophy. Now, forty years or more later, this atti­
tude no longer prevails in the mathem atical profession, except
maybe in corners of the world not yet much touched by modern
developments.

10

W hen viewing the history of modern logic as a process of ‘rational

disenchantm ent’ in areas of conceptual crisis or confusion, one is
entitled to the judgem ent that the most exciting development in
logical theory after the second world war has been the rebirth of
modal logic. The study of modal concepts had flourished in the
Aristotelian tradition— not only with its founder, but also with its
medieval continuation. In the renaissance starting with Boole and
Frege, this study, however, long remained neglected. W hen even­
tually it was revived in the work of Lukasiewicz and C .I. Lewis, its
rebirth was something of a miscarriage. This was so because it took
the form of a critique of Russellian logic. M odal logic was thought
of as a ‘non-classical’ alternative or even rival to it.
It was only with the conception of modal logic, not as an alterna­
tive to Russell’s but rather as a ‘superstructure’ standing on its
basis, that the logical study of modalities got a good start in modern
times. This conception did not gain ground until after the second
world war, although it had had precursors in the 1930’s with God el
and Feys.
A result of the new start was something that could be called a
General Theory of Modality. Instead of ‘General T heory5 one
could also speak of a family of related ‘logics’ of a similar formal
structure. These offshoots of an old stem of traditional modal logic
have become known as epistemic, doxastic, prohairetic, deontic,
and interrogative logic. Historical research has revealed ancestors
of many of them either in ancient and medieval logic or with
76 Poincar6, Science et Mitode (1909), p. 193f. T he references are to the Edition
Flamarion, Paris 1924, Cf. also Russell, op. cit., p. 68.
20 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

Leibniz, this prodigious logical genius, whose seeds mainly fell in

the barren soil of his own time.
One thing which has made the study of modal concepts con­
troversial is that it problematized one of the basic principles of
logic—it too of Leibnizian ancestry— known as the law of intersub-
stitutivity salva veritate of identities. Such substitutivity in sentential
contexts is the hallm ark of what is known as extenionality in logic. A
system of logic which disputes or limits the validity of Leibniz’s
principle is called intensional. M odal logic may therefore be re­
garded as a province within the broader study of intensional logic.
Already Frege had draw n attention to limits of extensionality in
doxastic and epistemic contexts. Formal operations in intensional
contexts, particularly the use in them of quantifiers, have seemed
doubtful and unsound to many logicians of a conservative bent of
mind. Above all, Quine has been an acute and staunch critic of
modal and other forms of intensional logic. But his criticism has
also been a challenge and source of inspiration for a younger
generation of logicians, partly following in Q uine’s footsteps, to
clear the jungle of modal and intensional concepts and make their
study respectable. To this has contributed the invention of the very
powerful techniques known as possible worlds semantics. The
Leibnizian echo in the name is not mere accident.
With these later developments the study of modal and intensional
logic has become progressively less ‘philosophical’ and technically
more refined. Another process o f ‘disenchantm ent’ is taking place,
an initially controversial subject being handed over by philoso­
phically-minded logicians to logically-minded mathem aticians.

11

M odal logic, also intensional logic in general, is still in some

quarters called ‘non-classical’. There is no received view of what
should count as ‘classical’, or not, in logic. As long as modal logic
was regarded as an alternative to some already canonized structure,
the name might have been justified. But modal logic is not an
‘alternative’ to the logic systematized by Frege and Russell— at
least not to that part of it which is known as first order logic and
which consists of the two layers of the propositional and the predi­
cate calculus.
A way of distinguishing classical from non-classical logic, which
cuts deeper both historically and systematically, is the following:
Classical logic accepts as unrestrictedly valid the two basic princi­
ples, first stated by Aristotle and subsequently known as the Law of
 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY 21

(Excluded) Contradiction and Law of Excluded M iddle (or Third).

Both are also fundam ental in the logic of Frege and Russell. To
question the one or the other is tantam ount to doubting the division
of what is sometimes called logical space in two jointly exhaustive
and mutually exclusive parts.
Doubts about the exhaustive nature of the partition were already
entertained by the founding father of logic himself. (Yet I do not
think it right to interpret Aristotle’s discussion of the ‘Sea-Battle
Problem’ in the ninth chapter of Peri Hermeneias as a denial of the
universal validity of the tertium non datur.) The same doubts reap­
peared in the M iddle Ages— together with groping attem pts to
construct a many-valued logic for coping with them. W ithin mod­
em logic these efforts were renewed by Lukasiewicz. His grand
vision of polyvalent logic as a generalization of classical logic did
not turn out as fertile as its originator had imagined it to be. The
idea of polyvalence has useful technical applications. But the con­
ception of it as a grating of logical space finer than the true-false
dichotomy encounters interpretational difficulties. It is therefore
doubtful whether many-valued logic should even count as non-
classical in the sense which I have in mind here.
A more consequential onslaught on the Law of Excluded T hird
and some other ‘classical’ ideas associated with it, such as the
Principle of Double Negation, came from Brouwer and the in­
tuitionists. As already noted, formalized intuitionist logic has
turned out to be a useful conceptual tool for proof-theoretic study.
It provides the logical backbone for a constructivist approach to the
notion of existence in m athematics and is also helpful for efforts to
clarify the concept of the actual infinite. To count with truth-value
‘gaps’ has becomc standard in many fields of formal study where
one deals with concepts of restricted definability or of an open
texture. The Law of Excluded M iddle can hardly any longer be
regarded as a controversial topic in the philosophy of logic.
More firm and less assailed, until recently, has been the second
pillar of classical logic, the Law of Contradiction, which prohibits
truth-value ‘overlaps’. Therefore, doubts about it, once they are
raised, cut much deeper into the foundations of logic than doubts
relating to the tertium non datur.
In fact, already Aristotle realized th at there might be problems
here. First among the modem s to see the possibility of a non-
classical opening were Lukasiewicz and the Russian Vasiliev.27

57 N .A. Vasiliev, Voobrezaemaja Logika, Izbrannyt Trudy, Ed. by V .A . Smirnov.

Nauka, M oscow 1989.
22 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Throughout the history of thought, antinomies have been a

headache of philosophers— and since the origin of set-theory also
of m athem aticians. Antinom ies exemplify seemingly im peccable
logical inference term inating in conclusions contradicting each
other. If this is thought unacceptable, one has to look for some error
in the reasoning—and lay down rules for how to avoid the calam ­
ity. This was w hat Russell did with his Type-Theory and Vicious
Circle Principle.
Moreover, the appearance of a contradiction in a context of
reasoning, such as for example an axiomatic system, seems to have
the vitiating consequence of making everything derivable within
the system, thus trivializing or, as one also says, ‘exploding’ it.
H ilbert’s efforts were pardy aimed at proving th at sound systems
are im mune to such disasters. This presupposed th at the logic of
the meta-proofs has the required immunity. H ilbert saw a w arrant
of this in what he called the finite Einstellung (‘finitist stand’), allow­
ing only finite Schlussweisen.
Another way of meeting the challenge presented by contradic­
tions is to scrutinize the idea of logical consequence itself. C ontra­
dictions may have to be rejected as false, but must they have the
catastrophic consequences which ‘classical’ logic seems to allow by
virtue of what is sometimes referred to as Duns Scotus’ Law after
the doctor subtilis of the School? Efforts to modify the classical view of
logical consequence or entailm ent have been the motivating force
behind the venture called Relevance Logic. A more recent and
more radical step in the same direction is known as Paraconsistent
Logic. One of its aims is to show how contradictions can be
‘accom m odated’ within contexts of reasoning without fear of triv-
ialization or collapse.
These non-classical developments in logic, of the past decades,
have found an unexpected, but I think not very trustw orthy, ally in
Dialectical Logic, ultimately of Hegelian inspiration. The best one
can hope for is that the treatm ent of dialectics with the formal tools
of paraconsistent and related ‘deviant’ logics will contribute to a
demystification of those features of it which have made it little
palatable to rational understanding. A similar service which these
new tools may render is that of reducing to its right proportions
what W ittgenstein called ‘the superstitious dread and veneration
by mathem aticians in face of contradiction’.28

28 W ittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations o f Mathematics, Third Edition, Basil

Blackwell, Oxford 1978, p. 122. In German: ‘D ie aberglaubige Angst und
Verehrung der M athem atiker vor dem W iderspruch.’
 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY 23

J u st as classical logic, i.e. the logic of Frege and Russell, can

be called the sub-structure on which stand the several branches
of modal and intensional logic— in a similar way the two main
varieties of non-classical logic: the intuitionist-like ones which
adm it truth-value gaps and the paraconsistent-like ones which
adm it truth-value overlaps, will serve as sub-structures from
which a variety of alternative epistemic, deontic and other logics
will grow out and be further cultivated. But these developments are
still in early infancy.

12

I have tried to review the development of logic in this century as a

gradual progress from the philosophic fascination of a foundation
crisis in mathematics and the confusions excited by the rediscovery
of fields of study long lying fallow to increased clarity, exactness,
and conceptual sobriety. But logic thus transformed ceases to be
philosophy and becomes science. It either melts into one of the old
sciences or contributes to the formation of a new one. W hat hap­
pened to logic was that it fused with the multifarious study of
m athematics, but also with newcomers on the scientific stage such
as com puter science and cognitive study, cybernetics and informa­
tion theory, general linguistics— all being fields with a strong
mathem atical slant.
Transformations of parts of philosophy into independent bran­
ches of scientific study are well known from history. T he phe­
nomenon has gained for philosophy the name ‘m other of the
sciences’. Physics was born of natural philosophy; in some English
and Scottish universities it still bears that name. The second half of
the 19th century witnessed the birth of psychology and sociology
through a transformation of predom inantly speculative thinking
into experimental and empirical research. In our century some­
thing similar happened with logic.29
Already in the early days of the developments which we have
here been following, Russell wrote: ‘M athem atical logic— is not
directly of philosophical im portance except in its beginnings.
After the beginnings, it belongs rather to m athematics than to

29 In a well-known sim ile, John Langshaw Austin compared this process to

philosophy perpetually being ‘kicked upstairs’— and he envisaged that his own
endeavours would result in the birth o f an independent descriptive study o f
conceptual features o f linguistic uses, in a "linguistic phenom enology’. J.L . Austin,
lIfs and C ans’, Proceedings o f the British, Academy, V ol. X L II, Oxford U niversity
Press, Oxford 1956.
24 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

philosophy.’30 And in an unpublished typescript of W ittgenstein’s

we read: ‘Die formale Logik— ein Teil der M athem atik.’31
Philosophy, I would say, thrives in the twilight of unclarity,
confusion and crisis in fields which in their ‘norm al’ state do not
bewilder those who cultivate them or cause excitement in their
intellectual surroundings. From time to time, however, philosophic
storms will occur even in the seemingly calmest of waters. We can
be certain that there will always remain obscure corners in logic
too, thus assuring for it a perm anent place among the concerns of
philosophers. And I can well imagine that individual thinkers will
find in logic the raw material for bold metaphysical constructions.
As an example m ight be cited Godel’s conceptual realism with
echos of Plato and Leibniz. But it seems to me unlikely that logic
will continue to play the prom inent role in the overall picture of
an epoch’s philosophy which it has held in the century now
approaching its end. This will be so partly because of logic’s own
success in integrating itself into the neighbouring sciences ju st
mentioned. But it will also be due to the rise on the philosophical
horizon of new clouds calling for the philosophers’ attention and
craving for clarification.
Big shifts in the centre of philosophy signalize changes in the
general cultural atmosphere which in their turn reflect changes in
political, economic and social conditions. The optimistic mood and
belief in progress, fostered by scientific and technological develop­
ments, which has been our inheritance from the time of the Enlight­
enment, is giving way to a sombre mood of self-critical scrutiny of
the achievements and foundation of our civilization. No attem pt to
survey the overall situation in contemporary philosophy can fail to
notice this and to ponder over its significance.
I shall not try to predict what will be the leading trends in the
philosophy of the first century of the 2000’s. But I think they will be
markedly different from what they have been in this century, and
that logic will not be one of them. If I am right, the twentieth
century will even clearer than now stand out as another Golden
Age of Logic in the history of those protean forms of hum an
spirituality we call Philosophy.

30 Russell, op. cit., p. 50.

31 W ittgenstein, T S 219. W ittgenstein’s relegation o f Formal logic to m athem a­
tics is not in conflict with the fact that he calls his own investigations in philosophy
‘logical*. T he adjective then means roughly the same as conceptual or, in W ittgen­
stein’s som ewhat excentric terminology, grammatical.
 II

ANALYTICAL PH IL O S O P H Y
A H IS T O R IC O -C R IT IC A L SURVEY

O f the main trends in the philosophy of our century the one named
‘analytical’ is the most typical of the spiritual climate of the time. It
is also the current which has spread most widely over the globe.
This is due to its alliance with the two forces which more than any
other have stamped contemporary civilization: science and tech­
nology.
1 am aware of an element of subjectivity in my evaluation. It is
no doubt tainted both by my experiences and by my personal taste.
In what follows I shall try to give it a rational justification. This
will be done by means of an examination of the historical origin of
the trend and the development of some conflicting tendencies in­
herent in it from the beginning.
Seen in a longer perspective, analytic philosophy continues the
tradition of the European Enlightenment. Not without reason has
its perhaps greatest representative, Bertrand Russell, been com­
pared to Voltaire. W hen it first appeared on the philosophical
stage, however, it was in opposition to another current of thought
which also stemmed from the Enlightenment. This was the idealist
tradition in philosophy. A landm ark in the break with the past was
G.E. M oore’s paper ‘T he Refutation of Idealism ’ which appeared
in 1903.
W hen the new philosophy, in the decades between the two
World W ars, made its breakthrough on a broad front, it professed
to be a great upheaval, a profound revolution in thinking. This time
is now long past. In the second half of the century, analytic philoso­
phy has acquired features typical of an established or received
tradition of thought. Its characteristic profile has faded; it has
become increasingly eclectic. Its identity threatens to go astray.
Simultaneously with this, the climate of opinion has changed.
The form of rationality represented by science and technology has
become problematic due to its repercussions on society and the
living conditions of men. Analytic philosophy, itself an offspring
of belief in progress through science, appears inherently incapable
of coping with these problem s. The task lies rath er with other
types of philosophy, different from and often critical of the analytic
current.
26 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

In the confusing situation of its identity crisis, it is befitting to

subject analytic philosophy to a historico-critical scrutiny. The
history of the movement has not yet been written in full. W ith its
increased diversification, it becomes pertinent to try to identify its
most essential features and distinguish them from later additions
which are alien to its origins.
In the last volume of the pre-war mouthpiece of logical positiv­
ism, the periodical Erkenntnis, there are two papers which are
im portant for our present undertaking. The first is by Friedrich
W aism ann and is called ‘Was ist logische Analyse?’ (W hat is
logical analysis?) T he author writes:
‘Philosophie und W issenschaft sind zwei grundverschiedene
Typen menschlicher Geisteshaltung.— Der wissenschaftliche Geist
sucht nach Erkenntnis, d.h. nach Satzen, die wahr sind, die mit der
Wirklichkeit ikbereinstimmen. A uf einer hoheren Stufe erhebt er
sich zur Bildung von Theorien.— W as m an durch die Philosophie
gewinnen kann, ist ein Zuwachs innerer K larheit. Das Resultat
einer philosophischen l)berlegung sind nicht Satze, sondern das
K larwerden von Satzen’.1
Behind these words lies a view according to which there is a clear
and sharp difference between philosophy on the one hand and
science on the other. It is a view which W ittgenstein had expressed
in the Tractatusy and to which he stuck throughout the changes
which his philosophy later underwent. This conception has also
from the beginning stam ped my way of thinking about philosophy.
The same, however, is by no means the case with all those who call
themselves analytic philosophers— whether in the past or at the
present time. Among philosophers of this denom ination both types
of intellectual attitude, as distinguished by W aism ann, have been
represented— sometimes in open opposition to one another, some­
times in a non-reflective alliance. For this reason, analytic philoso­
phy has, almost from the beginning, been loaded with latent
contradictions which in the end had to become manifest, thus
destroying the unity of the movement. How this happened, we shall
see presently.

1 W aismann, p. 265. In English: ‘Philosophy and Science are two fundam en­
tally different attitudes o f the human mind. — The scientific mind seeks knowl­
edge, i.e. propositions which are true, agree with reality. O n a higher level it
ascends to the formation o f theories. — Through philosophy one can gain in­
creased inner clarity. T h e result o fp h ilosop h ic reasoning is not propositions, but
the clarification o f propositions’. (Transl. by G H vW .)
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 27

The second of the two papers in the last pre-war volume of

Erkenntnis is entitled ‘Relations between Logical Positivism and the
Cam bridge School of Analysis’. Its author is M ax Black. It is a
meritorious first attem pt to draw attention to the two-fold roots of
the new philosophy and their peculiar characteristics, the root in
Vienna and the one in Cambridge. T he author is also aware of the
contrast between the two attitudes to the nature of philosophy
which have prevailed among analytic philosophers.

Im portant currents in the history of thought have often originated

from roughly contem porary beginnings in different corners of the
learned world. We have already indicated that this holds good of
the analytic current in philosophy. For purposes of characterization
it is useful, however, to localize the actual birth of the movement to
a definite place and time: Cam bridge at the turn of the century, and
to regard as its founders two men of outstanding stature: Bertrand
Russell and George Edward Moore. T he two philosophers in­
fluenced and inspired each other. It was Moore, younger by one
year, who incited Russell to revolt against K antian and Hegelian
idealism and who paved the way to a new platform in philosophy.
At the same time, the two were very different. A good deal of the
tensions inherent in the movement can be traced to the difference
between these two men— including the tension between the two
‘grundverschiedene Typen menschlicher G eisteshaltung’ distin­
guished by W aism ann.
Russell’s search in philosophy, one could say, was for unshake-
able knowledge of truth. This holds true both for his early occupa­
tions with logic and m athematics and for his late efforts to deal with
H um e’s doubts about induction. In this regard he can aptly be
compared to Descartes. Like the French philosopher, Russell first
saw the paragon of indubitable knowledge in mathematics. But
proof in mathematics proceeded from axioms, and they could be
doubted. This insight took Russell to logic. As he testifies in one of
his several autobiographies, his participation in the international
congress of philosophy in Paris in the year 1900 was of decisive
im portance to his development.2 There he met Peano and became

Russell 1944, p. 12: ‘T he most im portant year in my intellectual life was the
year 1900, and the most im portant event in this year was my visit to the Interna­
tional Congress o f Philosophy in Paris.’
28 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

acquainted with the Italian school of foundation research in

m athematics. As we know, the long term fruits of this meeting were
contributions to logic—first in The Principles o f Mathematics and
then, together with W hitehead, in Principia Mathematica— which
rank with the highest in the history of this discipline.
It is perhaps futile, but at the same time inviting, to speculate
whether logic would have come to occupy the cem ral place which it
has undoubtedly held in the philosophy of our century, had it not
been for Russell’s contributions to it and his view of logic as the
essence of philosophy.3 The new logic had been, in the first place, a
concern of m athem aticians rath er than of professional philos­
ophers. W ould one, for example, ever had come to realize that one
of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century was a professor of
mathematics in Jena? Russell generously says4 that Frege was the
first to use the method of logical analysis for dealing with problems
of philosophy. In the light of developments which really got under
way only in the second half of this century, it would not be in­
appropriate to see in Frege the actual ‘founding father’ of analytic
philosophy— and to regard Russell as a follower of Frege, rather
than Frege as a forerunner of Russell. But it is doubtful whether,
without Russell, one would ever have been tempted to accord this
position to Frege.
Russell’s search for sure knowledge had taken him to logic. As
providing a foundation for m athematics, logic was the most un­
assailable of sciences. And as constituting the core of philosophy, it
promised to give to philosophy too, at long last, the certainty and
exactitude of a science. In the book of his which perhaps better
than any other reflects this attitude, Our Knowledge o f the External
World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, Russell wrote:
‘Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and
achieved fewer results than any other branch of learning— I believe
that the time has now arrived when this unsatisfactory state of
things can be brought to an end.’5 And in an essay from the 1920’s
he said that philosophy is ‘essentially one with science, differing
from the special sciences only by the generality of its problem s’.6
From the standpoint of the distinction made by W aism ann, Russell
represents the scientific rather than the philosophic attitude of

3 Russell 1914, p. 42.

4 Ibid., p. 7.
5 Ibid., p. 13.
6 Russell 1928, p. 71. H e continues: T h e new Philosophy conceives that all
knowledge is scientific knowledge, to be ascertained and proved by the methods of
science.’
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 29

mind (Geisteshaltung). The same is true—or so I believe— of the

great majority of those philosophers who still think of themselves as
‘analytic’. M any of them would probably wish to dismiss Wais-
m ann’s distinction as unduly simplifying or even as altogether
misconceived.

Russell’s quest had been for certainty. Moore thought he already

possessed it. In his famous paper ‘A Defense of Common Sense’ he
listed a num ber of things which he m aintained th at he knew for
sure. For example, that he was a hum an being, th at he had a body,
that he had never been on the moon, that the world had existed a
long, long time before he was born, etc., etc.
Knowledge of these truths was not the fruit of philosophic reflec­
tion, nor of scientific investigation. T he truths in question were
‘common knowledge’. But they entailed im portant philosophic con­
sequences. T h at Moore has a body implies that there are material
things. W ith this Moore thought he could prove the existence of an
external world independent of his consciousness. In another
famous paper of his, the British Academy lecture of the year 1939,
he gave the proof in the form of a pathetic gesture, holding up his
two hands and assuring his audience th at they exemplified two
things belonging to the external world. As W ittgenstein once
observed, only a philosopher of M oore’s seriousness and intellec­
tual stature could have presented this ‘proof’ to a learned assembly
without thereby making himself ridiculous.
M oore’s ‘proof’ is, of course, no proof. But one could say that it
expresses a certain attitude to the problems of philosophy, an
attitude with which I sympathize myself and which also, though in
a different guise, is known from W ittgenstein’s way of thinking.
One could try to describe it as follows:
Philosophical views which deny things we all take for granted—
also the philosophers when they do not philosophize— must be
rejected as absurd or senseless. Examples of such views are that
there does not exist an external world independent of our mind, or
that everything which exists is material, or that, strictly speaking,
one cannot know anything with certainty, or that no m an could
ever have acted differently from the way he did. These are the
theses advocated by the philosophical idealists, materialists, scep­
tics, and determinists. Since they conflict with things we are sure
about in daily life and ordinary discourse, they are preposterous.
30 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

As they stand, they have to be rejected, even w ithout argum ent.

T h at there are material objects, but also things other than m aterial
ones, that we ‘really know* a good many truths, or th at we often, if
not always, could have acted differently— all that, and many other
things which some philosophers have disputed, m ust be accepted
as fact.
W ith this, however, philosophizing about such m atters has not
come to an end. O f that Moore was completely clear. The problem,
however, is not with the truth of the common sense opinions and
statements, but with their meaning. W hat does it mean that there is
an external world independent of my consciousness, or that I have
a free will? To answer such questions is the task of analysis.
It is tem pting here to parody one of M oore’s examples. M oore
said he knew that hens lay eggs.7 H e had not the slightest doubt
that this was not so. But w hat it means that hens lay eggs, he had not
been able to figure out. A considerable p art of M oore’s analytical
work in philosophy consists in efforts to clarify how things and
events in the m aterial (physical) world— such as the laying of eggs
by hens— are related to our perceptions of them (the sense data).
These aspects of his thinking, however, do not concern us here.
T he distinction between questions of truth and questions of
meaning is of crucial im portance for understanding w hat is specific
not only to M oore’s philosophy but to the whole analytic move­
ment. The set task of analysis in philosophy is to clarify the m ean­
ing of sentences (statem ents). However, even though the truth or
falsehood of the statements analysed is not at stake for the philos­
opher, one is entitled to ask whether his analysis of them is correct
or not. W hat decides this? The nature of and criteria for correctness
of the results of analysis is itself a philosophic problem. I do not
know the solution to it, and I shall not try to penetrate it myself in
this paper.8

Both Russell and M oore were em phatic about the ‘analytic’ nature
of their philosophy.9 Russell seems to have been the first to speak of

7 M oore 1905, pp. 65ff. (Reference to reprint in Philosophical Studies, 1922.)

8 I have m ade an effort to do so in my ‘Intellectual A utobiography’ in von
Wright 1989, pp. 42—54. But I am little satisfied with my endeavours to reach
clarity in the matter.
9 T his is also true o f their younger contem porary, Frank Ram sey, as w itnessed
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 31

logical analysis as a ‘m ethod'.10 In one of his later autobiographies

he wrote: ‘Ever since I abandoned the philosophy of K an t and
Hegel, I have sought solutions to philosophical problems by means
of analysis; and I remain firmly persuaded— that only by analyzing
is progress possible.’11 The progress thus attained, he says, is ‘the
same kind of advance as was introduced into physics by Galileo’.12
Russell, however, did not have much to say about the nature and
peculiarities of the new method. He did not contribute to its prob-
lematization. Moore was more aware of problems here.13 But what
he had to say about them is not very illuminating. His well-known
example ‘a brother is a male sibling’ is a good illustration of
analysis, i.e. the splitting up of a concept into components, but
completely void of philosophical interest.
In the paper by Waismann, already mentioned, we read: ‘Analyse
bedeutet Zerlegung, Zergliederung. Logische Analyse scheint also
zu bedeuten: Zerlegung eines Gedankens bis in seine letzten logis-
chen Elemente. U nd hier schweben uns nun allzu leicht Analogien
aus verschiedenen anderen Gebieten vor: Sowie der Physiker das
weisse Licht durch ein Prisma zerlegt—wie der Chemiker eine
Substanz analysiert— ungefahr so stellt m an sich das Geschaft
eines Philosophen vor: er soli die Struktur eines Gedankens, seinen
logischen Bau bloss legen.’14
Russell’s celebrated theory of definite descriptions is often cited
as a prototype of a philosophically significant analysis.15 Let us take
a look at it here:
According to Russell’s theory, as is well-known, the sentence
‘Scott is the author of W averley’ means the same as ‘T here is an x
such that x is author of Waverley and, for allj; it is true that, \iy is
author of Waverley, t h e n j is identical with Scott’.
W hat can we learn from this? First of all, that a sentence of the
simple subject-predicate grammatical form can have a much more

by^ numerous passages in Ramsey 1991.

*° See Russell 1914, p. 7 and passim.
1 Russell 1959, p. 14.
j* Russell 1914, p. 14.
13 See the two papers ‘W hat is Analysis?’ and T h e Justification o f A nalysis’ in
M oore 1966.
4 ‘Analysis means decom posing, dism em bering. 'Logical analysis’ thus seems
to mean: splitting up a thought into its ultim ate logical com ponents. And here we
all too easily come to think o f analogies from other fields: Ju st as the physicist
decom poses white light through a prism— as the chem ist analyses a stuff— roughly
like this does one im agine the business o f a philosopher: his task is to disclose the
structure o f a thought, lay bare its logical build.’
15 Ramsey 1931, p. 263: ‘— that paradigm o f philosophy, R ussell’s theory o f
descriptions’.
32 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

complex logical form. The gram m atical build of a sentence does not
necessarily reflect its logical structure. And secondly, that logically
im portant concepts may be implicit in a sentence without appear­
ing as words of the sentence. Thus in the sentence ‘Scott is the
author of W averley’ are concealed the notions of existence (‘there
is’), of universality (‘all’), of conditionality (‘if-then’), and also of
identity. Analysis makes these latent ingredients manifest.
We are not here interested in the philosophical problems which
Russell’s theory was designed to solve, nor with the question
w hether his suggested analysis is correct. There are rival theories
about the same topic. Russell’s analysis interests us here only as a
maximally impressive example of w hat could be called the logical
grammar of a given linguistic expression. As such a paradigm it also
deeply impressed the philosopher, who more than anybody else
contributed to making the new way of philosophizing represented
by Russell and Moore a world-wide movement.

No one could deny that W ittgenstein has been of decisive im port­

ance to the development of analytical philosophy, both as author of
the Tractatus and as author of the Investigations. W hether W ittgen­
stein himself can be rightly called an analytical philosopher is quite
another question. O f the Investigations one might say that its spirit is
alien and even hostile to the typically ‘analytic’ approach. The
Tractatus, on the other hand, may in some ways be regarded as a
paragon of the analytic trend in philosophy, especially in the form
this trend had assumed with Russell and was later carried forward
by the members of the Vienna Circle. The later W ittgenstein
exhibits some affinities to Moore.
The fundam ental problem of W ittgenstein’s Tractatus is, I would
say, the following: How can linguistic signs stand in a meaning-
relation to the world? O r shorter: How is language possible? The
answer is W ittgenstein’s view of language as a picture of reality.
W hat W ittgenstein calls an elementary sentence (Elementarsatz)
consists of names which represent things in the world and the m utual
relations of which in the sentence picture the m utual relations or
configurations of those things in a possible state of affairs. All
meaningful sentences other than the elementary ones are so-called
truth-functions of elementary sentences.
T hings are the substance of the world. The possible relations o f
things in states o f affairs and the corresponding possible relations o f
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 33

names in meaningful sentences constitute the logical form, the

essence, of the world. Thus the essence of language and the essence
of the world are one.
W ittgenstein’s view presupposes a two-fold analysis of the sen­
tences of a language. First, one m ust be able to analyze, decompose
the elementary sentences into names the concatenation of which in
the sentence corresponds to a possible configuration of things in the
world. Secondly, one must be able to exhibit all other meaningful
sentences in the form of truth-functions of the elementary ones.
In writings immediately before and after the publication of the
Tractatus, Russell expressed similar views of the logic of language
and therewith the world. For his view he coined the telling name
logical atomism. A logico-atomistic conception has been characteris­
tic of much that goes under the nam e of analytic philosophy. O ne
might even regard it as belonging essentially to this type of thinking.
This does not entail acceptance of the picture theory of language. It
has had relatively little influence on later developm ents.16
It is a peculiarity of W ittgenstein’s philosophy of language in the
Tractatus that one cannot give examples of elementary sentences
and of names— and therewith also not of things in the world. This
feature is connected with other peculiarities of this deeply ‘m eta­
physical’ work. Not only is the logical form often concealed by the
gramm atical forms o f ‘language as it is’, as illustrated by Russell’s
theory of definite descriptions. It is also in principle impossible to
describe this form in language itself. W ittgenstein’s ideal language
has therefore aptly been called a ‘never-never-language’.17 T he
‘crystalline stru ctu re’ of the logic of language shows itself in
meaningful speech, but it cannot be said to have this or that form.
In the Preface to his book W ittgenstein says that the problems of
philosophy rest ‘on the m isunderstanding of the logic of our lan­
guage’. When one has a clear grasp of this logic, as it shows itself in
meaningful use of language, the philosophic problems will dis­
appear. The problems of philosophy are thus pseudoproblems.
They cannot be solved— only dissolved. In philosophy one cannot
put forward theses for or against which one can argue. For exam­
ple, that there exists an external world, is not, strictly speaking, a
position which one can try to defend with the arguments of realists
or to refute with the argum ents of idealists.

16 An exception is the Finnish philosopher Erik Stenius who with interesting

arguments defended a version o f the picture theory o f language. See Stenius 1960.
7 Black 1964, p. 11. Black also calls it a lingua abscorukta (ibid.).
34 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

T he author of the Tractatus thought that he had disposed with the

problems of philosophy once and for all. Having completed his
book, he withdrew into intellectual solitude. Philosophically, C am ­
bridge was the place where the book was at home. This situation
would probably have lasted for a much longer time, had the book
not fallen in the hands of Moritz Schlick and some of his colleagues
in Vienna.
Schlick had in 1922 been invited from Kiel to take the Viennese
chair once held by Ernst M ach. Round Schlick soon gathered a
circle of people. Tow ards the end of the decade it introduced itself
to a broader public with a manifesto under the nam e ‘Der W iener
Kreis der wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung*. The members of the
circle were not ‘pure5philosophers, but had all been working also in
one or other of the special sciences.18 Common to them was a
scientifically grounded, anti-m etaphysical attitude in philosophy.
In this they were not unique in Europe. Circles with a similar
scientific-philosophic orientation existed in Prague, Lwow (Lem­
berg), W arsaw and other university towns in C entral Europe,
including Berlin. There was also lively contact between the circles.
In their fight against idealism, the Cam bridge analysts saw
themselves as allies of other neo-realist trends in philosophy round
the turn of the centuries. The people of the V ienna Circle, on the
other hand, viewed themselves as followers and continuators o f the
positivism of the 19th century particularly in the form it had
assumed with M ach, and were thus ‘idealistically’ rather than
‘realistically’ tainted. The philosophic position of the circle, p arti­
cularly in the beginning, could summarily be characterized as a
positivism enriched with the instrum ents created by the new logic.
The combination is reflected in the nam e ‘logical positivism’ which
became the label for the movement, particularly in the English
speaking world. T he name was not an invention of the circle itself.
Its origin seem to be the tides of two books appearing in Scandina­
via: Der logistische Neupositivismus by Eino K aila (1930) and Logisti-
scher Positivismus by Ake Petzall (1931).
T he Cam bridge variety of analytical philosophy had a two-fold
root, one with M oore and another one with Russell. O ne can
discern a similar dualism in the movement stem m ing from V ienna
with its two most eminent representatives, S c h lic k and C arnap.
The second is in many ways a follower and continuer of the work of

18 Wissemchaftlicht, Weltauffassung, p. 13.

 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 35

Russell. He m ust himself have been very well aware of this. Schlick
is more akin to Moore. But above all he was under the influence of
W ittgenstein. ‘The greatest genius of all times in logic’ he called
him .19 O f Tractatus he said that he was firmly convinced it was by
far the most im portant work in the philosophy of our era. He adds:
‘Die Tragweite seiner Gedanken ist in W ahrheit unermasslich; wer
sie wirklich verstehend in sich aufnimmt, muss in philosophischer
Hinsicht sofort verwandelt sein. Die neuen Einsichten sind fur das
Schicksal der Philosophic schlechthin entscheidend.’20
W hat Schlick took over from W ittgenstein was, in the first place,
the view of philosophy as an activity, the aim of which is to make
clear the meaning of sentences. In his famous opening paper in the
first issue of Erkenntnis> ‘Die Wende der Philosophie’ (The Turning
Point in Philosophy) Schlick wrote: ‘D urch die Philosophie werden
Satze geklart, durch die Wissenschaft verifiziert. Bei dieser handelt
es sich um die W ahrheit von Aussagen, bei jen er aber darum , was
die Aussagen eigentlich meinen.’21 This separation of questions of
truth from questions of meaning, which also marks a distinction
between science and philosophy, is the same contrast as the one to
which W aism ann gave expression in his article from the eve of the
second G reat W ar when the circle had already ceased to exist and
its members been scattered with the winds. The distinctions stem
directly from W ittgenstein, but one can also discern in them a
distant echo of the voice of Moore.
Philosophic activity attains its end when it makes the problem
disappear, vanish. Since philosophy, unlike the sciences, has no
specific subject m atter of its own, the disappearance of its problems
means the disappearance of philosophy itself. Thus the turn
(Wende) in philosophy, as announced by Schlick in his paper, also
signalized the end (Ende) of philosophy. This was said in so many
words by Schlick himself. The often quoted concluding sentence
of his paper runs: ‘D ann wird es nicht m ehr notig sein, iiber
“ philosophische Fragen” zu sprechen, weil man iiber alle Fragen
philosophisch sprechen wird, das heisst: sinnvoll und klar.’22
19 Oral com m unication from Eino Kaila to the writer.
0 In a Preface to the posthum ously published W aism ann 1976, p. 20f. Also in
Schlick 1979, p. 136: ‘T his book, which in my firm conviction is the most
significant philosophical work o f our day— T he scope o f these ideas is in truth
immeasurable: anyone who really adopts them with understanding must thereaf­
ter be a changed man from the philosophical point o f view. T he new insights are
absolutely crucial to the destiny o f philosophy.’
21 Schlick 1929, p. 8. English in Schlick 1979, p. 157: ‘Philosophy elucidates
propositions, science verifies them. In the latter we are concerned with the truth of
statem ents, but in the former with what they actually mean.'
22 Schlick 1929, p. 1 1. English in Schlick 1979, p. 160: lBy then there will be no
 36 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

C arnap too thought at a time th at philosophy in the traditional

sense was coming to an end. Its place was to be taken by a ‘logic of
science’ which, he said, was the same as ‘the logical syntax of the
language of science7.23 But he had also said, more in line with
Schlick and W ittgenstein, that philosophy was not a system or a
theory, but a method. This method is logical analysis.24 It yields us
sentences which speak about those sentences which are the objects
of the analysis. The former belong to the meta-language, the latter
to the object-language. The meta-language lays down rules to
which sentences of the object-language have to conform in order to
make sense. He thereby distanced himself from W ittgenstein’s
position in the Tractatus that one cannot talk meaningfully about
language. He accepted a position which Russell had already ten ta­
tively embraced in his Introduction to W ittgenstein’s book, viz.
that there is a logical hierarchy of languages. This position is also
related to the distinction made by H ilbert between m athem atics
and m eta-m athem atics.
T he language-metalanguage distinction has played a great role
in that branch of the analytic movement which might be termed
logico-constructivist and distinguished from another for which the
term logico-analytic is more appropriate. The beginnings of logical
constructivism (outside logic proper) are found in several of Rus­
sell’s works, among them Analysis o f Mind and Analysis of Matter. In
the former, incidentally, he comes very close to the position of
M ach and the logical positivists. An early point of culmination of
the constructivist line was C arn ap ’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt. It
appeared in 1928. It has struck me as strange that this highly
meritorious work did not much influence further developments in
philosophy.25
A Negative use’ of the analytic method, to borrow C arn ap ’s
phrase,26 was for defeating metaphysics and banning it from
philosophy. This crusading enterprize was particularly characteris­
tic of the logical positivist phase of the movement and was in the

further need to talk o f ‘philosophical problem s’, since all questions will be dealt
with philosophically; that is, in a clear and meaningful w ay.’
23 Carnap 1934, p. iii—iv: ‘Philosophic wird durch W isscnschaftslogik— ersetzt;
W issenschaftslogik ist nichts anderes als logische Syntax der W issenschafts-
sprache.’
24 Carnap 1931, p. 237.
25 Nearest to a continuation o f Carnap’s efforts in A u fb a u c o m e s p e r h a p s N e ls o n
Goodm an 1951. Another approach, rather different from C arnap’s, to the prob­
lems relating to a logical constitution o f reality is by Kaila. See the essay ‘Eino
K aila’s M onism ’ in the present collection.
26 Carnap 1931, p. 238.
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 37

opinion of its representatives of particular im portance and urgency

in the then prevailing situation in philosophy.27 W ith time the zeal
calmed down. Some later developments which can still be called
offshoots of analytic philosophy have even come to support posi­
tions of a surprisingly speculative and in this sense ‘m etaphysical’
character. I shall later return to this m atter.
The activity of the Wiener Kreis and related circles of a logico-
analytical orientation in Central Europe came to an abrupt and
brutal end with the rise of Nazism and the eventual outbreak of the
second World W ar. As campaigning a spirit of ‘progressive mo­
dernity’, this type of philosophy was a chosen target of persecution.
Happily, a not insignificant num ber of its adherents in A ustria,
Germany, and Poland found refuge in the Anglo-Saxon part of the
world. W ith time they came to play an im portant part in the
philosophical life of their host countries. The return of analytic
philosophy to the European continent after the w ar I find sur­
prisingly slow. In G erm any it was cham pioned with great energy
by an Austrian, Wolfgang Stegmiiller. In his native country the
legacy of the Circle seemed for a long time almost extinct.
In the time between its expulsion and its return, the analytic
movement itself had undergone great changes.

The same year as the Vienna Circle published its manifesto, W itt­
genstein returned to Cam bridge. H ere he developed a ‘new philoso­
phy’ in the 1930’s. I shall not try to describe it. W hat interests us is
its influence on the analytic movement.
The thinking of the later W ittgenstein differs radically from
Russell’s. Also the personal relations between the two men cooled.
Russell of the period after the second World W ar considered
W ittgenstein’s development a deterioration and his influence a
disaster to philosophy.
The spirit of the wissensckaftliche Weltauffassung of the V ienna
Circle had always been uncongenial and distasteful to W ittgen­
stein. But he had also, through his Tractatus, greatly fortified this
same spirit. At the beginning of his new career as philosopher, too,
his thinking was, as far as its them atic is concerned, closely related
to what was going on in V ienna.28 To clarify in detail these rela­
tions is an inviting task for the historian of philosophic ideas. M uch
27 Ibid., ‘in der vorliegenden historischen Situation notig und wichtigV
28 O n this see W ittgenstein 1967.
38 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

of W ittgenstein’s writings from w hat has been called his ‘middle

period’ is still awaiting publication.
The disagreem ent in spirit notw ithstanding, there is also a simi­
larity worth noticing in the ethos of both the Vienna Circle and the
W ittgenstein of the early 1930’s. According to an account by
Moore, who then attended W ittgenstein’s lectures, W ittgenstein
was anxious to stress the novelty of his method. He said it was going
to effect a change in philosophy, com parable to the change brought
about in physics by Galileo or to the change in chemistry with the
abandonm ent of pre-scientific alchemy.29 A similar feeling of hav­
ing arrived at a turning point in the history of thought was also
characteristic of the second upheaval effected by W ittgenstein. It is
known as ‘the philosophy of ordinary language’. A booklet issued
by adherents of this new movement had the title Revolution in
Philosophy. It can in certain respects be seen as a parallel to the
manifesto of the Wiener Kreis a quarter of a century earlier.
Although this second revolution had been kindled by sparks from
Cam bridge, it came to full eruption at Oxford. I have myself strong
recollections of this. I had visited Oxford shortly before the war,
when the tradition of idealism was still strong there. Alfred Ayer,
whom I m et for the first time, seemed an unfam iliar local bird.
W ittgenstein was next to a mythical figure; Russell and Moore had
made but little im pact at Oxford. W hen I returned to the place
eight years later, I was confronted with a completely changed
situation. W ittgenstein’s name was on everybody’s lips. Not as
author of the Tractatus, however, but of the Blue and Brown Books
and as an influential teacher whose lectures at Cam bridge some
privileged people had attended.
The philosopher at Oxford who more than anybody else con­
tributed to this change in the atmosphere was, no doubt, Gilbert
Ryle. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic, perhaps the best semi-
popular presentation ever written of the logical positivist and
empiricist movement in philosophy, had appeared some years be­
fore the war, but its influence in England, as far as I can judge, had
not been strong. After the war, Ayer moved to London.
As the nam e ‘ordinary language philosophy5 indicates, the new
variety of analytic thinking was not much dedicated to logic or to
the philosophy of science. In this it was strikingly unlike the type of
thought which Russell and the logical positivists had represented.
It was more akin to the thinking of the second founding father of

29 M oore 1954-55, p. 322. (Ref. to Moore 1959.)

 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 39

the Cam bridge School of Analysis, M oore.30 Like Moore, the O x­

ford analysts were interested in clarifying the surface structure of
linguistic expressions in common use and not in ‘formalizing’ with
the instrum ents of logic the deep-structures of m athem atical and
scientific thinking.
How can such concern with ordinary language be philosophically
im portant or even interesting? Critics of the new movement denied
that it could be this and mocked the pretensions of the new trend as
leading to a complete trivialization of philosophy. Among them was
Russell.
It is in fact not easy to answer the charge of irrelevance. One
could perhaps say as follows: In order to be of philosophic interest,
concern with ordinary language must aim at solving some difficulty
or puzzlement already acknowledged to constitute a philosophical
problem. This condition is eminently satisfied by G ilbert Ryle’s
justly celebrated and influential work The Concept o f Mind. Its topic
is, if anything, ‘philosophical’. It deals with the nature of the
mental and is a critique of what the author calls the Cartesian myth
o f ‘the ghost in the m achine’. The new method or way of attacking
the problem is described in the Preface to the book, as follows: ‘The
philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended
not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical
geography of the knowledge we already possess.1 Not to discover
new truths, but to clarify (old) meanings is the task of philosophy.
The case of the philosopher who will probably stand out for
posterity as the most original representative of post-war Oxford
Philosophy, Joh n Langshaw Austin, is more complex. He died
relatively young in 1960. I would call him the doctor subtilis of this
new form of scholasticism, thus com paring him mutatis mutandis to
another Oxford philosopher six and a half centuries earlier. Austin
was the unrivalled master in detecting conceptual shades of linguis­
tic usage—superior in this art even to W ittgenstein, I would say.
W ith Austin, however, it is not always clear whether his concep­
tual observations on language are also philosophically relevant.
Austin himself spoke of his analytic activity as the beginnings of a
linguistic phenomenology. This is not itself philosophy, but one of
philosophy’s many off-springs, ‘a true and comprehensive science
of language’.31 Its origin is similar to that of many other sciences,

30 There are of course also differences. Moore was never influential at Oxford.
Perhaps one could say that the influence which he might have had there became
eclipsed by the fascination exerted by W ittgenstein on the O xonian climate o f
thought.
31 Austin 1956,p. 132.
40 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

for example of physics in the 17th or of psychology and sociology in

the 19th century. In his paper with the characteristic and witty
title, ‘Ifs and C ans’, Austin wrote: ‘Then we shall have rid
ourselves of one more part of philosophy (there will still be plenty
left) in the only way we can ever get rid of philosophy, by kicking it
upstairs.’32—O ne should compare this with the concluding words
of Schlick’s paper about the turning point in philosophy. (Above
p. 35.)

O rdinary language philosophy flourished in Oxford from the late

1940’s to the early 1960’s. The untimely death of Austin certainly
contributed to its decline. O f importance was also the ferocious,
partly grossly unjust, criticism by Ernest Gellner.33 But long after
this philosophy had lost its greater vigour, Oxford continued to be
a Mecca to which philosophers from all over the world made
pilgrimage in order to acquaint themselves with the new form of
analytic philosophy which ultimately stemmed from the later W itt­
genstein.
Independently of Oxford, this philosophy had also begun to
invade the United States. Thanks to M ax Black and, in particular,
Norman Malcolm, Cornell University became a centre of Wittgen-
steinian philosophy, the influence of which soon extended over the
whole continent. Both philosophers had studied at Cam bridge
before the war. Malcolm has, perhaps better than anybody else,
succeeded in fusing influences from W ittgenstein and M oore in an
original contribution to philosophy.
In the meantime analytical philosophy also of the logical positiv­
ist and empiricist variety had taken root in the USA. A not insig­
nificant share in this process must be attributed to philosophers
and logicians from Central Europe who had escaped the physical
and spiritual devastation in their home countries. Suffice to m en­
tion here only a few of the most prom inent names: Rudolf C arnap,
Hans Reichenbach, Carl Gustav Hempel, Gustav Bergmann, H er­
bert Feigl, K urt Godel, and Alfred Tarski.
In the United States, however, there already existed an indige­
nous tradition, akin to the analytical one represented by Russell
and the logical empiricists. Its centre was H arvard, and its two
leading figures were C.I. Lewis and the 25 years younger W illard
32 Ibid.
33 Gellner 1959. T h e book lias an Introduction by Bertrand Russell.
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 41

Van O rm an Quine. Both were connected to the H arvard tradition

of American pragmatism. O f its two classics, William Jam es and
Charles Peirce, the second may in fact be counted another founding
father of analytic philosophy— alongside Russell and Moore and
the figure in their background, Frege. T he influence of Peirce is still
growing.
When surveying the contemporary state of analytical philoso­
phy, two things are striking.
One is this: Although the movement, having become world-wide,
is by no means cultivated only in the English speaking countries, it
is yet by and large connected with Anglo-American cultural in­
fluence. The movement’s first big wave, logical positivism and
empiricism, had its original home in Central Europe. It was checked
in its development by external forces. As already indicated, it took
surprisingly long for it to re-establish itself on the European conti­
nent. An explanation for this may be seen in the existence in
Germany and also in France of traditions in philosophy which were
more fit for survival— such as Hegelianism and phenomenology.
Another contributory cause may be the fact th at the analytic
orientation on the Continent had always been ‘peripheral’, geo­
graphically as well as spiritually. A great part of its original sphere
of influence remained, until recently, under the suffocating pressure
of marxist-leninist ideology. Now, when this parenthesis has come
to a close, it is perhaps reasonable to expect a renaissance of
analytic thinking in philosophy in some of the countries which had
a share in the movement’s early history. This would be in line with
their search for "roots’ and for a ‘national identity’.
The second thing which strikes one, when reviewing analytic
philosophy of today, is a confusing heterogeneity. W hat is today
‘analytic philosophy’? An acute and influential observer, Richard
Rorty, writes in his well-known book Philosophy and the Mirror o f
Nature: ‘I do not think that there any longer exists anything identi­
fiable as ‘analytic philosophyY34 He relates this to the fact that
philosophy which calls itself ‘analytical’ has in many academic
surroundings acquired the status of a philosophical establish­
m ent.33 Therewith the movement has lost its former revolutionary

“ Rorty 1980, p. 172.

Ibid. It has struck me that the name ‘analytic philosophy’, as far as 1 know,
became current relatively late in the history o f the m ovem ent. It only gradually
supplanted the label ‘logical positivism ’ which lingered on long after it had
become obsolete. To the change in terminology contributed, I should think,
significantly the works of Arthur Pap (1949 and 1955). T h e early Cam bridge
analysts and the members o f the Vienna Circle insisted on their method being
(logical and conceptual) analysis. But they did not use the term ‘analytical
42 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

ethos. I t is no longer a philosophy fighting p reju d ice and

superstition— as logical positivism once saw itself doing. It has, to
some extent, itself become an idol, enthroned in self-satisfaction
and thus inviting new iconoclasts.
I shall now try to make the rather confusing picture a little more
perspicuous.

10

‘I hold that logic is w hat is fundam ental to philosophy’, Russell

wrote in an autobiographical piece from the 1920’s.36 Russell’s
share in the rebirth and development of logic had been epoch
making. O f the members of the V ienna Circle, C arnap contributed
greatly to logic— not to speak of Godel who can be counted as half
belonging to the circle.
Is logic a sub-division of analytic philosophy? It would certainly
not be right to say so. Should logic any longer be counted as
belonging to philosophy at all? This is not an idle question. The
new ‘exact’ logic had one of its main sources in research into the
foundations of mathem atics and tends now, after some decades of
‘philosophical turbulence’, to return to its m athem atical origins.
This can be seen as another example of how a part of philosophy
turns into a science— philosophy being kicked another storey up­
stairs. (Cf. above p. 23.)
Even though logic cannot count as a branch of analytic philoso­
phy, it is right to label the activities of analytical philosophers
logical study. By philosophical logic I would understand the analysis
of concepts which are peculiar to logic proper—such as, for exam­
ple, consistency and entailm ent— and the application of the formal
apparatus of logic for clarifying clusters of concepts generally which
attract the attention of philosophers.
In his paper ‘Logical Atomism5 Russell had said th at among the
most im portant tasks of philosophy is the analysis of such concepts
as mind, m atter, consciousness, knowledge, experience, causality,
will, and time.37 These concepts are not exclusively scientific. They
play a role also in everyday discourse and thinking. Their clarifica­
tion does not necessarily call for ‘formalization’ involving use of
symbolic logic. However, formal methods have proved very useful

Chilosophy* for their new type o f thinking. T he (new) name can be said to reflect a
eginning syncretism within the m ovem ent.
36 Russell 1924, p. 359.
37 Ibid., p. 379f
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 43

for the task. T he same holds true of the analysis of conceptual

structures relating to hum an action and to norms and valuations.
In these uses of philosophical logic 1 would myself see the core of
what still deserves the nam e o f ‘analytical philosophy5. It can be
said to continue and combine the three traditions of the Cam bridge
School of Analysis, the V ienna Circle, and the post-war O rdinary
Language Philosophy.
In spite of its synthetizing character philosophical logic does not
have an exclusive claim to continue the tradition of analytical
philosophy. There are also other notable varieties of a movement
which has with time assumed a very protean character.

11

A second branch of analytic philosophy, related to and sometimes

indistinguishably fused with what I have called philosophical logic,
goes under name philosophy of science. Its roots go back to Russell,
the logical positivists, and the young W ittgenstein— but also to
various older science oriented traditions and trends in philosophy.
The sciences in which the V ienna Circle and related groups in
pre-war Central Europe had been chiefly interested were m athe­
matics and physics. In those sciences there had been, round
the turn of the century, spectacular progress, but problems had also
arisen which puzzled philosophers and scientists alike. To some
extent the problems are still there. But in the meantim e other
sciences have, also thanks to spectacular new developments, come
to the foreground of attention and challenged critical reflection.
This is true, for example, of the life sciences. Furtherm ore, new
sciences have sprung up and attained prominence. T o this group
belong com puter science, theoretical linguistics, brain research,
and cognitive study. M any of them carry a heavy philosophical
load because of their relations to logic and the traditional philoso­
phy of mind.
Two features in contem porary philosophy of science should
be noted here. The first is the shortcoming o f formal logical means
for the purposes of clarifying some key ideas common to all the
sciences. (This is a reason why I wish to distinguish philosophy of
science from philosophical logic.) Examples are the ideas of a law of
nature and of scientific explanation. In the early days of analytic
philosophy one thought one could ‘formalize* the first using the
notion of a universal im plication and the second using the
hypothetico-deductive Covering Law pattern. These simplifying
44 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

schematisms have long since turned out insufficient. A faithful

account of the logic of actual scientific practice will have to pay
attention to various contextual and pragm atic constraints which
are inherently incapable of formalization. This holds good also of
the criteria of confirmation of scientific hypotheses and of the
diachronic phenom ena of theory change (in the sense of K uhn,
Sneed, and Stegmiiller).
The abandonm ent of formal methods and the close attention to
scientific practice make one wonder to which extent the insights
thus attained have philosophical relevance. The answer hinges on
a terminological decision. In German the term Wissenschaftstheorie
has acquired currency. It has a different connotation from Wissen-
schaftsphilosophie. A good deal of that which in English goes under
the name Philosophy of Science I incline to regard as belonging to
an independent ‘science or theory of science’ rather than to
philosophy— either of the analytic or of some more traditional type.
The second feature of science oriented philosophy which I wish
to mention here is quite different from the first. I am thinking of a
tendency to look for hidden deep-structures in order to explain or
make intelligible manifest surface-structures. This tendency had
reached an early climax in W ittgenstein’s Tractatus. O ne can see a
revival of it in Chomsky’s ‘cartesian linguistics’ which postulates
innate syntactic structures for the sake of understanding the child’s
acquisition of linguistic competence. In later philosophy of lan­
guage, partly of Chomskyan inspiration, the idea reappears in the
form of a postulated inborn universal language of the mind, also
called ‘mentalese’, which one has to presuppose for explaining how
man can learn a first natural language.M ‘In order to learn to speak
the child must already have a language’ as one could put it
pointedly. But this ‘prim eval’ language, like W ittgenstein’s ideal
language of concatenated names in isomorphic relationship to con­
catenations of things, is surely a ‘never-never-construction’, an a
priori requirem ent which eludes empirical test.
Similar ideas about other mental functions, for example percep­
tion, memory, and thinking, have been current in contemporary
philosophy of mind. In view of the devastating criticism to which
W ittgenstein subjected his own early efforts to unravel the trans­
cendental presuppositions of language and thought, I find this
‘relapse into speculation’ surprising, even worrying. O ne some­
times has the impression that the philosophy which had set itself
the task of a ‘U berw indung der M etaphysik durch logische Analyse

38 See Fodor 1975. Sec also above p. 15.

 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 45

der Sprache’ has become, in some of its late branchings, the

perhaps most metaphysically loaded and speculative of all contem­
porary brands of philosophy worth being taken seriously.

12

Alongside philosophical logic and philosophy or theory of science,

mention should also be made of trends in contemporary thought
which because of their historical origin, if not for other reasons, can be
regarded as variants of analytic philosophy. One sometimes refers to
these trends speaking of a ‘pragmatic turn’ in philosophy. We already
noted that pragmatism had been a sort of American parallel to the
Cambridge and Vienna schools of analytic philosophy. T he con­
temporary ‘pragm atic tu rn ’ again might be characterized as a
blend of influences from Peirce and the later W ittgenstein. The
chief connecting force has been Q uine in his later years, after the
publication of Words and Objects in 1960. T he young Q uine had been
responsible for im portant contributions both to mathem atical and
philosophical logic. O f contemporary philosophers he is, in my
opinion, the greatest.
In the case of philosophical logic and theory of science one
sometimes wonders whether they should still count as philosophy.
With the new pragm atic orientation in the philosophy of language
and of mind one is less tempted to raise the same question. The
pragmatic trend within the analytic movement, if one is allowed
that label for a mixed bunch of phenomena, is without doubt
philosophy. W hat can be questioned, however, is whether this
philosophy can be correctly characterized as analytic.
‘Analysis’ means division, the splitting up of a totality or whole
into mutually separate parts. A view, according to which the char­
acteristics of a whole have to be explained on the basis of features of
its parts, is often called meristic, from the Greek word (i£p0 5 which
means part. A view again which explains the features and functions
of the parts with reference to the whole is called holistic, from the
Greek 6 ^ 0 5 . The logical atomism of Russell and the early W ittgen­
stein is a typically meristic philosophy. The late philosophy of
Wittgenstein, as has often been noted, is conspicuously holistic in
character. It does not look for a foundation of knowledge or
thought in conceptual ‘atom s’ not capable of further analysis,
nor for an ultimate justification of all true beliefs. The possibility
of language need not be explained; the facts of linguistic usage and
the ‘puzzles’ arising from it have to be described as features of
46 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

forms o f life characteristic of the ‘natural history of m an5. Against

this changed background of the philosophic enterprise also W itt­
genstein’s view of philosophy as an activity, and not, a doctrine,
becomes, to me, more understandable.
The holistic approach to problems of philosophy encourages
points of view which in a general sense can be called relativistic.
Conceptual distinctions which to an older generation of analytic
philosophers seemed sharp and univocal, appear blurred or be­
come questionable. A case in point is the analytic-synthetic distinc­
tion which Q uine problematized in an influential paper a long time
ago .39 Further steps on a road to relativism are Q uine’s theses on
the Indeterm inacy of Translation and various views of the contex­
tual dependence of the references of linguistic expressions. This
also has consequences for the concept of truth. The correspondence
theory which of old had been a dogma of realist philosophers— and
in the opinion of many was raised to a new dignity of exactness with
T arski’s semantic theory— has begun to lose ground to revived
forms of the coherence theory of truth, traditionally associated with
idealist philosophy .40 Russell’s and M oore’s refutation of idealism,
which marked the very beginning of the analytic movement in
philosophy, is no longer an accepted article of faith. Thought and
the world are not as clearly separable as they seemed in W ittgen­
stein’s Tractatus. The pros and cons of idealism are once again in the
balance of philosophic debate.
As long as one sticks to the view that there is an objective reality,
there is hope that differences of opinion will in the end be reconciled
through a further approxim ation to the truth. The case is different
if one concedes that opinions may be conceptually incommensurable.
Then conflicting truth-claim s do not necessarily relate to the same
reality. This kind of relativity has given rise to lively debate in
contemporary cultural anthropology. ‘U nderstanding alien cul­
tures’ has become a philosophical problem— and with this also the
concept of rationality .41 Behind the new approaches to partly old
controversies one can almost always discern the multifarious in­
fluences of the later W ittgenstein. But in these regions one is a far
cry from anything that could aptly be called ‘analytic philosophy’.

39 Quine 1953.
40 See for exam ple Rescher 1973.
41 See the works Rationality and Relativism and Cultural Relativism and Philosophy
listed am ong the References.
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 47

13

W hat has been said in the last four sections of this paper was m eant
to throw light on the ‘identity crisis’ of the analytic movement. The
question of what should today count as analytical philosophy, is
not easy to answer. In many cases a genetic relationship either to
Cam bridge or to Vienna is the only criterion to go by.
Since some thirty years there has been a rem arkable upsurge in
writings by philosophers trained in the analytic tradition on topics
in the history of philosophy. This trend has, in the first place,
concentrated on arguments and thoughts of individual philosophers
who can be considered remote ancestors of analytic philosophy
such as Aristotle, Descartes, K ant, and the British Empiricists of
the 18th century. H ither may also be counted the marked revival
among philosophically minded logicians of interest in the medieval
scholastic tradition from Anselm to William Occam. The tools
developed within the logico-analytic current in philosophy have
thus turned out a very powerful instrum ent for a deepened under­
standing of the subject’s past. At the same time one can in this
‘retrospective tu rn ’ see a sign of tiredness and slackening of the
enthusiasm for the conquest of virgin land which anim ated the
protagonists of what was then ‘a new philosophy’. There is no
longer a sentiment of bringing the unsatisfactory state of traditional
philosophy to an end— as Russell said in 1914. (Above p. 28). O ne
can rather speak of a revived sentim ent of veneration for the
subject’s great past.
The confused and syncretistic picture presented by contempo­
rary global civilization also makes it difficult to distinguish in the
present landscape currents of thought which are decidedly not
‘analytical’. For the sake of marking a contrast, I shall, however,
single out two trends in philosophy which seem to me to represent a
spirit which is characteristically different from or even opposed to
what 1 understand by ‘analytic philosophy’. The two are mutually
related and, moreover, also related to late trends of thought which
one usually classifies as ‘analytic’.
The first is hermeneutic philosophy. ‘H erm eneutics’ means in­
terpretation, understanding of meaning. Phenomena which aim at
or mean something we call intentional. To them belong all artefacts
and expressions of hum an culture— in contrast to things and events
in nature which do not, by themselves, mean anything.
The distinction between intentional and not-intentional phe­
nomena answers to a corresponding distinction in the sciences. In
German one refers to it with the terms Geisteswissenschaften and
48 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Naturwissenschaften. The first is difficult to translate. The terms

‘hum an sciences’ and ‘hum anities’ seem too broad. ‘Sciences of
culture’ (Kulturwissenschaften) comes closer. Stressing the different
nature of the two types of science runs counter to the idea of the
unity o f science which was proclaimed with great emphasis by the
logical positivists and is still embraced, it seems, by a majority of
science-oriented analytical philosophers. Differences in the views of
the sciences reflect in their turn differences in the philosophic
orientation generally.
T he hermeneutic movement in contemporary philosophy can be
seen as a revival of the neo-Kantianism of the Badener School of
Rickert and W indelband, but above all of the position held by
Dilthey. Hermeneutics was given a new profile by its most em inent
modern protagonist, Hans-Georg Gadamer. His influence is notic-
able also in the Anglo-Saxon and Latin countries. With its diffusion to
new surroundings, however, the trend has lost some of its original
distinctiveness. Who should be counted as ‘analyst’ and who as
‘herm eneuticist’ is not always clear .42 This applies, for example, to
a group of philosophers with whom I feel kinship and who are often
labelled ‘neo-W ittgensteinians\ Among them should be mentioned
Charles Taylor and Peter Winch.
Hermeneutics is a holistic type of philosophy. The holism of
hermeneuticists differs, however, from the holism of philosophers of
a pragm atist orientation such as Q uine or Sellars or Davidson. The
philosophy of the former bears a humanist, that of the latter a
naturalist stamp.
Hermeneutic philosophy tries to understand man as a being of
culture, a socio-historical creature. It shares this aim with another
type of philosophy which is intent on enhancing, through philo­
sophic reflection, the self-awareness of man and therewith also on
reviewing critically the societal circumstances under which he lives.
T he classic example of such a ‘praxis-relevant’ philosophy is, of

42 In von Wright 1971 I proposed a distinction within the hermeneutic current

between a hermeneutic dialectical and a hermeneutic analytical branch. O p. cit.,
p. 182f. ‘Perhaps one could, with due caution, distinguish between hermeneutic
philosophers o f a dialectic and those o f an analytic orientation. The term “ her­
m eneutic philosophy’’ might then be used as a generic name for both trends. T his
would serve the purpose o f marking a sharper divide than has up to now been
thought appropriate between analytic philosophy stem m ing from the later W itt­
genstein and analytic philosophy o f the logical positivist or logical empiricist
mainstream. With time, such a regrouping will probably do more justice to the
morphology o f trends in contemporary thought than placing W'lttgensteinian
philosophy under the heading analytic and regarding continental hermeneutic
philosophy as basically a variant o f phenom enology.’
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 49

course, Marxism. As an off-shoot of its stem one may regard the

Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Its foremost living repre­
sentative is Jurgen H aberm as. His philosophy is a critique of the
civilization characteristic of the industrial societies of the W est and
its influence on the rest of the world. The ethos of this civilization
has been belief in progress through science and technology. Ana­
lytic philosophy in its beginnings em braced and strongly affirmed
this ‘spirit of m odernity’. O n the whole it has remained faithful to
it. Thanks to this it has also been accused— not entirely unjustly—
of contributing to the cementation of an established socio-political
order. This accusation is not contradicted by the fact that typical
representatives of analytic philosophy have been, as individuals,
critically engaged in social and political issues of the time. But this
engagement of theirs is but loosely connected with their philoso­
phy. I know this self-division from personal experience. Also of
W ittgenstein it can be m aintained that his severe censure of con­
temporary Western civilization and doomsday view of the world
has little to do with his contributions to philosophy.

14

The picture of analytic philosophy which I have tried to draw

becomes increasingly confused and unsurveyable as we move closer
to the present moment. In the end it becomes inseparably inte­
grated in the overall picture of contemporary philosophy. O f some
of the branches which have grown out of the analytic stem, it holds
good that they have attained ‘the secure path of science’— but
sometimes at the price of losing philosophic relevance. O f some
other branches again, no one would question their being ‘philoso­
phy1, but some might wish to sever them from the analytic tradition
altogether in spite of their origins. And among these latter branches
there is much heterogeneity.
There are critical observers of the tides of the time who think that
the two and a half thousand years history of W estern philosophy
has come to an even more radical breach with its past than the one
proclaimed by representatives of analytic philosophy in the move­
m ent’s early days. We are, it is said, at the end of a tortuous search
for an unshakeable foundation of knowledge and beliefs, for a
world-picture which faithfully mirrors ‘true reality’. T he search has
failed in its objective, and the failure leads to a ‘decomposition’ of
the entire past tradition of philosophy. If this is true, analytic
philosophy has been one of the contributory factors to it. I am
50 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

thinking both of those, who like Russell and the V ienna Circle
wanted to make philosophy ‘scientific’ and of those who in the
spirit of W ittgenstein have conceived of philosophy as an activity
which aims at making itself superfluous. In both these quarters one
has been working to make the turning-point ( Wende) in philosophy
also the term inal point (Ende) of the subject— though not exactly in
the way envisaged by Schlick who thought th at philosophy may no
longer be needed because one has become able to speak ‘m eaning­
fully and clearly’ about all things.
I am myself, presumably, too deeply rooted in the enlightenment
tradition of modernity to be able to embrace these ‘post-modern*
perspectives. But I am also of the opinion that one cannot light-
heartedly brush them aside. Because I am convinced of the following:
We live in a time of unprecedented changes in the cultural and
social life of man. The turbulence in the spiritual climate makes
people feel lost in the world and in desperate need of landm arks for
their orientation. Support is offered them from many sources: in the
form of spurious claims to ‘ancient wisdom’ and superstitious
teachings of salvation, not infrequently in a treacherous scientistic
disguise. Wolfgang Stegmiiller, the indefatigable cham pion of the
return of analytic philosophy to Europe after the deluge of irra­
tionality had passed, at least temporarily, speaks in a Preface to his
Hauptstrdmungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie of the ‘semantic pollution of
the spiritual environm ent of m an’. H e saw in it a parallel to the
destruction and pollution of the physical environm ent which has
become a threat even to the survival of our species .43 His w arning is
worth taking seriously. To fight against all forms of the obscuring
effects of words on the minds of men is, as I see it, the supreme task
of philosophy— not least in the darkness peculiar to our times.

R EFEREN CES

Austin 1956: J.L . A ustin, ‘Ife and C an s’. Proceedings o f the British A cadem y 42,
l956‘
Black 1940: M ax Black, ‘Relations between Logical Positivism and the Cam bridge
School o f A nalysis’. ErkenrUnis 8> 1939-1940.
------ . 1964: M ax Black, A Companion to Wittgenstein's T RA C TATU S.
Carnap 1931: R udolf Carnap, ‘O berw indung der M etaphysik durch logische
Analyse der Sprache’. Erkenntnis 2 , 1931.
-------. 1934: R udolf Carnap, Logische Syntax der Sprache. Julius Springer, W ien 1934.

43 Stegm iiller 1979, Band II, Einleitung zur 5. Auflage, p. xx. ‘die sem antische
V erschm utzung der gcistigen U m w elt des M enschen5.
 ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY 51

Fodor 1975: J. Fodor, The Language o f Thought. Thom as Y. Crowell, N ew York

1975*
Gellner 1959: E. Gellner, Words and Things, A Critical Account o f Linguistic Philosophy
and a Study in Ideology. W ith an Introduction by Bertrand Russell. G ollanz,
London 1959.
G oodm an 1951: Nelson G oodm an, The Structure o f Appearance. Harvard U niversity
Press; Cambridge, M ass. 1951.
Moore 1905: G.E. M oore, T h e Nature and Reality of Objects o f Perception’.
Reprinted in G.E. M oore, Logical Studies. Routledge & K.egan Paul, London
1922.
— —. 1954—1955: G.E. M oore, ‘W ittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930-33. I—I I I 9. Mind
63 & 64, 1954-1955. Reprinted m G.E. M oore, Philosophical Papers, Allen &
U nw in, London 1959.
------ . 1966: G .E. M oore, Lectures on Philosophy. Edited by Casim ir Lewy. Allen &
U nw in, London 1966.
Pap 1949: Arthur Pap, Elements o f Analytic Philosophy. M acm illan, N ew York 1949.
------ . 1955: Arthur Pap, Analytische Erkenntnistheorie. Julius Springer, W ien 1955.
Q uine 1953: W .V .O . Q uine, ‘T w o D ogm as o f Empiricism'. Reprinted in From a
Logical Point of View. Harvard U niversity Press; Cam bridge, M ass. 1953.
Ramsey 1931: F.P. Ramsey, The Foundations o f Mathematics and Other Logical Essays.
K egan Paul, Trench, Trubner & C o., London 1931.
------ . 1991: F.P. Ramsey, Notes on Philosophy, Probability, and Mathematics. Ed. by
M aria Carla Galavotti. Biopolis, N apoli 1991.
Rescher 1973: N. Rescher, The Coherence Theoiy o f Truth. Oxford U niversity Press,
Oxford 1973.
Rorty 1980: Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror o f Nature. Basil Blackwell,
Oxford 1980.
Russell 1914: Bertrand Russell, Our KnowUdge o f the External World as a Field fo r
Scientific Method in Philosophy. Here quoted from the edition with Allen &
U nw in , London 1949.
------ . 1924: Bertrand Russell: ‘Logical A tom ism ’. In Contemporary British Philosophy,
First Series. Allen & U nw in, London 1924.
------ . 1928: Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays. W .W . Norton, N ew York 1928.
------ . 1944: Bertrand R ussell, The Philosophy o f Bertrand Russell. Edited by P. A.
Schilpp. T he Library o f Living Philosophers, N ew York 1944.
------ . 1959: Bertrand Russell, M y Philosophical Development. Allen & U nw in, Lon­
don 1959.
Schlick 1929: Moritz Schlick, ‘D ie W ende der Philosophie’, Erkenntnis /, 1929.
------ . 1979: Moritz Schlick, Philosophical Papers, edited by H. M ulder and Barbara
F.B. van de V elde-Schlick. Reidel Publishing C o., Dordrecht 1979.
Stegm iiller 1979: W olfgang Stegmiiller, Hauptstromungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie.
Kroner Verlag, Stuttgart 1979.
Stenius 1960: E. Stenius, Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractates’. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1960.
W aismann 1939: Fr. W aismann, ‘W as ist logische Analyse?’, Erkenntnis 8, 1939-1940.
------ . 1976: Fr. W aism ann, Logik, Sprache und Philosophie. Edited by Gordon P.
Baker and Brian F. M cG uinness. R eclam , Stuttgart 1976.
W ittgenstein 1967: Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis. Edited by Brian F. M cG uin­
ness. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am M ain 1967. Also in English: Wittgenstein and the
Vienna Circle. Edited by Brian F. M cG uinness. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1979.
von W right 1971: G .H . von W right, Explanation and Understanding. Routledge &
K egan Paul, London 1971.
------ . 1989: The Philosophy o f Georg Henrik von Wright. Edited by L. Hahn and P.A.
Schilpp. T he Library o f L iving Philosophers. O pen Court, C hicago 1989.
Cultural Relativism and Philosophy. Edited by M arcelo D ascal, E.J. Brill, Leiden
1991.
Rationality and Relativism. Edited by Martin H ollis and Steven Lukes. Basil Black-
w ell, Oxford 1982.
52 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

The Revolution in Philosophy. Edited by A.J. Ayer, W .C. Kneale, G.A. Paul et al.
W ith an Introduction by Gilbert Ryle, London 1956.
Der Wiener Kreis der Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung. Herausgegeben vom Verein
Ernst Mach. Artur W olf Vcrlag, Wien 1929. Tht Scientific Conception o f the
World: The Vienna Circle. D. Reidel, Dordrecht: Holland 1973.
 Ill

M U S IL AND M ACH

In 1903 Musil gave up his job as assistant at the Technische

Hochschule in Stuttgart, moved to Berlin and began to study
philosophy and psychology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University.
Five years later he completed his studies and got his doctorate with
a published dissertation on the philosophy of science of Ernst
M ach . 1
M usil’s main teacher in Berlin was C arl Stumpf, a former pupil
of Brentano and Lotze. Stum pf was also a renowned psychologist
and author of a two-volume work on the sensation of musical
sound, Tonpsychologie. Part of M usil’s work in Berlin seems to have
been done in Stum pfs institute for experimental psychology. His
talent as engineer proved itself in the invention and construction of
a machine ( Variationskreisel) for rotating monocoloured discs so as to
produce, to the eye, impressions of mixed colours. M usil’s appre­
ciation of Stum pf as a teacher is interestingly reflected in an entry
in his diary of the m id-1930*8 when he was living in Vienna. An
assistant of Schlick’s, he writes ,2 had been talking to him about the
then current ideas of ‘physicalism’ in the V ienna Circle and their
application to psychology. To this M usil remarks: ‘Wieviel genauer
ist es doch in der Stumpfschule zugegangen. Diese niichtem e und
wissenschaftliche Atmosphare war doch ein Verdienst dieses
Lehrers’. It is not surprising that the philosophical psychology of
the Wiener Kreis should have seemed to Musil artificial and barren.
A contemporary school in psychology which impressed him more
favourably and probably has also left an im print on his writings as

1 Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs. Inaugural-D issertation zur Erlangung
der Doktorwiirde, gcncnm igt yon der philosophischen Fakultat dcr Friedrich-
W ilhelm s-U niversitat zu Berlin. Berlin-W ilmcrsdorf: Dissertationsverlag Carl
Arnold, 1908. Page references are to this edition.
2 Robert M usil, Tagebucher, Aphorismen, Essays und Redcn. H erausgegeben von
A dolf Frise. Hamburg: Rowohlt V erlag, 1955, p. 451f.
54 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

an author of fiction was G&yto/f-psychology, associated chiefly with

the names of W ertheim er and K ohler .3
Musil, however, did not find work in experimental psychology
congenial.4 The subject m atter of his dissertation is pure philoso­
phy. We have no reason to think that the choice of topic was not
M usil’s own. We know from his diaries that he was already ac­
quainted with and impressed by the work of M ach before he went
to Berlin to study philosophy .5 There was certainly an element of
personal concern involved in his choice of a theme. Musil wanted to
know w hether M ach’s claim was correct that the methods and
results of exact natural science, when properly interpreted, would
give decisive support to the positivistic philosophy which M ach
was professing. M usil’s answer to the question is No. M ach had not
been able to defend his claim consistently. An exam ination of his
arguments revealed inner contradictions .6 M aybe the answer was a
disappointm ent to M usil—and a contributory cause to his decision
to give up continued academic work.
There were external complications too. Stum pf was not too
pleased with the work of his student. His own opposition to M ach
was deeper and stronger than M usil’s. He was hesitant about
letting the dissertation pass, and we are told that there were
controversies 7 between the two men before Musil eventually, on 14
M arch 1908, was promoted to the doctorate.
For some years after his promotion, Musil continued to live in
Berlin. He was offered a Dozentur in philosophy in the university of
Graz in Austria, where Meinong was Professor. Musil, however,
declined the offer. He moved to V ienna early in 1911 and took up
employment in the Library of the Technische Hochschule.
After the dissertation, Musil did not publish anything strictly
‘philosophical’ of his own. There are a few reviews of philosophical
and psychological books, and a long— at the same time critical
and understanding— essay from the year 1921 on Spengler’s Unter-
gang des Abendlandes.8 It is hardly any longer possible to tell in detail

3 See Tagebikker, on a m eeting in V ienna in 1911 w ith von H ornbostel and

W ertheimer, and p. 291 and p. 6 3 If. on Kohler.
4 Tagebiicher, p. 445: ‘W enig Freude am psychologischen E xperim ent\
5 C f Tagebiicner, p. 37.
6 Dissertation, p. 78.
7 Karl Dinklage, ‘M usils Herkunft und Lebensgeschichte’ in Robert Musil, Leben,
Werky Wirkung, herausgejjeben von Karl Dinklage, Zurich: A m althea V erlag, 1960,
p. 217. T he information is from the psychologist J . von A llesch who knew M usil in
Berlin. D etails o f these ‘w isscnschaftliche Auseinandersctzungen* are not known.
8 ‘Geist und Erfahrung, Anmerkungen fur Leser, w elchc dem Untergang des
Abendlandes entronnen sind’, Der neue Mcrkur, M arch 1921.
 M USIL AND MACH 55

to w hat extent M usil followed the changes in philosophy and

psychology 9 in the decades between the two wars. I do not know
that he participated in the activities of the Verein Ernst Mach or
associated much with members of the Wiener Kreis when he was
living in Vienna in the 1920’s and 30’s. But he is known to have
been a frequent visitor to the house of the mathem atician-
philosopher Richard von Mises, when he again resided in Berlin in
the years before H itler came to power. Von Mises was a prominent
member of the circle of empiricist philosophers in the German capital
who closely cooperated with their Viennese colleagues. It can hardly
be doubted that Musil was informed about what was going on in these
circles. (Cf. above on his reaction to ‘physicalism’.)
It would be particularly interesting to know w hether Musil had
read W ittgenstein and what his reaction was to the author of
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. There seems to me to exist a great
kinship between these two most remarkable men. Also, their life-
curves show a striking resemblance. W hat Musil writes about
feeling (Gefuhl) and related psychological concepts in the un­
finished parts of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is often astonishingly
like the ‘later’ W ittgenstein’s writings on these topics. I have seen
one brief m ention 10 that Musil had taken interest in the changes in
Wittgenstein after the Tractatus—but I should regard it as practically
excluded that he had seen or read any of the dictations or m anu­
scripts by W ittgenstein which were in circulation in the 1930’s.
(Nor do I know that W ittgenstein had ever read Musil.)

The two philosophers who had most strongly impressed Musil were
Nietzsche and Mach. If we had to mention a third, it would probably
be Ralph Waldo Emerson. Musil’s reading of Nietzsche goes back to
1898. His first acquaintance with Mach seems to have been in 1902
when he was living in Brunn in M oravia where a year earlier he had
matriculated as engineer from the Technische Hochschule.
It would be tempting to see in M ach the source of inspiration for
Musil’s abortive venture into academic philosophy, and in Nietzsche

9 Cf. Tagebiichery p. 445: ‘Geistiges M iterleben der W endung in der Psychologie

und Philosophic’.
10 By Ervin P. Hexner in ‘M usils Interessenkreis’ in Robert Musil, Leben, Werk,
Wirkung, p. 143. It is not clear from this reference, however, whether M usil’s
interest concerned the changes in W ittgenstein’s style o f life or style o f thinking.
56 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

the philosopher-poet who kindled the spark in Musil the novelist.

This judgem ent would not be entirely wrong. Certainly the
influence of Nietzsche was much longer lasting and can be clearly
seen also in the m ature writings of Musil. Traces of M usil’s reading
of Mach may be discernible too— but at least to me they seem
accidental and without deeper significance to the content of M usil’s
later thoughts.
W hen set in the proper perspective of the time, however, the
combination M ach-Nietzsche is more significant than many a mod­
em reader might suspect. The philosophy of Nietzsche can be
associated with such attributes as ‘subjectivist’ and ‘voluntarist’,
that of M ach with ‘phenomenalism and ‘positivist’. Both pairs of
attributes have an affinity with something which is sometimes also
labelled ‘idealism’. M ach and Nietzsche were further exponents of
a Zeitgeist which can be characterized as post-Darwinian ‘evolu­
tionism’.
Nietzsche made no systematic effort to develop an epistemology
or theory of knowledge. The scattered remarks on epistemological
matters which are found in his writings show similarity with the
‘phenom enalism’ or ‘sensualism’ of M ach. The parallelism was
noted in a work of the time, viz. Hans K leinpeter’s Phanomenal-
ismus.M Kleinpeter also wrote studies on M ach’s philosophy of
science . 12 He is, incidentally, one of the very few authors, beside
M ach himself, to whom Musil refers in his dissertation.
O ne sometimes talks of a Hum e-M ach tradition in epistemology
— represented also by Bertrand Russell in some of his writings, and
later by the logical positivists. As far as theory of knowledge is
concerned, Nietzsche too belongs in this tradition.
Round the turn of the century philosophy witnessed a reaction
against the positivist epistemology in the spirit of H um e and M ach,
as well as against various forms of ‘idealism1. In the G erm an­
speaking world this reaction can be said to stem from the philoso­
phy of psychology professed by Brentano. Meinong in Austria,
Husserl and Stum pf in Germany, and the Pole Twardowski were
outstanding pupils of this remarkable teacher. In the English-
speaking world Moore and the early Russell represented a similar
trend. The first part of H usserl’s Logische Untersuchungen had

11 Der Phanomenalismus, eine naturwissenschajtlicke Weltanschauung. Leipzig: Barth,

1913
12 Die Erkenntnistheorie der Naiurforschung der Gegenwart. Leipzig: Barth, 1905.
(Dedicated to Ernst M ach.)
 M USIL AND MACH 57

appeared in 1900. M oore’s celebrated ‘Refutation of Idealism ’ was

published in 1903. In neither is M ach directly a target of attack but
the kind of sensualist epistemology which he represents certainly is.
A most violent attack on M ach’s ‘idealism’ was Lenin’s Materialism
i empiriokritizizm published the year after M usil’s dissertation. In
the philosophy of physics Boltzmann, M ach’s colleague in Vienna,
defended a ‘realist’ position in conscious opposition to M ach. O f
the two great innovators in physics in the early years of the century,
Planck followed Boltzmann, whereas the young Einstein was more
a follower of Mach.
It is in the setting of these philosophical issues of the time:
‘realism’ versus ‘idealism’, ‘phenomenology’ versus ‘phenom enalism ’
that one also has to place Musil against M ach. Like Boltzmann and
Planck, Musil can be said to defend a realist position in the philoso­
phy of physics. He criticizes, in particular, the ‘fictionalist’ and
‘subjectivist’ aspects of M ach’s thinking. A crucial issue concerns
the status of natural laws and w hether there is a physical necessity
(‘in nature’) or only a logical necessity (‘in thought’). M usil argues
against M ach in favour of the notion of natural necessity. But, as
we shall see, his argum ent is not convincing and contains an
obvious non sequitur.
Basic questions in the general theory of knowledge are, on the
whole, set aside in the dissertation. There are some very trenchant
critical remarks on M ach’s phenomenalism and on his efforts to
overcome the mind-body dualism. But there is hardly a trace of
defence of the act-object analysis of states of consciousness which is
so central to Brentano and his pupils or, for that m atter, to Moore.
This is in line with M usil’s aim as set forth in the concluding
paragraph of the Introduction to the book. His statem ent is worth
quoting here in full:

The only aim of the present work is to get as exact a view as possible
of the inner consistency of what Mach says. If one wanted to take into
account the truth of Mach’s results rather than the rigour of the
arguments for his views, a much more broadly based work of episte­
mology would be needed. The present work is intended only as a
contribution to such a broader work. It avoids, as far as possible,
taking up positions which would require justification by reference to
any personal opinions and limits itself to the attempt to demonstrate,
by way of immanent critique, that M ach’s account contains, besides
numerous positive features, so many contradictions or at least
obscurities, that it is impossible to accord it any decisive significance.

One gets from these lines the impression that Musil was anxious
to stress his unwillingness to commit himself to any alternative to
58 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

M ach’s philosophy. Considering this and also the fact that M usil’s
‘im m anent criticism’ of M ach is not always very convincing, one
can well understand the reserved attitude of Stum pf to the disserta­
tion. The merits of the work, it seems to me, lie in the concise and
lucid presentation rather than in the criticism or attem pted refuta­
tion of M ach’s philosophy of science.

After having stated in the Introduction the aim of his investigation

and summarized some of the main tenets of M ach’s philosophy,
Musil proceeds to examine M ach’s ‘biological’ view of science as a
process for acquiring and systematizing knowledge. This scrutiny is
undertaken in the second chapter of the book. It leads to an
im portant distinction (p. 24) between what Musil calls an ‘indiffer­
ent’ and a ‘sceptical’ interpretation of M ach’s standpoint. O n the
first interpretation, roughly speaking, M ach’s emphasis on econ­
omy, idealization, and search for invariance and permanence is
only a description of the way science progresses and scientific
knowledge accumulates. O n the second, M ach’s position is also
thought to w arrant far-reaching epistemological and ontological
conclusions of a ‘sceptical’ nature about the foundation of know­
ledge and the criteria of truth in science. U nder the ‘indifference
interpretation one can, on the whole, agree with the account M ach
gives. An im portant aspect of the Werdegang of the exact sciences is
thereby described in biological and psychological term s . 13 The
‘sceptical’ interpretation, however, Musil is inclined to reject: in no
case does it follow logically from M ach’s ‘denkokonomische Be-
trachtungsweise’.
M ach himself is not very clear about his own pretensions. But
that he, by and large, saw his position as a sensualist (phenomenal­
ism positivist) philosophy of knowledge with the ‘sceptical’ implica­
tions traditionally associated with such a position is all too obvious
from many of his utterances. It is of some interest in the context to
note M usil’s reference to K leinpeter (p. 26), who not only gave to
M ach’s view the ‘sceptical’ interpretation which Musil criticizes
but also interpreted Nietzsche in a similar vein (above p. 56).
In the third chapter Musil gives an account of M ach’s criticism
of the ‘mechanistic’ world-picture of classical physics and of some

13 Cf. H usserl’s judgem ent on M ach in Logische Untersuckungen, V ol. I, Ch. ix.
T his comes very near to M usil’s opinion. There is no m ention o f H usserl in the
dissertation, however.
 M U SIL AND MACH 59

of its key concepts— mass, energy, inertia, space, time, movement,

tem perature, etc. The account given of M ach’s ‘antim echanism ’
seems to me extremely good and M usil’s own, on the whole positive
evaluation of it (p. 36) agrees, I think, fairly well with the present
standpoint in the philosophy of science. O f M ach’s criticism of the
key concepts Musil says, rightly I think, that it perhaps constitutes
the most im portant part of M ach’s achievement (p. 40).
The fourth chapter deals with M ach’s criticism of causality. The
idea that causality is obsolete in science and has to be replaced by
the notion of functional dependence or relationship can be said to
have been in the air at the time. To English readers it is probably
best known from Bertrand Russell’s famous paper lOn the Notion
of Cause’, published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
for 1912-1913. The ideas of M ach and (at that time) also of Russell
may be characterized as a consistent development of the criticism
of causality by David Hume.
M ach’s criticism is trenchant and still today of great interest.
Musil concedes that from the point of view of the working scientist
M ach’s position contains much truth. But from the point of view of
the epistemologist it leaves open crucial questions. In what way
and in what sense do the functional relationships between the
scientist’s conceptual idealizations correspond to relationships be­
tween ‘real’ phenomena? In particular: Does M ach’s criticism show
that the idea of necessary connections in nature must be banished
from scientific thinking and regarded as an atavistic remainder from a
more primitive stage in m an’s intellectual history?
The discussion of these questions is pursued in the fifth and
concluding chapter of the dissertation. The gist of M usil’s argu­
ment against M ach seems to be that M ach, by denying the exis­
tence of necessary connections in nature, is unable to account for the
obvious fact— rightly emphasized by Musil— that ‘eine logische
Verkniipfung nur dann einen Erkenntnisgrund abgeben kann,
wenn sie durch eine sachliche G rundlage gerechtfertigt ist’ (p. 57).
I do not think that M usil’s argum ent holds water, however. He
thinks he can accuse M ach of inconsistency. M ach had agreed
that science can be successful in its pursuit oflaw s only if there exist
regularities in nature and that the predictability of phenom ena on
the basis of laws is proof of the uniformity of the world. Now Musil
thought that if it is agreed that the equations or functional relation­
ships which are the laws of nature have to correspond to regularities
among the phenomena, then there must exist necessary connections in
nature. At first (p. 67) he does not say this expressly. He says that
‘solange die Gleichungen tatsachliche gesetzliche Beziehungen
60 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

ausdriicken—weisen sie auf reale notwendige Verkniipfimgen’. This,

presumably, only means that there is an ‘Anschein von Notwendig-
keit’ in nature (p. 67). But later he goes a step further and says (p.
79) that M ach, by postulating lawlike connections between natural
phenom ena, is thereby also postulating necessary connections in
nature. Musil is here identifying ‘lawlike connection’ with ‘neces­
sary' connection ’ . 14 Before he had only said thai the first ‘hinted a t’
the second. For the step from this to an identification of the two he
produced no argument. Yet the question whether the notion of
natural law involves the notion of natural necessitation is the very
question at stake in the discussion. M ach denied this involvement.
Musil simply assumes it. But thereby he also begs the question—
and his conclusion against M ach is a non sequitur.
Before his final return to the question of law and necessity, Musil
had made a digression (pp. 70-75) into a related, yet clearly distinct
topic, viz. M ach’s sensualism (phenomenalism) and Theory of Ele­
ments. Some of Musil’s observations in this context are in my opinion
very well taken. M ach thought that the laws of nature ultimately
describe relations between constituents of reality which he calls
‘Elem ents’. W hat these ‘Elements’ are is, however, not made very
clear. As examples, M ach mentions colours, tastes, tones, odours,
(sensed) tem peratures, etc. He calls them ‘sensations’— but he also
insists upon their character as a ‘neutral stuff out of which both the
mental (psychical) and the material (physical) aspect of reality may
be constituted. (The position is also known as ‘neutral monism’.)
Musil acutely observes (p. 71) that the ‘elements’ which are
related to each other through the equations of physics are not
sensory but conceptual units. Even if the ‘raw m aterial’ of concept
formation has to be given in sensory experience, the concepts
themselves cannot be identified with ‘bundles of sensations’. This is
true of colours and tastes as well as of the more ‘abstract’, q u an ­
tified concepts which occur in the functional relationships of natu­
ral laws.
M usil’s criticism of the sensationalism of M ach stands somewhat
apart from the rest of the content of the dissertation. In M ach’s
philosophy it occupies a central position. A few decades after Musil
had criticized it in his dissertation, it experienced a revival, first in
Russell’s Analysis of Mind (1921) and later in the doctrines of some
of the logical positivists. Its historical im portance notw ithstanding
one has, however, the impression that it has now receded into

14 Dissertation, p. 79: ‘feste, gesetzliche, das sind aber notwendige Beziehungen

in der N atu r\
 M USIL AND MACH 61

obsolescence. This, however, is not true of M ach’s philosophy of

science in the more restricted sense, i.e. of what he has to say about
the character and status of laws of nature, about the categories of
causality and substance, and about the fundam ental concepts of
mechanics, optics, and the theory of heat. W hat makes M usil’s
dissertation interesting to a modern reader is that it concentrates
on those aspects of M ach’s thoughts which seem most challenging
and fresh today and probably will in the long run be regarded as
those of most lasting importance. Musil is, I think, far from always
successful in his efforts to criticize M ach, but his exposition of
M ach’s thought is fair and lucid and the dissertation still makes
good philosophical reading.

O f all the great writers of this century Musil is perhaps the one who
is most deeply ‘philosophical’ in the true sense of this word. But
what is fertile and original in his thinking is not found, not even in
germ, in his dissertation on Mach. M usil’s digression into philoso­
phy after he gave up the career of an engineer for which he had
been trained turned out to be a blind alley for his genius. It was on
the other road which he entered at about the same time with the
publication of Torless (1906) and the early plans for what eventually
became Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften that his creative talent and genius
found fulfilment. This is true, also, of the philosopher in him.
 IV

E IN O K A ILA ’S M O N ISM

In several works from his later years K aila describes an episode

which he calls his ‘philosophic awakening’. As far as I know, the
description first occurs in the most personal of K aila’s writings, the
book Tankens oro (the Swedish title could be rendered in English as
‘T he Disquietude of T hought’) of the year 1944.' W ith some varia­
tions it recurs in a paper published nine years later 2 and then, once
again, in a posthumously published chapter of his unfinished book
with the next to untranslatable Finnish title Hahmottuva maailma3—
roughly ‘T he W orld as a Structured W hole’. T he episode is located
to a beautiful sum m er day when he was sixteen years of age 4 and
lay floating in a rowboat on a Finnish lake watching the clouds
drifting in the sky.
T hen it seemed to him suddenly— these are his words— ‘that
everything which there is is in some very deep sense a unified
whole, so to say an ‘all-u/iity’, a self-structuring totality ’ .5 This
self-structuring whole he calls in another of the descriptions, with a
reference to Spinoza, natura naturans. It exists to the exclusion of
everything super-natural from the w orld .6 It also entails the rejec­
tion o f ‘all kind of dualism ’ .7 There is no unbridgeable gap separat­
ing the so-called material from the so-called spiritual, the lifeless
from the living, the bodily from the m ental .8 W ith a note reminis­
cent of Leibniz he says 9 that the difference between all these con­
trasts is only one of degree, not one of kind, and th at there are

' K aila 1944(1), p. 104f.

2 K aila 1953, p. 261f.
3 K aila 1979(1), p. 436ff.
* Probably 1907, but might be one year earlier.
5 K aila 1953, p. 261.
6 K aila 1979(1), p. 436.
7 K aila 1953, p. 261.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
 EINO KAILA’S M O NISM 63

between them hidden bonds which connect them to inseparable

wholes.
T he task, Kaila says 10 o f ‘clarifying, supporting and proving true
this monistic or Unitarian conception* is the one task which has kept
him engaged through all the years which passed after his awaken­
ing to become a philosopher.

Before following K aila on his lifelong journey to clarify the meaning

and nature of his early monistic vision, let us stop for a mom ent to
consider w hat might have been its roots. It is obvious that a
monistic view of the world such as Spinoza’s—also with its panthe­
istic tenor—had a strong resonance in K aila’s personality. This
was a rare combination of critical and visionary powers— the ideal
intellectual equipment for a philosopher, one might say. But it is
also obvious that both early reading and influence of a prevailing
‘climate of opinion’ contributed to the way in which he was going to
make use of his gifts.
The only book which is mentioned in the descriptions of his
‘awakening’ is Friedrich Paulsen’s Einleitung in die Philosophie, which
was at the time in common use as a university text-book . 11 But he
also says that he received his strongest impressions from Spinoza,
Leibniz, and K an t . 12 He saw in the joint achievement of these three
great thinkers that which in the posthumous fragment already
mentioned, he called the ‘classical view’ of the mind— body prob­
lem and which, in substance, he identified with his own. O ne is
struck by the fact that he does not mention Descartes, who gave to
the problem its modern form. But by being a dualist Descartes also
created the difficulties which his successors through the centuries
tried to overcome in w hat m ight be called, vaguely, a ‘monistic
synthesis’.
This view of our ‘classic’ philosophic inheritance is in tune with
the general cultural atmosphere which prevailed, particularly in
the arts, in Finland and Scandinavia during the decades round the
turn of the century. It is sometimes referred to with the nam e

1110KIbif
aila 1944( 1), p .
105. 1 like to think that this book played a similar role as a
guide to philosophy lor Kaila as another well-known text o f roughly the sam e time,
viz. W ilhelm Jerusalem ’s Einleitung in die Philosophie, played for me. K aila’s very
first published philosophic w riting was, incidentally, a review o f Jerusalem ’s book
in the daily paper Uusi Suometar for O ctober 1st, 1910.
12 Kaila 1979(1), p. 437.
64 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

neo-romanticism and contrasted with the preceding period of

naturalism which had culminated in the 1880s. In Finland it is also
known as the era of national romanticism. It was the time when the
‘classics’ in Finnish literature, painting, music, and architecture
were active. Young K aila’s great artistic sensibilities could not fail
to be deeply touched by what was going on; he was also personally
associated with the galaxy of artists whose brightest star was Jean
Sibelius. No person has made a deeper im pact on K aila than the
master of Finnish music.
The Weltanschauung which looms in the background of this cul­
tural situation— most strongly reflected in the literature of the time
— is a pantheistic feeling of man as a member of a world in which
the naturalistic and the spiritual elements are inseparably knit
together . 13
These sentiments are widely reflected also in the philosophical
literature of the period. A writer who was much read in Finland
was the Danish philosopher H arald Haffding. He defended a neo-
spinozist psycho-physical parallel-theory. He certainly had a
formative influence on young K aila’s way of thinking. O ne of
K aila’s first published papers was a presentation of Hoffding for the
Finnish reading public.
Since the late 1880s a lively debate had been going on in the
Philosophical Society of Finland between supporters of Cartesian
dualism and supporters of the then fashionable parallel- or
identity-theory of the mind— body relationship. T he chief com­
batants had been the Society’s founder and chairm an Thiodolf
Rein and our renowned moral philosopher Edvard Westermarck.
Both defended in turn the one and then the other position, much to
each others’ consternation . 14 It is actually in the context of this
debate that we see K aila first enter the philosophic arena. O n 4
November 1910 he read in the Society a paper about Hugo Miin-
sterberg’s work Philosophie der Werte. In the ensuing discussion,
according to the minutes, he defended, with a reference to M ach,
the empirio-criticist view that the im mediate experience does not
make a distinction between the physical and the psychical. Rein
and W estermarck were both present and seemed to have regarded
the views of the young speaker with some scepticism.
M ach was, with Avenarius, the most prom inent defender of a
monistic philosophy known as empirio-criticism in the early days of

13 T he peculiar Zeitgeist o f Finnish neo-rom anticism round the turn o f the

century is perceptively described in Sarajas 1961.
14 For details sec von W right 1983.
 EINO KAILA’S M O NISM 65

the century. How deep its im pact was on K aila we cannot exactly
tell. I have found only a passing, though approving, reference to
Avenarius in his w ritings .15 M ach, on the other hand, is a writer
with whose thoughts K aila throughout his m ature career con­
fronted his own. This confrontation, however, was also polemical.
K aila was always critical of M ach’s phenomenalism which in Fin­
land had an eloquent defender in the philosopher Rolf Lagerborg.
Particularly in the much later work Uber den physikalischen Realitats-
begrijf which is perhaps the most accomplished of his contributions
to the philosophy of the natural sciences K aila criticizes M ach’s
positivist and phenom enalist approach to physics as running ‘coun­
ter to some of the deep tendencies of physical research over the last
four centuries ’ . 16 These tendencies, as K aila understood them, were
decidedly monistic or unitarian— but not necessarily in agreement
with the empirio-criticism of M ach. Still, he never concealed and
often professed his high adm iration for M ach . 17
Another monistic philosophy of the time which young K aila
emphatically rejected was the one whose chief proponents were
Haeckel and O stw ald .18 It flourished in the form of a movement
with a strong—as one would say nowadays— ‘scientistic’ ethos and
also with marked anti-clerical and reformist social tendencies. In
one of his earlier printed papers , 19 K aila criticized the ‘scientific
world-view’ of the H aeckel/Ostwald type of monism as being ‘phi­
listine and superficial natural science’ bordering on vulgar m ater­
ialism. A few years later he wrote polemically against Lagerborg ,20
who took a not uncritical but still decidedly favourable view of the
program of the monistic movement. K aila expresses astonishm ent
that anyone could take seriously the, as he calls it, ‘conceptual
chaos’ of Haeckel.

As we have seen, even before K aila had tried to articulate clearly

his own monistic philosophy, he had criticized the monism most en
vogue during his years as a young student. He was always acutely

J5 Kaila 1928, p. 78.

16 Kaila 1941, p. 49; here quoted from the English translation in K aila 1979(2),
p. 155.
I’ E-g- >bid-
O n K aila’s rejection o f this type o f monism and on his early position
generally on issues in the philosophy o f science, see N iiniluoto 1979, pp. 370-409
w Kaila 1911.
20 Kaila 1915.
66 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

aware of the difficulties of stating his monism in a clear and

convincing way— and it is probably right to say that he never
succeeded in this completely.
K aila’s monism can be said to rest on two pillars which, howev­
er, stand apart from each other and do not necessarily support the
same edifice of thought. One is psycho-physical parallelism or the
conviction, in Spinoza’s words, that ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac
ordo et connexio rerum. T he other is the unity, at the level of concepts
and theories, of the scientific picture of the w orld .21 The first is, so to
say, a metaphysical oneness of the ‘stuff of which the world is
m ade’. The second again is a oneness of that which, in G oethe’s
words ‘die Welt im innersten zusam m enhalt’, i.e. the laws and
principles governing the Weltgeschehen or world process.
A metaphysical monism has to be on its guard against certain
charges or dangers.
One is the charge of not being able to overcome metaphysical
dualism. If the order of things and th at of ideas answer to or reflect
one another—for example neural events and sense impressions—
how can they be correlated except by m utual causal connection?
This problem seems never seriously to have worried Kaila. To him
dualism was ‘o u t5, once and for all. This attitude is, I think, a
reflection of the situation in the philosophy when he grew up— and
also long after. He did not live to see the revival of interest in
Cartesian dualism and the problems connected with it which we
have witnessed in the second half of our century. K aila would
presumably have regarded it an aberration and relapse into already
conquered positions.
A danger with monism of which he was acutely aware, however,
is that of reductionism. If mind and m atter are, somehow, one, does it
not mean that the mind is material as the materialists would have
it? This was the charge notoriously directed against Spinoza. But
on the other hand, does not monism equally mean th at m atter is at
bottom mental, as the idealists and phenom enalists m aintain. This
was the accusation which Lenin levelled against the empirio-
criticists. M aterialism (physicalism) and idealism (phenom enal­
ism), one could say, are the Scylla and C harybdis of a monistic
philosophy. K aila tried to steer his way clear of the two. His
monism is emphatically anti-reductionist. As we have already
noted, he criticized M ach’s phenomenalism. And he certainly was
never in danger of the m aterialistic pit-falls of Haeckel’s and
O stw ald’s philosophy of nature.

21 Cf. Kaila 1953, p. 268f.

 EINO KAILA’S M ONISM 67

Even though K aila’s monism can be said to have been in origin a

‘metaphysical’ vision of psycho-physical parallelism and the unity
of mind and m atter, his own both earliest and latest efforts to
support it with argum ents relies on the second of the above men­
tioned ‘pillars’ or the idea of the unity of the scientific world-
picture. In the 1953 paper where he describes his awakening to
philosophy he says in so many words that ‘a Unitarian or monistic
philosophy is— in essence intimately connected with one of the
life-nerves of the natural sciences, viz. the tendency to unification of
scientific theory form ation ’ .22 As an example he there gives the
Danish physicist C hristian 0 rs te d ’s discoveries of the connection
between ‘galvanism’, as it was called in former days, and electric­
ity. 0 rs te d ’s (and Faraday’s) discoveries were the basis of the
unified electro-magnetic field-theory later developed by Maxwell.
This was one of the greatest achievements of 19th century theoret­
ical physics. K aila finds the example impressive because 0 r s te d ’s
research had been guided by a firm conviction of the fundam ental
unity of all forces in nature—including those governing the mind.
0 rs te d ’s work Aanden i Naturen—in Germ an Der Geist in der Natur—
was at the time one of the most influential specimens of the early
19th century tradition of Naturphilosophic, Kaila thought of his own
work as a latter-day revival of that same tradition.

K aila’s earliest attem pt to state his philosophic position is a little

book of the year 1920 called Sielunelama biologisena ilmiona, in English
‘M ental Life as a Biological Phenom enon’. K aila was then 30. His
earlier published work had been in experimental psychology or else
of a belletristic and semi-journalistic nature.
The professed aim of Sielunelama is an attack on the position
known as vitalism in biology and psychology. K aila argues for
something he calls ‘the mechanistic principle’. It says that the state
of a material system at time t depends in a lawful m anner solely on
the state of the system and its environm ent at the immediately
preceding time-differential .23 This principle governs all phe­
nomena. There is no special causation operating in the realm of the
mental or psychic.
The idea of mechanistic causation which Kaila here defends must
not be confused with that form of mechanism which maintains

22 Ibid.
23 K aila 1920, p. 10.
68 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

that all natural phenom ena are ‘reducible to the movements of

bodies and all natural laws to laws governing those movements 5.24
K aila is decidedly against this reductionist view .25 Moreover, he
thinks that the laws of chemistry are not reducible to the laws of
physics, nor the laws of biology to those of physics and chem istry .26
But the laws governing psychological phenom ena, he thought, are
but special cases of laws of biology. O n the mental level they
manifest themselves as laws of association and reproduction .27
They reflect underlying physiological principles .28 This is so be­
cause of the strict parallelism which, he assumes, obtains between
m ental and bodily phenom ena .29 W ith this K aila gives to his posi­
tion in the philosophy of science a metaphysical underpinning. The
alternative conception, which he rejects ,30 is th at body and mind
causally interact.
It is interesting to note here that K aila later came to abandon the
peculiar form of anti-reductivism in the philosophy of science
which he defends in Sielunelama. U nder the impact of more recent
developments in microphysics and molecular chemistry, he re­
jected the view that the laws of chemistry are ‘autonom ous’ in
relation to the laws of physics. For a long time, however, he insisted
on the autonomy of biology in relation to the physico-chemical
basis of life phenom ena .31 In the end, however, he abandoned this
position too— in view of later advances in biophysical science .32 But
these moves of his in a reductionist direction did not mean that he
had accepted a mechanistic view either in the classic sense of
reducing all natural phenom ena to bodies in motion or in the sense
of the determinism of his early principle of mechanistic or initial
causation. W hat made the reductivist concessions acceptable for
K aila was his growing conviction that the field-theoretic laws of
micro-physics offered a possibility for a unified non-mechanistic
natural science. In a polemical paper of the year 1952, directed
against what he saw as a revival of mechanistic ideas in the study of
self-regulating mechanisms in the then new science of cybernetics,
he expresses his conviction that life for its explanation requires a

24 Ibid., p. 88.
25 Ibid., p. 90ff.
2* Ibid., p. 77f. and p. 90.
27 Ibid., p. 50.
28 Ibid., pp. 36, 48.
29 Ibid., p. 137.
30 Ibid., pp. 10f., 42ff., and passim.
31 Kaila 1948. For som e cariy doubts, see K aila 1944(1), p. 135.
32 Kaila 1952(1)
 EINO KAILA S M ONISM 69

quantum biology .33 It is in quantum theory that physics, chemistry,

and biology meet and become unified. This rejection of ‘m echa­
nism ’ is equally a rejection of ‘vitalism’ which had been K aila’s
polemical target in the 1920 publication.

The mechanism which K aila professed in Sielunelama reflects the

theoretical background of his early work in experimental psycholo­
gy. He was an adherent of the then current associationist psycholo­
gy. But soon after, a change took place with him. He became, first
acquainted with and then deeply influenced by the new current of
Gestalt-psychology the leading figures of which were W ertheimer,
Kohler, and Koflka. In the most voluminous of all his writings, the
synoptic work Sielunelaman rakenne (‘T he Structure of M ind’) of
1923, he gave a sympathetic presentation of their views, w ithout yet
completely rejecting his earlier associationist position. But a few
years later he is fully ‘converted’ to the Gestalt-view. It dominates
his second systematic attem pt to articulate a monistic philosophy.
This is the book Beitrdge zu einer synthetischen Philosophie of the year
1928. The title is characteristic. Synthesis, along with monism and
unification, is what K aila aimed at.
Gestalt-thtory was for Kaila much more than a position in
psychology .34 It is a monistic philosophy in nuce which embraces
inorganic nature as well as life and mental phenom ena. K aila calls
this a ‘monism from above ’ .35 This is an allusion to the non­
additive character of the Gestalten. They are wholes governing their
parts in the sense that the law for the whole cannot be derived from
laws about the parts considered in isolation. The whole, therefore,
is not a mere ‘sum ’ of its parts. It has features peculiar to it. This
point is related to the theory o f emergence, entertained by Lloyd
M organ and others, to which K aila makes sympathetic reference in
the book .36
K aila’s concern in Beitrdge is basically with the metaphysical and
not with the unification of science aspect of monism. And here he
also encounters grave philosophical difficulties. They are caused by
the anti-reductivist stand which he is anxious to m aintain.
Though a professed adherent of psycho-physical parallelism,

33 Kaila 1952(2) and K aila 1952(3), pp. 91-97.

34 K aila. 1928. d . 91.
70 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

K aila neither wanted to say that mind and m atter are ‘identical’
nor that mental and physical phenom ena were of different nature.
He approvingly refers to the ‘neutral stuff 5 monism 'of Avenarius
and Bertrand Russell (of that period). He is looking for a concep­
tual standpoint ‘beyond the cleavage in ‘m ind’ and ‘m atter”
(‘jenseits des Gegensatzes von ‘G eist’ und ‘M aterie” ), he says .38
But in which sense can the neutrality or unity of the world-stuff be
maintained? An idea which he entertains in Beitrage is th at from the
point of view of quality everything is m ental (Geist), but from the
point of view of relation (or structure) everything is m aterial
(Materie).39 So in a sense everything th at there is is both m atter
and mind. T he thought recurs often in his writing and is even the
title of the much later paper in which he criticizes cybernetics .40 It
would be good, he says, to eliminate these two heavily loaded
concepts (‘diese schwerbelasteten Begriffe’) from philosophy .41 But
therewith he has not solved his problem.
As ju st noted, the m ind-m atter duality is for K aila closely tied to
the quality-relation or quality-structure distinction. Physical scien­
ce deals with relations or structures only .42 This idea resembles
thoughts of C arnap and Schlick. But there is no indication that
K aila at this stage of his development had got his inspiration from
them .43 To the extent th at one can speak of an influence, it is rather
Russell who seems a source, particularly through his Analysis of
M atter .44 T he terms of the relations which science clarifies, howev­
er, are ultimately things or phenom ena of qualitative nature, K aila
thinks .45 Thus if relation presupposes quality, there is also a sense
in which m atter can be said to presuppose mind— and the phe-
nomenalistic ghost which K aila in defense of realism is anxious to
exorcize46 is still lurking in the background.
T he problem of the qualities and the possibility of eliminating
them from the scientific world-picture remains a Leitmotiv through­
out K aila’s thinking—and we shall, after a detour in partly other
directions, later return to it. In Beitrage he proposes, somewhat

37 Ibid., p. 78.
“ Ibid.
39 Ibid., p. 207.
40 K aila 1952.
41 K aila 1928, p. 207.
42 Ibid., p. 15.
45 T here are, however, occasional references to both authors also in K aila’s
publications in the 1920s.
44 Ibid., p. 16 and passim.
44 Ibid., p. 18.
44 Ibid., p. 49ff.
 EINO KAILA’S M ONISM 71

tentatively, a solution according to which the qualitative or phe­

nomenal is a field-state (Feldzustand) co-ordinated with processes in
the living brain .47 The phenomenal and the physical are, as it were,
two modes in which this field-state exists. W ith this idea we touch
the core of psycho-physical parallelism.
If there is parallelism between the phenomenal and the physical
then it would seem th at there ought to exist non-additivity also on
the physical side. Kaila was deeply convinced that this was, in fact,
the case .48 Kohler’s theory of ‘physical Gestalten’ in the brain had
been an attem pt to vindicate this idea. K aila was fascinated by
Kohler’s views. But he was also critical of them—in Beitrage and
later. There is a detailed exposition and criticism in Beitrage, term i­
nating in the conclusion th at K ohler’s supposed neural equivalents
of the Gestalts were, after all, additive, and not ‘holistic’, wholes .49
Non-additivity on the neural side had to be sought ‘deeper’, in a
field-theoretic conception of the microstructures of the brain.
Psychology, pace Kohler, is still awaiting its Faraday and Maxwell,
who, says K aila ,30 were the ‘Gkrta/J-theorists’ of physics. (A good
comparison.)

One year after Beitrage K aila published a book with the title
Nykyinen maailmankasitys, (in English ‘T he Contem porary W orld-
View’). It is one of his several semi-popular, synoptic works for a
broader academic public. In the Preface K aila tells the reader that
the book is an attem pt to present the view of the world at which he
had arrived after a decade o f research in ‘logic, psychology, and
philosophy of nature’. For two reasons, he says, he calls this view
‘contemporary*. One is that it is based on recent findings in phys­
ics, biology, and psychology. T he other is that it has affinities with
‘some im portant trends of thought in contemporary philosophy’.
He mentions, in addition to Russell and the Gfcrta/J-psychologists,
also Reichenbach’s philosophy of space and time and C arn ap ’s Der
logische Aujbau der Welt. This last appeared the same year as K aila’s
Beitrage, in 1928. K aila immediately studied it. It seems that K aila

47 Ibid., p. 79f.
48 Ib id , Ch. III.
49 Ibid., pp. 93ff.
30 I b id , p. 108. 4— die Physik hatte ihre “ Gestalttheoretiker” in Faraday und
M axw ell,— entsprechend musste es einm al auch in der Psychologic— zu einem
radikalen Bruch mit solchen Vors tell ungen, denengem ass die konkreten Stiicke
der phanomenalen “ Felder” die Elemente der Psychologie seien kom m en.1
72 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

had received a copy from the author in return for Beitrage and
another one of his w ritings .51 Later in the year he wrote to Schlick,
asking Schlick’s assistance with the publication of comments he
had written on C arn ap ’s book— possibly together with a reply by
C arnap himself. This plan did not materialize, but K aila’s Der
logistische Neupositivismus which appeared 1930 is presum ably an
extended version of the comments mentioned in the letter to
Schlick.
W ith these events begins a new era in K aila’s philosophical
development. Simultaneous with them is his appointm ent to the
chair in theoretical philosophy in Helsinki, after ten intellectually
lonely years as professor of philosophy in the Finnish university at
Turku. In 1929 he paid a first visit to Vienna, and he returned
there, on Rockefeller grants, 1932 and 1934. He got to know several
members of the V ienna Circle and took part in its meetings.
It is surely remarkable that a professor working in w hat now­
adays would be regarded as deadening isolation in a Finnish provin­
cial university 32 could have reached for himself and on his own a
position which was on a level with a revolutionary breakthrough in
one of the great centres of the intellectual and scientific life of
Europe. But it should also be remembered that K aila always
preserved a critical attitude to the movement initiated by the Wiener
Kreis. He never called himself a logical positivist. For his own
position in philosophy he had as early as in the mid-1920’s coined
the name ‘logical empiricism ’ .53 This was later adopted also by
others who worked in the tradition of the Vienna Circle, but who
perhaps thought, with Kaila, that the label ‘positivism’ was too
strongly suggestive of a trend in nineteenth-century philosophy and
of reductionist tendencies from which they wanted to dissociate
their own position. Nor did K aila accept for himself the term
‘analytical philosophy’ when after the war it became current for the
several outgrowths of w hat was originally known as logical positiv­
ism. He insisted that his philosophy was synthetic, not analytic.
It should also be noted that the idea o f ‘unity of science’, which
became another label for the movement starting in Vienna, is
rather different from K aila’s idea of a unified scientific view of the
world. K aila’s idea was not so much one of a conceptual and
methodological unity of the sciences as of their unification through
scientific theories— prim arily those of physics— of very general
11 Letter from Carnap to Kaila of 5 June 1928.
52 Kaila in a letter to Schlick o f 28 September 1928: ‘In meiner fernen H eim at
lebe ich aber in ciner zicm lich vollstandigen geistigen Isolierung*.
as Kaila 1926, p. 35.
 EINO KAILA S M O NISM 73

scope and applicability. He was looking forward, one could say,

to a modern version of the mathesis universalis or scientia generalis
envisaged of yonder by such great scientist-philosophers as Des­
cartes and Leibniz. He was, therefore, as can be expected, also
critical of the claims of the Baden-school and of Dilthey of metho­
dological autonomy for the Geisteswissenschaften in relation to the
Naturwissenschaften.M

In K aila’s literary output the beginning of the new period in his

creative life is marked by his m onograph Der logistiscke Neupositivis-
mus of the year 1930. Its title contains the earliest occurrence known
to me of the term ‘neo-positivism’ which soon gained currency as a
name of the new movement in philosophy. But contrary to what the
title may let us expect, K aila’s book is not a presentation of the
message of the V ienna Circle. It is an exposition and critique of
some main ideas in C arnap’s Aujbau. (Cf. above p. 71f.). K aila was
convinced of the im portance of C arn ap ’s book. He goes as far as to
say that it bears a relation to exact thinking in our time somewhat
analogous to that of K an t’s Critique of Pure Reason to Newtonian
science of nature .55 But he also finds several details of C arn ap ’s
conceptual constructions debatable. His criticisms called forth
some friendly polemics in correspondence with C arnap and
H em pel .56
K aila’s own later contributions to the new trend centre almost
exclusively round the problem of a ‘logical constitution’ of reality.
They culminate in two books, the m aturest I would say in his entire
output. The first, from the year 1936, is called Uber das System der
Wirklichkeitsbegrijfe, ein Beitrag zum logischen Empirismus; the second
from 1941, is entitled Uber den physikalischen Realitdtsbegrijf, z^oeiter
Beitrag zum logischen Empirismus. Between and very much in tune
with them is another of K aila’s synoptic works, Inhimillinen tieto,
mita se onja rnitd se ei ole (in English ‘H um an Knowledge, W hat It Is
and W hat It Is N ot’). It appeared simultaneously with a Swedish
translation in 1939 and was for a num ber of years used as an
advanced text in Finnish and Swedish universities.
K aila’s own constitution theory is original and rather different
54 K aila’s nearly only contribution to questions o f scientific method is K aila
1930(2).
“ Kaila 1930(1), p. 9.
“ Letters from Carnap to K aila o f 28 January 1929 and 12 D ecem ber 1930.
Letter from Hem pel to Kaila o f 3 January 1931.
74 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

from C arnap’s. It is much to be regretted that it never attracted the

attention internationally which, in my opinion, it amply deserves.
To this contributed no doubt the intervention of the war and the
‘em igration’ of a whole tradition in philosophy from the G erman to
the English-speaking world. The only noteworthy trace which
K aila’s contributions have left are with Alfred Ayer, who in his
Foundations o f Empirical Knowledge acknowledged indebtedness to
K aila .57 Ayer’s book was published in 1940.
C arnap’s effort in Aufbau can with full right be said to aim at a
monistic philosophy .58 But it is a monism of a rather different kind
both from what I have here called the metaphysical monism center­
ing round the idea of psycho-physical parallelism and from the
scientific monism of a unified theory covering all natural phe­
nomena. The C arnapian version of monism could be called concep­
tual or epistemological, or why not simply, logical monism. It
entertains an idea of a common ancestral tree for all concepts
concerning what is real and of some form of logical interconnected­
ness of all types of discourse about empirical reality.
K aila’s contributions to constitution-theory are also a facet of his
craving for a monistic philosophy. But, as far as I can see, he never
uses the name ‘m onism ’ for it. Instead another term now becomes
prom inent in his writings. This is the term invariance.
An invariance, roughly speaking, is a lawful order, a regularity
or stability, which subsumes different phenom ena under a common
concept or heading and which enables us to anticipate or predict
new phenom ena under that same heading. All hum an knowledge
aims at finding invariances, says the opening sentence of Inhimil-
linen tieto.39 Along with this goes a tendency to smooth out minor
deviations from the rule, make the invariance even more perfect
than it is in reality. This ‘smoothening out’ K aila calls idealization or
rationalization. ‘Invariance 5 and ‘rationalization 5 are two key-terms
of his philosophy from the mid-1930’s on.
K aila distinguishes three levels or segments of reality: the phe­
nomenal or qp-level of sensory experience, the physical or f-level of
macroscopic things, and the physico-scientific or physicalist level of
micro-phenomena and other entities of physical theory. O ne can
also speak of the three layers as three levels o f discourse about reality.
T he relation between the three levels is roughly as follows: the
entities of a higher level are conceptualizations of invariances (in­
variant relations) among phenomena of the next lower level. Thus,
57 Ayer 1940, p. 248 and passim.
58 Carnap 1928, § 162.
59 K aila 1939, p. 13.
 EINO KAILA’S M ONISM 75

to quote his words ‘the entire physical theory is nothing more than
a precise representation of the more general ‘‘higher” invariances
of the physical everyday w orld .’60 Similarly, the physical objects of
our ‘everyday world’ are conceptual or logical constructs of in­
variances in the world of perceptions and sensations. O f the way in
which the physical world is ‘constituted* on the bases of invariances
in the flux of sensory experiences K aila presents an interesting and
original theory, the details of which, however, we cannot digress
upon here.
In the original logical positivist conception of an Aufbau was
contained an idea to the effect that all concepts of a higher level of
discourse should be, in principle, eliminable in terms of concepts of
a lower level and in the last resort of w hat K aila calls the qp-level.
This entails the translatability of all ‘higher type’ discourse into the
language of sense-experience, the basis of all knowledge.
Kaila’s idea, as I understand it, of constituting the higher levels of
reality in the terms of invariances among lower level phenom ena is
not necessarily tied to these views about eliminability and trans­
latability. K aila, however, initially embraced them too. It therefore
came to him—indeed to us in Helsinki, I vividly remember— as
something of a shock when C arnap in ‘Testability and M eaning’
came up with the since notorious difficulties to eliminability caused
by disposition concepts. K aila in Inhimillinen tieto tried to overcome
C arnap’s difficulties— but without success, as Anders W edberg
showed in a review in The Journal of Symbolic Logic. As for the related
idea of translatability, K aila accepts it in the 1936, 1939, and 1941
publications although with the obvious limitations imposed by the
‘smoothing out’ process of rationalization which is characteristic of
theory formation in the more advanced sciences.
In the posthumously published The Perceptual and Conceptual Com-
ponents o f Everyday Experience which was originally a chapter in his
unfinished synoptic work Hahmottuva maailma, previously men­
tioned, Kaila once again returns to the translatability problem.
With arguments, somewhat reminiscent actually of those of C arnap
in ‘Testability and M eaning 5 he now tries to show th at translatabil­
ity fails between the f-language and the cp-language. It fails,
roughly speaking, because the antecedents in conditional sentences
which are supposed to give the perceptual meaning of a sentence
about physical objects, necessarily will have to be themselves (a
kind of) physical sentences .61
60 Kaila 1941, p. 13. Q uoted from the English translation in K aila 1979(2),
p. 132.
61 K aila 1979(2), pp. 294ff.
76 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

A problem which has presented notorious difficulties to a monistic

constitution-theory is the problem of the reality o f other minds.
According to logical empiricism, K aila says ,62 ‘the objective m ean­
ing of statem ents about the other-m ental consists in statem ents
about the behaviour (in the broadest sense of the word) of other
persons.’ A statem ent about another person’s mind— about what
he senses or feels or thinks, etc.— is, somehow, equivalent with a
statem ent about (what is going on in) his body. This may be true;
but it immediately also gives rise to an intriguing problem. K aila
posed it in clear terms already in his examination in Neupositivismus
of C arnap’s position in Aufbau. Here he says :63
The question now is whether this equivalence is analytic, i.e. whether
that equivalence is a definition, namely the only possible definition of
the ‘other-mental states’. If the answer is affirmative the statements
about the mental states of others have the same meaning as the
statements about certain expressive processes;—This would amount
to an epistemological foundation of an extreme ‘behaviourism’.
Yet, according to customary theory of knowledge, this question is
certainly not to be answered affirmatively.
In Neupositivismus K aila makes a somewhat half-hearted attem pt
to criticize the ‘customary theory’ and rests content with the fact
that from the point of view of constitution-theory the equivalences
in question have to be analytic. In System der Wirklichkeitsbegriffe six
years later the difficulty is somehow slurred over .64 He suggests,
vaguely, an alternative to the analytic equivalences of logical be­
haviorism. This alternative is to regard the experienced other-
m ental— for example the pain we see in a contorted face or the
contem pt which we recognize in another person’s glance— as an
Urphanomen or primitive phenomenon, belonging to our sensory
experience or <p-world.65 For Kaila the psychologist the reductivist
step involved in radical behaviourism always seemed an illicit and
unrealistic simplification.
In Inhimillinen tieto the problem of other minds is dealt with at
greater length. Here, for the first time, he considers the equivalents
as obtaining between mental phenom ena and brain-states. T he ques­
tion whether these equivalences are analytic or synthetic is, how­
ever, not raised. But the problem torm ented him— and in two

62 Kaila 1936. Also in Kaila 1979(2), p. 120.

63 Kaila 1930(1), p. 33. (Q uoted from Kaila 1979(2), p. 17).
64 Kaila 1936, p. %ff., (K aila 1979(2), p. 1 18ff.)
65 Ibid., p. 100. (K aila 1979(2), p. 121.)
 EINO KAILA’S M O NISM 77

papers from the year 1942 he made a serious attack on it. One
paper is called ‘Physikalismus und Phanom enalism us’, the other
‘Reaalitiedon logiikka’ which in English means the logic of our
knowledge of reality.
In these papers Kaila accepts w hat might be called a two-
language solution— hinted at already by C arnap in Aufbau and
later becoming current under the im pact of ‘physicalism’ as an
alternative to the ‘phenom enalism’ of early logical positivism.
Whereas the latter locates the basis of knowledge, i.e. the
Constitution-System, in K aila’s cp-world, the former locates it in
the f-world. From the point of view of physicalism, K aila says ,66 the
behavioural equivalences are definitional, analytic; from the point
of view of phenomenalism, however, they are empirical, synthetic.
Physicalism may be said to have the advantage of overcoming the
asymmetry between w hat in German is named with the terms
‘Eigen-psychisch’ and ‘Fremd-psychisch’ which gives to a phe-
nomenalist constitution of the world its solipsistic flavour. But this
advantage is gained at the expense of an incompleteness, viz. of
having a language ‘in der man aber das eigentliche Fundam ent
unserer gesamten Wirklichkeitsauffassung nicht beschreiben kann,
namlich die—phanomenologische “ Erlebniswelt” in ihrer qualita-
tiven Eigenart ’ .67

The two papers mentioned mark the end of an era in K aila’s search
for a monistic philosophy. It is the era of his wrestling with the
Constitution-Problem. It is also the time of his closest alliance with
the movement in philosophy which had its origin in the V ienna
Circle and continued in various forms of ‘analytic philosophy’.
Later K aila is again the lonely wolf he was before his encounter
with the logical positivists.
I think, although this m ust rem ain a conjecture, that when K aila
in his 1953 description of his philosophic awakening speaks 68 of a
‘detour’— this is how I translate the Finnish ‘syrjataipale’— which
lasted some ten years in his life-long efforts to articulate his monis­
tic vision he has in mind the period from roughly 1930 to the early
1940s. T he impression of a ‘detour' gains force from the fact that
with the two papers mentioned of the year 1942 he is back at

66 Kaila 1942(2), p. 82ff.

67 Kaila 1942(1), p. 123.
68 Kaila 1953, p. 261.
78 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

substantially the same problems with which he was wrestling in

Beitrage, i.e. the problem of monism both in its ‘m etaphysical’ and
its ‘scientific’ variant .69
K aila clearly noted and emphasized th at the middle one of the
three layers of reality he had distinguished, viz. the physical level,
enjoys a certain ‘privileged position’ in relation to the two extreme
ones, the phenom enal and the physicalistic level. O u r ‘natural
language’ is predom inantly an f-language, the predicates and rela­
tions of which apply to physical things and events. Yet the basis of
our knowledge is sensory experience which is described in the
qp-language. This means ‘dass die naturliche Sprache au f einer
verhaltnismassig hohen Stufe des “ logischen Aufbau der W elt” erst
einsatzt', die unterhalb dieser Stufe gelegenen D aten— bleiben dabei
unberucksichtigt; die naturliche Sprache ist zu einer Beschreibung
derselben von N atu r aus ungeeignet .’ 70
It is a merit of K aila’s to have seen that the problem of the
relationship between the f-level and the (p-level is not ju st a ques­
tion whether physical concepts can be ‘constituted’ on the basis of
phenomenological concepts or physical language ‘translated’ into
phenomenological language. The question is rather whether there
is such a thing as a ‘phenomenological language’ at all. W hen
wrestling with this K aila comes close to the thoughts which made
W ittgenstein, after his return to philosophy in the late 1920’s,
abandon the idea of a basic phenomenological language. T here is
some resemblance also with the shift from a phenom enalist to a
physicalist position which took place among logical positivists in
the early 1930s. But Kaila’s critical doubts concerning the (p-world
went deeper than theirs. They are foreboded in the two 1942-
papers and further developed in two papers from the year 1944. As
in the case of the twin-papers of 1942, one is in G erm an, the other
in Finnish. The first is called ‘Logik und Psychophysik’, the title of
the second would be in English ‘T he Problem of the Gestalt'. The
concluding pages of Tankens oro, also published in 1944, summarize
the position then reached by Kaila.
T he contrast phenom enal-physical is for K aila related to the
dualism quality-structure or quality-relation which had intrigued
him in Beitrage. The qp-language is the language of (sensible) qual­
ities, the f-language a language of structures. But any effort to give
a phenomenological analysis or description of w hat we really
69 A n alternative interpretation is that K aila had in mind the roughly ten years
o f his tenure o f the professorship in Turku. T h e Finnish word m entioned in the
text gives som e support also to this interpretation.
70 K aila 1944(2), p. 108.
 EINO KAILA’S M ONISM 79

‘sense’ seems to fall back on a language of structure. This is best

illustrated by the Gwtaft-qualities:
Gestalt-qualities are, for example, the seen straightness of a line
or flatness of a surface, or the separation and grouping of lines in a
complex drawing. Any attem pt to ‘analyse 5 the quality will refer to
some relational invariances in the physical m aterial— line, surface,
drawing—in which the Gestalt is perceived. There simply is no
‘pure’ phenomenological language available in which the quality
can be described. This means, K aila says , 71 th at the very notion of
‘Gestalt-qxiaiity' is self-contradictory, a ‘hybrid’ between <p- and
f-reality, and therefore something which, in a sense, does not even
‘exist’. W hat the attem pted phenomenological analysis gives us is
what K aila calls 72 a ‘semantic description’ referring to the ‘m ean­
ing’ which the qualitatively experienced has in physical reality,—
for example the impression of flatness of a surface as a sign of the
fact that any line which has at least two points common with the
surface falls entirely in the surface.
W hat we call a Gestalt-quality is, in K aila’s view, the experienced
equivalent of a neural reaction on the relational invariances in a
given sensational manifold. ‘Die “ G estaltqualitaten” ’, he says , 73
‘sind die Korrelate jener Reaktion; in ihnen haben wir die betref-
fenden Invarianten als “ unm ittelbar erlebte” Phanom ene.’
In still later writings from the 1950s74 and a posthumously pub­
lished fragment from the unfinished Hahmottuva maailma,75 K aila
extends these observations on Gestalt-phenomena. to qualities
generally. An experienced colour-quality, for example, is a diffuse,
unanalyzed sign referring to a place in a relational system of, say,
degrees of luminosity, saturation, and shade. Its phenomenological
analysis is a ‘semantic description’ of this place in the f-world.
Kaila supports his view with a reference to the defective verbal
reactions to colours of people who suffer from so-called ‘colour amne­
sia’. This shows, he thinks, that the normal use of colour-words
makes latent reference to the relational structure of colours as
physical phenomena.
K aila’s efforts in the last 16 years of his life to deal with the
relation between the phenomenal and the physical, quality and
structure, the perceptual and the conceptual, seem to me a very
im portant but sadly neglected contribution of his to the philosophy

71 Ibid,, p. 107.
72 Ibid., p. 109.
73 Ibid., p. 99.
74 Kaila 1953, p. 274.
75 Kaila 1979(1), p. 4 5 1 £
80 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

of psychology. Philosophers who write about these m atters usually

have but little schooling in empirical and experimental psychology.
Psychologists again seem too often to be blind to the conceptual,
i.e. philosophical, dimension of their subject. Specialization in the
fields has made the combination which K aila represented almost
unique in our time.
I shall not try to pass verdict on K aila’s metaphysics of the
body-mind or of the quality-structure relation. I do not feel in
every respect com petent for the task. M any of his thoughts rem ain
for me unclear. But even if he did not succeed in giving a precise
sense to the thought that ‘everything is m atter and everything is
m ind’ he certainly succeeded in showing that the body-mind sepa­
ration is an unfortunate instance of what he in later writings
calls ‘the schematism of dichotomies ’76 and that the two Cartesian
substances are conceptually inseparably bound together. It does not
seem to me certain that a monistic philosophy can go much farther
to their unification.

10

Towards the end of his K aila tended more and more to view his
own work in philosophy as a continuation and revival of the
Romantic tradition of Naturphilosophie. (Cf. above p. 67). This is
already apparent from the title of the great work in three volumes
which he began to plan in the mid-1950s. It was to be called
Terminalkausalitat als die Grundlage eines unitarischen Naturbegriffs, eine
naturphilosophische Untersuchung. Only the first volume, Terminalkausa­
litat in der Atomdynamik materialized (1956). For the second, Termi­
nalkausalitat in der Biodynamik, he had already prepared a vast
material of notes. T he third, uncommenced, volume he would
presumably have called Terminalkausalitat in der Neurodynamik.
‘Term inalkausalitat’ is K aila’s nam e for a unifying explanatory
principle. Its precise meaning is difficult to gather from his w rit­
ings. There is a touch of finality or teleology with the notion of
‘term inal causation’— but it should certainly not be associated with
ideas of purposiveness or striving for a goal in natural processes.
The principle is in some way an ‘holistic opposite’ of the mechanis­
tic principle or determ ination through initial causation which
Kaila in his early work of 1920 had thought of as a unifying
explanatory principle valid for all nature. Initial causation may still
be im portant for explaining and predicting macrophenomena. But
76 Ibid., p. 455.
 EINO KAILA’S M O NISM 81

in the micro-world of atoms, living cells, and neurons terminal

causation reigns. And it is in this world that, according to K aila,
the innerm ost secrets of a unitary conception of nature are hidden.
The source of inspiration of K aila’s striving for a ‘unified theory’
was, of course, the grand achievements of relativity and quantum
physics. In 1950 he had published Zur Metatheorie der Quantenmecha-
nik and the title of his last complete book, which he did not live to
see in print, would be in English ‘The Einstein-Minkowski Theory
of Invariance. Investigations into its Logico-Epistemological N a­
ture and its Significance for a Philosophy of N ature’.
It almost goes without saying that K aila’s program was too
ambitious for a single m an’s efforts to be crowned with success. But
we can appreciate it as a grandiose vision of the goal to which
W estern exact science has been striving for the past four or five
hundred years.
As a motto for his first effort to state his philosophic position, the
Sielunelamd biologisena ilmiona of 1920, K aila used the following
quotation from M ach’s Mechanics: ‘Die hochste Philosophie des
Naturforschers besteht darin eine unvollendete W eltanschauung zu
ertragen’. To endure an unfinished world-view may be the plight of
all deep and serious thinking. To accept this is doubly difficult for
one whose craving for a ‘unified theory’ never yields to compromise
with recalcitrant facts.

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------ . ‘Replik till dr. Lagerborg* (‘Answer to Dr. Lagerborg’). Nya Argus 8, 1915.
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82 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

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What It Is N ot). O tava, Helsinki 1939.
------ . Uber den physikalischen Realitatsbegriff. Acta Philosophica Fennica 4, 1941.
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1942 (2).
------ . Tankens oro. Tre samtal on deyttersta tingen (T he D isquietude o f T hought. Three
Dialogues on the U ltim ate Q uestions). Soderstrom & C o., Helsingfors
1944 (1).
------ . ‘Logik und Psychophysik’. Theoria 10> 1944 (2).
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lehti 11.11.1948.
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Perspective o f Philosophy’). Valvoja 72, 1952 (1).
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6.8.1952 (2).
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tion o f 1952 (2) by V eli V alp ola.A jatu s 17. 1952 (3).
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Philosophica Fennica 10, 1956.
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teestaja sen luonnonjilosojisesta merkityksestd (T he Einstein— M inkowski Theory of
Invariance. Investigations into its Logico-Epistem ological Nature and its
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Conceptual Com ponents o f Everyday Experience). Ajatus 23, 1960. German
translation by H. H enning, Acta Philosophica Fennica 13,1962. English
translation by Ann and Peter Kirschenm ann in Kaila 1979 (2).
------ . ‘Filosofian klassillinen kasitys aineellisen ja sielullisen suhteesta’ (‘T he
Classical V iew in Philosophy o f the Relation between M atter and M in d ’). In
Aate ja maailmankuva, ed. by Sim o K nuuttila, Ju h a M anninen and Ilkka
N iiniluoto. W erner Soderstrom, Helsinki 1979 (1).
------ . Reality and Experience. Four Philosophical Essays. Ed. by Robert S. C ohen. D.
Reidel Publishing C o., Dordrecht— H olland 1979 (2). V ienna Circle C ollec­
tion. Vol. 12. C ontains English translations, by Ann and Peter Kir­
schenm ann o f Kaila 1930, 1936, 1941, and 1960.
N iiniluoto, I.: ‘Tigerstedt, K aila ja Lagerborg: tieteenfilosofian varhaiskylvoa
Suom essa’ (‘T ., K ., and L.: Early Philosophy o f Science in Finland’). In
K aila 1979 (1).
Sarajas, A.: Elaman men. Tutkielmia uusromaniiikan kirjallisista aatteista (T he Sea of
Life. Studies in the Literary Ideas o f N eo-R om anticism ). Werner Soderstrom,
Porvoo 1961.
von W right, G.H.: ‘The Origin and D evelopm ent o f Edward WTestermarck’s
Moral Philosophy’. In Edward Westemarck. Essays on his Life and Works. Ed. by
T im othy Stroup. Acta Philosophica Fennica 34, 1983.
------ . ‘Introduction*. In K aila 1979 (2). A few passages from this paper have been
incorporated, more or less verbatim, in the present essay.
 V

W ITTGENSTEIN AND TH E TW EN TIETH CENTURY

I have called this essay ‘W ittgenstein and the Tw entieth C entury’.

It is not my intention, however, to discuss how W ittgenstein has
impressed and changed thinking in our century; nor shall I discuss
the influences and impulses which he may have received from other
philosophers. W hat I wanted to do is something which is more
hazardous and indefinite— and in the opinion of many perhaps not
very im portant either. I wanted to relate W ittgenstein to a prevail­
ing climate of opinion or cultural situation, to something which
may also be called the ‘moods’ or Stimmung of a time. I have made
an effort in this direction once before . 1 H ere I wanted to follow it up
with thoughts on how W ittgenstein’s rejection of the civilization of
contemporary W estern society reflects a basic attitude of his to life
and on how this attitude carries both his earlier and his later work
in philosophy.

A dom inant feature in the spiritual physiognomy of the twentieth

century is M odernity. It has become recognized under that nam e
largely in retrospect and in contrast to tendencies which either are
critical of it or cham pion a new, ‘post-m odern’ mood of the time.
M odernity, thus conceived, is our legacy of the Enlightenm ent
and the French Revolution. It is the Age of Reason m atured to
become an age of science and technology, of an industrial mode of
production, and of dem ocratic forms of government. In origin it
was an optimistic mood. It cherished a vision of linear and unlim­
ited perfection and progress towards a regnum hominis of free and
equal men. The yoke of superstitious beliefs being lifted, also th at of
despotic government would never again be allowed to oppress man.
This original mood was partly reflected in but partly also rein­
forced by the ideas of evolution which were characteristic of 19th

1 In von W right 1978.

82 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Thinking in the H um an and in the Natural Sciences*). In Juhlakirja Yrjo Himin

kuusikymmenvuotispdivaksi 7.12,1930. O tava, Helsinki 1930 (2).
------ * Uber das System der Wirklichkeitsbegriffe. Ein Beitrag zum logischen Empirismus.
Acta Philosophica Fennica 2, 1936.
------ . Inhimillinen tieto, mitd se onja mitd seei ole (H um an K now ledge, W hat It Is and
What It Is N ot). O tava, Helsinki 1939.
------ . Uber den pkysikalischen Realitdtsbegriff. A cta Philosophica Fennica 4, 1941.
------ . ‘Physikalismus und Phanom enalism us’. Tkeoria 8, 1942 (1).
------ . ‘Reaalitiedon logiikkaa’ ( ‘O n the Logic o f K now ledge o f R eality’). Ajatus 11,
1942 (2).
------ . Tankens oro. Tre samtal on deyttersta tingen (T he D isquietude o f T hought. Three
D ialogues on the U ltim ate Q uestions). Soderstrom & C o., Helsingfors
1944 (1).
------ . ‘Logik und Psychophysik’. Theoria 10i 1944 (2).
------ . ‘Hatfimoprobleemasta’ (‘O n the Problem o f Gestalt1). Ajatus 13, 1944 (3).
------ . ‘H um anistinen elam annakem ys’ (‘T h e H um anist V iew o f Life’). Ylioppilas-
lehti 11.11.1948.
------ . Zur Metatheorie der Quantenmechanik. A cta Philosophica Fennica 5, 1950.
------ . ‘Elaman ongelm a filosofisessa katsannossa’ (‘T he Problem o f Life in the
Perspective of Philosophy’). Valvoja 72, 1952 (1).
------ . ‘Alit ar materia, allt ar sjaT (‘All is M atter, All is M ind’). Svenska Dagbladet
6.8.1952 (2).
------ . ‘Kybernetiikan illuusio’ ( “T he Illusion o f C ybernetics” ). Finnish transla­
tion o f 1952 (2) by V eli V alpola. Ajatus 17. 1952 (3).
------ . ‘Laatujen asem a suureiden m aailm assa’ ( ‘T he Place o f Q ualities in a World
o f Q uantities’). Valvoja 73, 1953.
------ . Terminalkausalitat als die Grundlage eines unitarischen Naturbegriffs. Eine naturphilo-
sophische Untersuchung. Erster Teil, Terminalkausalitat in der Atomdynamik. Acta
Philosophica Fennica 10, 1956.
------ . Einstein— Minkowskin invarianssiteoria. Tutkimuksia sen loogistietoteoreettisesta luon-
teesta ja sen luonnonjilosojisesta merkityksestd (T he Einstein— M inkowski Theory o f
Invariance. Investigations into its L ogico-Epistem ological Nature and its
Significance for the Philosophy o f Nature.) Ajatus 21, 1958.
------ . Arkikokemuksen perseptuaalinen ja konseptuaalinen aines (The Perceptual and
Conceptual Com ponents o f Everyday Experience). Ajatus 23, 1960. Germ an
translation by H. H enning, Acta Philosophica Fennica 13,1962. English
translation by Ann and Peter K irschenm ann in Kaila 1979 (2).
-------. ‘Filosofian klassillinen kasitys aineellisen ja sielullisen suhteesta’ (‘T he
Classical V iew in Philosophy o f the Relation between M atter and M in d ’). In
Aate ja maailmankuva, ed. by Sim o K nuuttila, Ju h a M anninen and Ilkka
N iiniluoto. W erner Soderstrom, Helsinki 1979 (1).
-------. Reality and Experience. Four Philosophical Essays. Ed. by Robert S. Cohen. D .
Reidel Publishing C o., Dordrecht— H olland 1979 (2). V ienna Circle C ollec-
don. Vol. 12. C ontains English translations, by Ann and Peter Kir­
schenm ann o f K aila 1930, 1936, 1941, and 1960.
N iiniluoto, I.: ‘Tigerstedt, Kaila ja Lagerborg: deteenfilosofian varhaiskylvoa
Suom essa’ (‘T ., K ., and L.: Early Philosophy o f Science in Finland’). In
K aila 1979 (1).
Sarajas, A.: Elaman meri. Tutkielmia uusromantiikan kirjallisista aatteista (T he Sea of
Life. Studies in the Literary Ideas o f N eo-R om anticism ). W erner Soderstrom,
Porvoo 1961.
von W right, G .H .: ‘T h e Origin and D evelopm ent o f Edward W estermarck’s
Moral Philosophy’. In Edward Westemarck. Essays on his L ift and W orks. Ed, by
Tim othy Stroup. Acta Philosophica Fennica 34, 1983.
------ . ‘Introduction’. In K aila 1979 (2). A few passages from this paper have been
incorporated, more or less verbatim, in the present essay.
 V

W ITTGENSTEIN AND TH E TW EN TIETH CENTURY

I have called this essay ‘W ittgenstein and the Tw entieth C entury’.

It is not my intention, however, to discuss how W ittgenstein has
impressed and changed thinking in our century; nor shall I discuss
the influences and impulses which he may have received from other
philosophers. W hat I wanted to do is something which is more
hazardous and indefinite— and in the opinion of many perhaps not
very im portant either. I wanted to relate W ittgenstein to a prevail­
ing climate of opinion or cultural situation, to something which
may also be called the ‘moods’ or Stimmung of a time. I have made
an effort in this direction once before . 1 Here I w anted to follow it up
with thoughts on how W ittgenstein’s rejection of the civilization of
contemporary W estern society reflects a basic attitude of his to life
and on how this attitude carries both his earlier and his later work
in philosophy.

A dom inant feature in the spiritual physiognomy of the twentieth

century is M odernity. It has become recognized under th at name
largely in retrospect and in contrast to tendencies which either are
critical of it or champion a new, ‘post-m odern’ mood of the time.
M odernity, thus conceived, is our legacy of the Enlightenm ent
and the French Revolution. It is the Age of Reason m atured to
become an age of science and technology, of an industrial mode of
production, and of dem ocratic forms of government. In origin it
was an optimistic mood. It cherished a vision of linear and unlim­
ited perfection and progress towards a regnum hominis of free and
equal men. The yoke of superstitious beliefs being lifted, also that of
despotic government would never again be allowed to oppress man.
This original mood was partly reflected in but partly also rein­
forced by the ideas of evolution which were characteristic of 19th

1 In von W right 1978.

84 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

century scientific thought. They range from the historical linguis­

tics of a Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm, through Charles Lyell’s
biography of the earth, to D arw in’s theory of the origin of species
and descent of man. These scientific achievements encouraged the
beliefs and sentiments, epitomized in the positivist philosophy of
Auguste Comte and his followers, the evolutionist progressivism of
H erbert Spencer, and also, though with more ambiguous and
sophisticated overtones, in Hegel’s phenomenology of the spirit.
This climate of opinion, here briefly characterized, prevailed not
least in late Victorian and Edw ardian England. It enjoyed an
exceptionally intense ‘Indian Sum m er’ of creative intellectual
talent in pre-first-war Cam bridge where the young W ittgenstein
came to study logic with Bertrand Russell.
The First W orld W ar gave a shock to this mood but it by no
means crushed it. The war could also be viewed as a great convul­
sion needed for breaking the fetters of unreason in which reaction­
ary forces of the past had tried to hold back hum anity on its way to
Modernity. To many the revolution in Russia seemed the continua­
tion and final breakthrough of the spiritual forces first let loose in
France more than a century earlier.
The so-called modernistic movements in architecture, art and
literature testify to this renewed optimism of the post-first-war
period. And so do the efforts to create a global international orga­
nization to secure peace and progress for a world made—as said a
slogan of the time— ‘safe for dem ocracy’.
This rejuvenated M odernity had one of its most consequential
and serene reflections in the philosophic trend known as logical
positivism. I say ‘consequential’, thinking of the repercussions
which this trend has had on philosophy throughout the century.
And I say ‘serene’, thinking of the rationalist ethos and conscious­
ness of a message which anim ated many of its early protagonists.
This feeling of unisonity with a tune of the times is perhaps no­
where reflected as movingly as in C arn ap ’s Foreword to Der logiscke
Aufbau der Welt.2

2 Carnap 1928, p.v.f.: Wir spiiren eine inncre Verwandtschaft der H altung, die
unserer philosophischen Arbeit zugrunde liegt, mit der geistigen H altung, die sich
gegenwartig au fgan z anderen Lebensgebieten auswirkt; wir spiiren diese H altung
in Stromungen der Kunst, besonders der Architektur, und in den Bewegungen,
die sich um eine sinnvollc Gestaltung des menschlichen Lebens bemuhen: des
personlichen und gem einschaftlichen Lebens, der Erzichung, der a u ss e r e n
Ordnungen im Grossen. Hier liberal! spiiren wir dieselbe Grundhaltung, densel-
ben Stil des Denkens und SchafFens.— Der Glaube, dass dicscr G esinnung die
Zukunft gehort, tragt unscre A rbeit.1 (See also below, the essay ‘T he M yth o f
Progess’, p. 208)
 W ITTGENSTEIN AND THE 20TH CENTURY 85

I vividly remember how his words moved me as a young student

in Helsinki in the mid-1930’s— and I think we were fortunate in my
country to have received our inspiration in philosophy from a
charism atic teacher, Eino Kaila, who saw himself in the vanguard
of a radically new way of thinking.
The optimistic mood apart, w hat was new about this thinking
were above all two things. O ne was the strong emphasis on logic as
the core and center of philosophy. The other was the alignment
with science, the feeling that philosophy too had, at long last,
attained the status of a Wissenschaft.3 ‘W issenschaft’ should then
be understood in the traditional English sense of the word ‘science’,
comprising m athematics and the natural sciences, rather than in
the broader Germ an sense.
It is worth noting here that the idea of the natural sciences
setting the pattern also for philosophic thinking has deeper roots in
Austrian than in German or even in French or English philosophy.
Schlick was successor to the chair once held by M ach in Vienna,
and the W iener Kreis could be called an inner circle of the Ernst
Mach Society which introduced the Kreis to the world in its m an­
ifesto Wissenckaftliche Weltauffassung. But already long before that,
Brentano had proclaimed in his Habilitationsschrift of 1866 that ‘vera
philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est \ 4 The
key position of Brentano and his several pupils in the development
of philosophy in our century has with time become increasingly
obvious when the ties of the ‘new philosophy’ to the phenomenalis-
tic sensualism of M ach have gradually loosened, and the current
originating as logical positivism has broadened into the mighty
stream of analytic philosophy.
In spite of the many tributaries which have, in the course of the
years, emptied their waters into this river, I think it is right and
illuminating to call analytic philosophy the mainstream of philo­
sophic thinking in this century. In all its heterogeneity it retains the
two features which I already mentioned as typical of its origin:
the emphasis on logic and the alignment with science. It is, in
short, the philosophy most characteristic of a culture dom inated by
scientific rationality.
As is well attested, the influence of W ittgenstein’s Tractatus on the
Vienna Circle was profound. The authors— C arnap, H ahn, and
Neurath— of the ‘manifesto 7 hailed W ittgenstein, together with
’ An early forccful expression o f this view o f ‘the new philosophy’ is Russell
1 9 1 4 .It is interesting to read it in conjunction with the writings from the years of
the flowering of the V ienna Circle.
4 Quoted from Haller 1981.
86 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Einstein and Russell, as the leading representative of a ‘scientific

view of the world’ or, with its more telling G erm an name, ‘eine
wissenschafdiche W eltauffassung ’ .3
T h at this characterization is profoundly untrue of W ittgenstein’s
Denkart is obvious to every serious student of his philosophy. Yet it
is even today quite common to label W ittgenstein, if not a ‘logical
positivist’ so at least an ‘analytic philosopher’. There are deeper
reasons for this m isunderstanding than ju st the difficulties of get­
ting rid of a label once attached. If W ittgenstein is not an analytic
philosopher, what kind of philosopher is he then? This question
certainly cannot be answered in the terms of current classifications.
He is not a phenomenologist or hermeneuticist, nor an existentialist
or hegelian, least of all is he a marxist.
It is, moreover, not too difficult to reinterpret W ittgenstein’s
thinking so as to fit the analytic mould. He said in the Tractatus that
‘Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences’ (4.111). But nor
would the logical positivists have claimed that to be the case. He
also said that philosophy is ‘something which stands above or
below, but not beside the natural sciences’ (ibid.). How does this
differ from C arn ap ’s view that philosophy is the logical syntax of
the language of science ?6 Is not the logic of science exactly some­
thing which stands ‘above’ or ‘below’ but not ‘beside’ the sciences
themselves? And W ittgenstein said many more things about w hat
philosophy is and what it is not which can without too much ado be
reconciled with the opinions both of earlier and later so-called
analytical philosophers. Yet there are, I think, profound differences.

T here had existed throughout the 19th century undercurrents

which did not share the optimistic belief in progress through mod­
ernity and did not vest hopes for the future of m an in the further
development of science and technology. K ierkegaard’s opposition
to Hegel and system-philosophy, particularly in his Concluding Non-
Scientific Postscript, struck an early note of discord. Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from the Underground dug deep into those dark layers of the

5 Hahn 1929, p. 54: ‘Einstein, Russell und W ittgenstein seien hier als diejenigen
unter den fuhrenden D enkem der Gegenwart genannt, die die wissenschafdiche
W eltauffassung am wirkungsvollsten in die Offentlichkeit vertreten und auch
starksten Einfluss au f den W iener Kreis ausuben.’
6 Carnap 1934, pp. iii-v: “ Philosophie wird durch W isscnshaftslogik— erscizt;
W issenschaftslogik ist nichts anderes als logische Syntax der W issenschafts-
sp rach e/
 W ITTGENSTEIN AND THE 20TH CENTURY 87

hum an soul which might one day erupt in violent protest against a
rationally organized, progressive society. T he climax of 19th cen­
tury critique of civilization is, of course, the ‘U m w ertung aller
W erte’ attem pted by Nietzsche. O f Nietzsche W ittgenstein once
said that he had perhaps touched on ‘problems of the intellectual
world of the W est 5 which no other philosopher had ‘tackled and
wrestled w ith 5 and which could only be written about ‘in the
language of prophesy, comprehensible to the fewest5.7
The mood of these writers is not necessarily pessimistic. But it is
a sombre mood of self-reflexion and questioning of dom inant cur­
rents of their time, as they saw them. And these writers, we know,
were more congenial to Wittgenstein than any 19th century philos­
opher of the established style. From his early years he distanced
himself from and condemned modernity in all its philistine m an­
ifestations.
It is but natural that the cataclysm of the first W ar should have
nourished this mood and added to it apocalyptic overtones—ju st as
it is also understandable th at the same disasters were hailed by
others as having created a tabula rasa for the ground-work of a brave
new world. The doomsday prophet par excellence, is, of course,
Spengler.
W ittgenstein has mentioned Spengler as one of those who had
influenced him. He says he took over from Spengler a line of
thinking and seized on it with enthusiasm for his own work .8 This,
and the fact that Spengler’s name occurs on the list— beginning
with Boltzmann and ending with Sraffa—of persons, whom W itt­
genstein recognized as influences, does not mean, however, that
Spengler had deeply influenced the mood in which W ittgenstein
viewed his times. It means, in the first place, that he had received
from Spengler5s Untergang the germ of one of the pervasive ideas of
his later philosophical thinking. This is the notion of conceptual
family resemblances. It is quite another thing that W ittgenstein also
shared the apocalyptic view of Spengler's. W ith the years, this even
deepened to a hatred of our decaying civilization and a wish for its
destruction. ‘Do you really think that Europe needs another great
war?5, I once asked him in the twilight of prewar sentiments in
1939. ‘Not one, but two or three5, was his reply. This shook his
young interlocutor deeply and seemed to him then unintelligible.
The apocalyptic views of W ittgenstein are best reflected in some
of the ‘general rem arks’ he wrote in the late 1940s. But the best and
7 W ittgenstein 1980, p. 9.
8 W ittgenstein 1980, p. 19. In German ‘Ich habe sie (sc. die Gedanken-
bcwegung) nur sogleich leidenschaftlich zu meinem Klarungswerk aufgegriffen’.
88 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

fullest articulation of his attitude to M odernity is of much earlier

date. I am thinking, in particular, of the sketches of a Foreword
written in 1930 for a projected work. A version was printed with the
Philosophische Bemerkungen, the earliest of W ittgenstein’s prepared
typescripts after his return to philosophy in the late 2 0 s, published
in 1953.9 The book for which it was written cannot, however, have
been it. M ore likely, the Foreword was m eant for the great and
externally more accomplished work to which W ittgenstein’s liter­
ary executors used to refer as the ‘Big Typescript’ and which—
most regrettably— to this day has not been published in its entirety.
W ittgenstein’s early sketches for a Preface should be read in
juxtaposition to C arn ap ’s Preface to Aufbau. They afford an im­
pressive and nice illustration to the contrast between the protago­
nists and the critics of the spirit of M odernity. Although we have no
docum entary evidence, the thought is close at hand that W ittgen­
stein wrote his words in reply to C arn ap ’s. The way the two
prefaces match seems to me too good to be a result of sheer
coincidence.

The H ungarian philosopher and historian of ideas C hristoph Nyiri

sees in W ittgenstein a representative of the neo-conservative trend
which rose to prominence in the 1920s, chiefly in the G erm an
speaking w orld . 10 It continues an earlier conservatism which had
taken a critical view of the rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment
and of the progressive dem ocratization and secularization of 19th
century society. An early exponent of this type of conservative
thinking is the great A ustrian poet Grillparzer. Nyiri points to the

9 W ittgenstein 1980, p. 6f. ‘Dieser Geist ist— ein anderer als der des grossen
Stromes der europaischen und amerikanischen Zivilisation. Der G eist dieser
Zivilisation, dessen Ausdruck die Industrie, Architektur, M usik, der Faschismus
und Sozialism us unserer Zeit ist, ist dem Verfasser fremd und unsym patisch.—
U nsere Zivilisation ist durch das Wort 4Fortschritt’ charakterisiert. Der Fort-
schritt ist ihre Form— . Ihre Tatigkeit ist es, ein immer komplizierteres G ebilde zu
konstruieren.— Es interessiert mich nicht, ein Gebaude auizufiihren, sondern die
Grundlagen der moglichen G ebaude durchsichtig vor mir zu haben. Mein Ziel ist
also ein anderes als das der W issenschaftler, und meine Denkbewegung von der
ihrigen verschieden.’ See also ‘The M yth o f Progress*, below p. 208f.
See in particular his essay ‘Konservative Anthropologie: Der Sohn W ittgen­
stein* in J.C . Nyiri, 1988. T he essay opens with the words (p. 91): ‘Ludwig
Wittgenstein begann um die W ende der zwanziger-dreissiger Jahre des 20. Jahr-
hunderts jenen Ideenkreis auszuarbeiten, den man heute, ruckblickend, wahr-
scheinlich als die tiefste und umfassendste G rundlegung vom konsevativen Bild
des M enschen bezeichnen kann.’
 W ITTGENSTEIN AND TH E 20TH CENTURY 89

deep impression G rillparzer had m ade on W ittgenstein and which

anybody knowledgeable in literature cannot fail to notice through­
out his writings also in places where there is no mention of Grillpar-
zer’s name.
I have great respect for Nyiri’s attem pt to locate W ittgenstein on
the cultural map. I think it in m any ways illum inating of W ittgen­
stein’s attitudes and thoughts. But I also have reservations.
The label ‘conservatism’ does not seem to me appropriate— pace
Nyiri’s own observations on its am biguities . 11 W ittgenstein was
much more anxious to com bat and distance himself from a prevail­
ing climate of opinion than to work for the restoration of one which
was already fading. He is as little nostalgic in his thinking as are
Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche. Moreover, the philosopher who wrote ‘I
destroy, I destroy, I destroy ’ 12 was not alien to the thought that
something new could be built once the heap of rubble of a decaying
culture had been cleared away. Not unlike some radicals of the left
he appears to have seen something hopeful in the drastic sweeping
away of an obsolete social order which had taken place in Russia.
His plans of settling in the Soviet Union can be viewed in this light
too. Among his Cam bridge friends in the 1930’s m any had a
pronouncedly marxist orientation. T he only periodical which I
have seen him reading and not frowning upon was ‘T h e New
Statesman and N ation’— much more in tune with the tastes of left
intellectuals than with those of apolitical conservatives.
Ju st as W ittgenstein’s philosophy defies classification in relation
to movements and trends in 2 0 th century thought, so also is his
attitude to modernism and its critics far from univocal. It may even
appear to us loaded with paradox and contradiction.

Allan Janik, co-author of the book Wittgenstein’s Vienna and another

writer who has tried to place W ittgenstein in a broader cultural
setting, has criticized N yiri’s diagnosis. He objects above all to the
way in which Nylri exploits for his purposes two key notions in
W ittgenstein’s later philosophy. These are the notions of rule-
following and form of life. Nyfri tries to link them to political and
social conservatism. This does not seem to me right. Ja n ik ’s critical
points against Nylri I find well taken here.
Janik suggests that it is characteristic of W ittgenstein that ‘he
" Nyiri 1988, p. 104 ff.
12 W ittgenstein 1980, p. 21.
90 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

wished to separate his philosophizing from his personal beliefs’ and

that, accordingly, he ‘took great pains to separate his cultural
pessimism from, say, his view of meaning and thinking .’ 13 If this is
right, it would be futile to look for a connection between W ittgen­
stein’s philosophy and the mood in which he viewed his times.
O ne could go one step further and say that also the modernism
and rationalist optimism, characteristic of many of the leading
logical positivists, bears only a contingent relationship to their
philosophy. It is true th at neither W ittgenstein nor the positivists
(with the sole exception of N eurath) elaborated their views of
culture, history, politics, and society in the discursive form of
philosophical or scientific writings. Their Weltanschauung shines
forth only in various obiter dicta; in the case of the positivists the
Vienna Circle manifesto or C arn ap ’s Preface to Aujbau\ in the case
of W ittgenstein some ‘aphorism s’ in the Tractatus, the prefaces to
works not published in his lifetime, and a good many ‘general
rem arks’ scattered throughout his writings. (H ither may also be
counted the notes on Frazer’s The Golden Bough.)
The truth of these observations notw ithstanding, I disagree with
Jan ik ’s suggestions above. Fichte’s famous words ‘Was fur eine
Philosophie man wahlt, hangt davon ab, was fur ein M ensch man
ist’, may not be interestingly applicable to the average, mediocre,
academic philosopher. But for the great ones it is, I think, pro­
foundly true. Their philosophy reflects their personality, and vice
versa. And if personalities differ profoundly, so will the philosophies.
Therefore it is not futile to look for the way in which W ittgenstein’s
thought can be said to reflect his view of life.

A different attem pt from Ja n ik ’s to resolve the puzzles here is made

in Professor Stephen H ilm y’s book The Later Wittgenstein. It is
another one of those not too many writings which discuss W ittgen­
stein’s thought in relation to intellectual currents of the time. (A
virtue of H ilm y’s work is that it bases its argum entation directly on
W ittgenstein’s Nachlass and does not confine it to the printed
sources only.)
Hilm y’s view is that W ittgenstein’s later philosophical delibera­
tions should be seen ‘as a struggle against dom inant intellectual
trends in our modern civilization ’ 14 and also ‘against this trend as it
13 Tanik 1985, p. 130.
14 H ilm y 1987, p. 190.
 W ITTGENSTEIN AND THE 20TH CENTURY 91

manifested itself in his own earlier philosophy ’ . 15 Thus, according

to Hilmy, W ittgenstein of the Tractatus was himself ‘caught up in
the scientific current of the tim es ’ 16 and had ‘succumbed to the
scientific intellectual trends of the day . 17 Simplifying a little, one
could then say that the logical positivists were right when they saw
in the Tractatus an ally to their own philosophy, and that it is only
the later thinking of W ittgenstein which reflects his Abstandnahme
from that intellectual mood of the times to which I have here
alluded with the term ‘m odernity’.
There is certainly some truth in H ilm y’s view. At least two
arguments can be given in support of it. O ne is so to speak ‘bio­
graphical’. It points to changes in Wittgenstein’s life. The Wittgen­
stein of pre-war Cam bridge, a student of Frege’s and Russell’s
logic, was in many ways a different man from the W ittgenstein who
returned to Cam bridge in the late 1920s. His experiences from the
years of the war had deeply affected his sentiments. After return
from captivity he renounced his fortune and withdrew to a life of
Tolstoyan simplicity in remote countryside villages. His life later at
Cam bridge and in his hut in Norway is stam ped by the same
austere frugality. The professor of philosophy refused to let himself
be integrated in the academic establishm ent of one of the world’s
most distinguished universities. This was W ittgenstein’s mood
when he met the philosophers of the V ienna Circle,— but it was a
different mood from the one in which he had first conceived the
ideas for the work which m eant so much to them. The W ittgenstein
who had radically changed his ways of life was now also on the road
to a new philosophy which was to become less and less congenial to
most of his former admirers.
The other argum ent in support of H ilm y’s view trades on the
difference between the philosophy of the Tractatus and that of the
Philosophische Untersuckungen, between the philosophies sometimes
referred to simply with labels ‘W ittgenstein I ’ and ‘W ittgenstein
IT. The first belongs in the atmosphere of logic and the science-
oriented thinking of the positivists and later the analytic philosophers.
The second is deeply infected by doubts about the influence of scien­
tific rationalism on our thought and our lives.
W hat I should like to do now is the following: Against Jan ik I
shall try to show that there is a close correspondence between
W ittgenstein’s thought and th at which I have called his ‘mood’. To

15 Ibid., p. 192.
16 I b id , p. 194.
17 Ibid., p. 210.
92 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

this end we must look towards features of his personality which lay
deeper than those habitually referred to as his ‘cultural pessimism’
and which remained substantially unaffected by external changes
in his way of life. Against Hilmy I shall try to show that there is a
continuity in W ittgenstein’s thought which links his ‘two philos­
ophies’ in the very way which makes them correspond to a fun­
dam entally unchanged attitude to life. This connecting link is
found, not surprisingly, in W ittgenstein’s conception of philosophy
and his attitude to language.

W ittgenstein’s intellectual and moral personality must be under­

stood against the background of the society in which he grew up.
He was a son of the late H absburg Empire. This was a very
peculiar socio-political construct. The multinational and m ulti­
lingual state was in many ways an obsolete phenomenon in a
Europe then on its road towards democracy and industrialization in
the frames of consolidated national states. It was a reactionary
bulwark against progressing modernization. At the same time it
appears to us today strangely modern, a forecast of what may come
in a Europe now in a process of integration with national borders
breaking down and a new mixing of languages and nationalities in
the offing.
O f this ‘kaiserliche und konigliche’ construct— for which the
author of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften invented the name with ironic
Greek overtones ‘K akanien’— was characteristic a hypocrisy and
doubleness of morality which, though certainly not unique in his­
tory, was perhaps unique in the Europe of the 19th century. O r
how else shall one understand that in this atmosphere of conven­
tional half-truth and insincerity there arose such a strong reaction
against it, a violent passion for truthfulness and purity, unsparing
efforts to debunk the illusions and lay bare the underground of the
hum an soul? We witness this reaction in the puristic architectural
language of Adolf Loos, in the stern atonality of Schonberg’s music,
in the searching cultural criticism of authors like H erm ann Broch
and Robert Musil, and in the apocalyptic irony of Karl Kraus. In
the same circle also belongs the greatest debunker of all, Sigmund
Freud.
It is against this background in Austrian Geistesgeschichte that we
have to understand W ittgenstein: his passion for truth and sincerity
and his longing for pure and simple forms of life. W ittgenstein had
a rare sense for detecting or, to use a favourite world of his,
 W ITTGENSTEIN AND THE 20TH CENTURY 93

‘smelling’ even the slightest trace of conventional lie, untruthful­

ness, artificiality and pretense in the people whom he met. This
made relations with him strained, in some cases even unbearably
difficult, for those who had the privilege of coming close to him
personally. The statement holds true equally of the W ittgenstein
who came to pre-war Cam bridge to attend Russell’s lectures and of
the one who returned there in 1929 after ten years of voluntary
withdrawal from the world. ‘Are you thinking of logic or of your
sins’ Russell asked him in a memorable conversation . 18 ‘O f both’
was W ittgenstein’s reply. Paraphrasing a word by Ibsen— certainly
well known to W ittgenstein— one could say that philosophical
thinking was to him a perpetual holding of doomsday with himself.
To the best of my knowledge, W ittgenstein is the only one among
those twilight figures mentioned of M usil’s ‘K akanien5, whose crav­
ing for honesty prompted him to radical efforts to change his
(outward) life. Here the influence of Tolstoy on W ittgenstein must
be rated high. Tolstoy was at home in a society at least as morally
depraved as ‘K akanien’ but perhaps with greater resources of
unconsumed vitality than the latter. Tolstoy’s m ature life was a
relentless fight to free himself from the nets of bigotry and conven­
tionality. He lured, moreover, a num ber of men and women all over
the world to try to ‘return’ to a pure and simple life in truth. He was
himself tragically incapable of this return; the last effort he made
was a suicide of its kind. Also W ittgenstein’s withdrawal to be a
schoolmaster for peasant children was a failure. I think that both
Wittgenstein and the great Russian were partly victims of an
illusion about the actual existence of a country ‘Erehw on’ uncon­
taminated by the moral ills of the society we live in and where we
can go to start a new life. Tolstoy went to Caucasus and to the
Bashkirs in search of it. W ittgenstein sought it in remote villages in
lower Austria, in the wilderness of the fjords of Norway or on the
shore of the Ocean in Galway. His abortive plans of setding in the
Soviet Union is also a chapter in this story. But the land he sought
is really the land ‘Nowhere’.

In a social atmosphere of bigotry and insincerity language also

tends to become corrupted. It is infiltrated by euphemisms. Things

18 Told and retold by Russell in many places. See, for example, Russell 1968,
p. 99.
94 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

are no longer called by their blunt and simple names, but are
wrapped up in evasive circumscriptions or referred to by invented
technical terminology. Style becomes unperspicuous, meaning un­
clear. In m odem society this distortion of language has assumed
grotesque proportions in the jargon of public adm inistration and
the media. A ustria under the late H absburgs may have been the
place where this ‘illness of the times’, now universal, first flared up.
To fight it was the set task of th at generation of A ustrian ‘purifiers’
of which W ittgenstein was a member.
Fritz M authner’s Sprachkritik was an early sam ple of this reaction
to language. T he fact th at W ittgenstein in the Tractatus said
(4.0031) that all philosophy is critique of language, though not in
M authner’s sense, has, I am afraid, long distracted modem philos­
ophers from paying due attention to M authner’s work. It belongs
in the same tradition of which— not counting W ittgenstein— K arl
K raus is the supreme and most influential example.
Wittgenstein admired the work of Kraus. He counted Kraus and
Loos among those who had influenced him. It is an interesting but
perhaps unanswerable question, whether the Krausian moral attitude
to language, which Wittgenstein shared, was perhaps a force which
made him broaden his philosophy of logic of the early Cambridge
years to the philosophy of language embodied in the Tractatus.
It is sometimes held th at W ittgenstein’s concerns in the Tractatus
were the conditions which a logically ideal or perfect language has
to fulfil. Thus, for example, Russell in his Introduction. This has
also been disputed. I think those who dispute it are right, i f the
ideal language was to be a perfection of the Begriffsschrift first
propounded by Frege and then further developed by the authors of
Principia Mathematica. W ittgenstein’s contribution to their project
was in the first place the tabular theory of truth-functions and the
notion of tautology. But although logic no doubt was the gate
through which W ittgenstein entered philosophy, his work in the
tradition of Frege and Russell was of short duration. It ended, I
would say, when in the early part of the 1914—1918 w ar the thought
of the proposition as a picture first dawned upon him and he wrote
in his notebook in Jan u ary 1915 ‘My whole task consists in explain­
ing the nature of the proposition ’ . 19 This had not been the ‘whole
task’ of Frege or of Russell.
R ather than saying that W ittgenstein in the Tractatus was con­
cerned with the conditions of an ideal language we should, I think,

19 W ittgenstein 1979, p. 39: ‘M eine game Aufgabe besteht darin, das W esen des
Satzcs zu crklaren.’
 W ITTGENSTEIN A N D TH E 20TH CENTURY 95

say that he was in search of pure language or of language in its pure

and uncorrupted form. The language which would depict the world
as it really is, absolutely ‘true to fact’. It was to this end that, at a
later stage of his work on the book, he conceived of the ontology of
immutable and indestructible things to which there correspond
names the configurations of which in language picture the contin­
gent configurations of things in reality. T here are some indications
in the notebooks that W ittgenstein’s position was initially wavering
on the question whether such a language could actually be found,
examples given of things and corresponding names. But in the end
he realized that the form and content of the ‘pure’ language is
ineffable. T he language of which he was in search is, to use M ax
Black’s happy phrase, a ‘never-never language ’ .20 It is as remote
from the language we speak as is the nowhere land of pure and
simple life from the contam inated societies in which we are des­
tined to live.
Because of the way in which the pure language of the Tractatus is
supposed to reach up to reality, one can also say th at the world it is
supposed to picture is a ‘never-never-world’, a postulated ideal
which is nowhere to be found. It has occurred to me th at the traits
of relativism and opposition to realism which some interpreters see
in W ittgenstein’s later work have their root in the impasse of the
Tractatus approach to language. Ju st as there is no ‘pure’ language
there is also no ‘pure’ reality for language to depict.

17th and 18th century philosophers had entertained the fiction of

‘man in a state of nature’. This fiction was thought useful in their
search for the raison d'etre of the state and the legitimation of societal
institutions. Some fancied it to have been an existing state of affairs
in the ‘uncorrupted’ infancy of prehistorical man. Even if this was
an illusion, it does not necessarily ruin the philosophic value of the
fiction.
In a somewhat similar sense W ittgenstein may be said to have
been in search, throughout his reflective life, of a ‘natural state of
language’. In the Tractatus he thought it was hidden under the
disfiguring veils of ordinary speech. It existed somewhere deep
under the surface of language as used. But he did not find it there.
He came to the conclusion that it was not there to be found either.

*° Black 1964, p. 11.

96 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

He had been looking for it in the wrong direction. It was not to be

attained by diving under a surface but by looking at the surface
itself. There was to be found the uncorrupted language of which he
was in search. The difficulty was only to see it. ‘Nothing is hidden . 1
It is often said that one of his early ideas which W ittgenstein
never gave up is his conception of philosophy. Basically this is true,
I think. But it is not a truth without modifications. It holds for his
conception of philosophy as an activity and not a doctrine (Lehre),
and of philosophy as critique of language. But it does not hold for
his specific view that philosophical problems are due to linguistic
confusions, to what he later called the bewitchment (Verhexung) of our
thinking by the means of language. There is no statem ent to this
effect in the early writings. There he speaks of the philosophic
problems resting on a m isunderstanding of the (‘true’) logic of our
language, on a confusion of the grammatical with the logical form of
thought .21
The problems which arise through a ‘linguistic bew itchm ent’ of
our thought are not questions in search of an answer, but ‘bumps
that the understanding has got by running its head up against the
limits of language’ (PU 119). A main reason why we get these
‘bum ps’ is ‘that we do not command a clear view of the use of our
words’ (PU 122). We miss the ubersichtliche Darstellung (‘perspicuous
presentation’) which will expose to us the undistorted use of lan­
guage and ‘bring words back from’ what W ittgenstein calls ‘their
metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PU 116). The clarity which
the perspicuous presentation gives is an absolute. It makes the
philosophical problem disappear completely (PU 133). The dis­
quietude is gone and the philosopher attains his aim which is
‘Friede in den G edanken ’ .22
Philosophy which follows these lines is strictly descriptive. It does
not explain anything— for example how it is possible for signs to
mean. Nor does it answer questions of essence, for example what
thinking, or truth, or logical necessity are. Unlike most philosophy
after K ant it is neither transcendentalist nor essentialist .23 It puts
the ‘how possible?’— and ‘what is?’— questions aside by directing
our attention to the role which the problematic words play in actual

21 Sec, for exam ple, the Tractatus, the Preface (Vorwort) and ibid. 4.002, 4.003,
and 4.0031.
2“ Wittgenstein 1980, p. 43.
23 Both attributes, in my opinion, apply to the Tractatus. There W ittgenstein is
in search o f the essence ofla n g u a g e (the proposition) and o f the transcendental a
priori conditions o f the possibility o flan gu age. (The resem blance with K ant has
often been noted.) T he later philosophy o f W ittgenstein is opposed to both
 W ITTGENSTEIN AND THE 20TH CENTURY 97

communication. In this sense ‘the work of the philosophers’ can be

said to consist ‘in assembling reminders for a particular purpose’
(PU 127).
A philosophy which does not look for answers to questions, does
not explain or theorize about the things which attract the philos­
opher’s curiosity, and does not try to provide the foundations for
our beliefs, is not a philosophy for which scientific thinking sets the
pattern. It, on the contrary, fights the infiltration of this thinking
into philosophy and makes it responsible for the confusions from
which the philosopher tries to rid himself. It is not, need not be,
hostile to science as such. But it may be said to take a critical or
even hostile attitude to the influence of science outside its proper
domain—and in particular on philosophic thought. In this it runs
counter to an intellectual m ainstream of the century.

There are a few points on which one m ight wish to challenge the
consistency of W ittgenstein’s (later) view of philosophy. O n the one
hand W ittgenstein says that the philosopher must ‘in no way
interfere with the actual use of language’ and that philosophy
‘leaves everything as it is’ (PU 124). But he also says that he is
‘engaged in a struggle with language ’ .24 In a passage in the unpub­
lished part of the ‘Big T ypescript’ he describes this struggle as
follows— I have here translated it into English — :25
Human beings are deeply embedded in philosophical, i.e. grammati­
cal confusions. Freeing them from these presupposes tearing them away
from the enormous number of connecting links that hold them fast. A
sort of rearrangement of the whole of their language is needed. (‘Man
muss sozusagen ihre ganze Sprache umgruppieren.*)—But of course
that language has developed the way it has because some human
beings felt—and still feel—inclined to think that way. So the tearing
away will succeed only with those in whose life there already is an
instinctive revolt against the language in question and not with those
whose instinct is for the very herd which created that language as its
proper expression.

tendencies. There is a profound change in this regard as compared w ith the

Tractatus. Some attempts to ‘transcendentalize* W ittgenstein’s later philosophy o f
language therefore seem to me substantially mistaken. (W hich does not prevent
them from having some independent interest in them selves.)
14 W ittgenstein 1980, p. 11. ‘Wir kampfen mit der Sprache. Wir stehen im
Kam pf mit der Sprache.1
M MS 213, p. 423.
98 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

This sounds almost like a cry for a ‘cultural revolution’ needed

for putting the philosophic worries to rest. Because is not the
‘K am pf mit der Sprache’ also an interference with it? Particularly if
it requires a ‘rearrangem ent of the whole of language’? And a
similar question can be raised about the attem pt to ‘bring back’ (in
German ‘zuriickfuhren’) the words from their ‘m etaphysical’ to
their ‘everyday’ use.
W ittgenstein’s talk about philosophy suggests to me the follow­
ing picture:
There are in the large garden of language tidy plots of land where
uncorrupted language-games are being played by hum an users.
But this garden is also partly overgrown by m etaphysical weeds
which hide the plots from sight and blur their borders and thereby
confuse those who play with language. T he good philosopher
should be a gardener who by clearing away the weeds displays the
plots of linguistic ground in their purity and thereby helps com­
m unication to go on unimpeded by the metaphysical-philosophical
confusions.
But is this picture not another vision of the pure and uncorrupted
language of which W ittgenstein had been in search in the Tractatus?
He could not find it then because he sought it under the surface of
everyday language rather than on the surface itself. But if this
surface is partly veiled, hidden, overgrown by m etaphysical weed
which must be removed before we com mand a perspicuous view of
what things are like, may it then not be the case that this uncor­
rupted ordinary (use of) language too is a never-never thing and
that the search for it must end in frustration? Does belief th at this
is not so perhaps rest on an illusory idealization of ordinary
language ? 26
My impression sometimes is that W ittgenstein in the Tractatus
had attained a position which, as it stood, was unassailable. As we
know, he himself assailed it later. He even talked o f ‘grave errors’ in
his earlier w riting .27 His thinking took what may be called a 'philo­
sophic t/-tu rn ’: from the surface to the hidden depths, then from
the depths back to the surface .28 But I know from what W ittgen­
stein told me that there were moments when he doubted whether
this was a turn in direction to final clarity or whether it too would

26 T he phrase 'idealization o f ordinary language1 was suggested to me in

conversation by Heikki N ym an.
27 W ittgenstein 1953, Vorwort, p. x.
28 Cf. W ittgenstein 1953, 108: ‘D ie Betrachtung m uss gedreht werden, aber um
unser eigentliches Bedurfnis als A ngelpunkt.’
 W ITTGENSTEIN AND TH E 20TH CENTURY 99

end in an impasse of obscurity. This is the radical, ‘existential’

doubt of one who cannot resolve the question whether all his efforts
have been a failure. No outsider can resolve it for him either.

10

The bewitchment of our thinking through language happens when

words take on w hat W ittgenstein calls a ‘m etaphysical’ use. So one
can say that W ittgenstein’s fight with language was a fight with
metaphysics. This was precisely w hat the logical positivists had
been engaged in. ‘Uberwindung der M etaphysik durch logische
Analyse der Sprache’ was the title of one of C arn ap ’s articles in
Erkenntnis. So what difference, if any, was there in their respective
attitudes to metaphysics?
For the positivists, questions were ‘metaphysical’ when they
could not be decided by the methods of natural science or by logical
deduction from scientifically acceptable premisses. As amply tes­
tified in the documents from the heyday of positivism, metaphysics
was seen by the champions of the ‘new philosophy’ as an outgrowth
and residue of religious beliefs of a pre-modern society, as a
rationalized disguise of at bottom irrational attitudes. M etaphysics
was philosophy which had helped reactionary forces in society to
block and retard the progress of em ancipated, rational, and secu­
larized man.
W ittgenstein’s fight against metaphysics was something very
different. By a metaphysical use of language W ittgenstein means
the ‘free-wheeling’ of language which occurs when words get
detached from their actual use in the language-games of com­
municative discourse and are being used for constructing w hat
W ittgenstein calls Luftgebaude (translated ‘houses of cards’) in the
linguistic isolation of the philosopher’s m ind .29 In past centuries of
European history the thinking of metaphysicians was to a large
extent nourished by the linguistic rituals of a religious culture. This
was a culture in which language-games with words like ‘G od’, ‘sin’,
‘grace’ and ‘doom ’ and ‘redem ption’ had an established everyday
use. In a similar m anner, the thinking W ittgenstein calls m eta­
physical is stam ped by the linguistic patterns and thought habits of
a predom inantly scientific civilization.
The metaphysics which W ittgenstein is fighting is thus not one
rooted in theology b ut one rooted in science. He is fighting the

29 W ittgenstein 1953, p. 118.

100 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

obscuring influence on thinking, not of the relicts of a dead but of

the habits of a living culture. O f this he gives clear warning in the
Blue Book where he w rote :30
P h ilo so p h ers c o n sta n tly see th e m e th o d s o f s c ie n c e before th eir e y e s,
and a re irresistib ly te m p te d to a n sw e r q u e stio n s in th e w a y sc ie n c e
d o cs. T h is te n d e n c y is th e real so u rce o f m e ta p h y sic s , a n d lea d s th e
p h ilo so p h e r in to c o m p le te d a rk n ess.

He immediately gives examples: The craving for general

theories, what he calls ‘the contemptuous attitude to the particular
case ’ ;31 the tendency to explain the concept of number, to reduce
the infinite to the finite, mathematics to logic, intentional be­
haviour to bodily movement. The most vulgar examples of these
tendencies we find, it seems to me, in contemporary philosophy of
mind, be it in the form of the physicalists’ ‘identification’ of so-
called mental states with brain processes or the eliminative m ate­
rialists’ rejection of our common sense psychological concepts—
what they call ‘folk-psychology’— as a ‘radically false theory’ even­
tually to be replaced by a perfected neuroscience. Farther into
the jungle of metaphysics, as W ittgenstein saw it, philosophy can
hardly lose itself than in these latter day phenom ena of a philo­
sophic culture gone ‘scientist’.
Thus one can say— I am here quoting Stephen Hilm y’s book on
the later Wittgenstein— that Wittgenstein’s ‘conception of meta­
physics was such that it encompassed not only traditional
metaphysics, but also, and especially, the dom inant mode of reflec­
tion of our own epoch; and it is primarily the latter,— that consti­
tuted the intellectual current against which he was struggling ’ .32
It is ironic that the metaphysics which W ittgenstein was fighting
was exactly the one in the cobwebs of which the logical positivists
and a good many of their followers among analytical philosophers
according to him had been caught.
It is worth asking here how W ittgenstein himself viewed the
great efforts of past thinkers who had tried to encompass the world
intellectually in systems we call ‘m etaphysical5. The thing to say in
response to the question is that he had no need to combat these
systems and that he therefore also was, or would have been, able to
bestow on them the respect and awe (Erfurcht) which he was
disposed to feel towards great achievement in all spheres of human
life. But he was also acutely aware that he was not continuing a

30 W ittgenstein 1958, p. 18.

31 Ibid., p. 18.
32 Hilm y 1987, p. 225.
 WITTGENSTEIN AND TH E 20TH CENTURY 101

tradition. W hat he did was as different from what a Leibniz or a

Spinoza had been doing as is life in our times different from w hat it
was in theirs. Yet there is also enough resemblance to make his
philosophy, as he said himself, ‘a legitimate heir’ to those intellec­
tual pursuits of the past which traditionally go under the nam e
‘philosophy ’ .33
I hope to have made it clear in which sense W ittgenstein’s efforts
in philosophy were a fight against a dom inant climate of opinion in
our century. I have called this climate that of M odernity. It was in
origin coupled with a euphoric belief in progress thanks to the
managerial uses of reason in industrialized dem ocratic societies.
This optimism has largely faded in the woes of two global wars and
under the load which m an has imposed on nature, threatening the
biosphere with breakdown. But also amidst the sombre or even
apocalyptic mood of scared humanity, this rake’s progress continues.
‘Science and industty— Wittgenstein wrote a few years before he
died, ‘might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modem
world ’ .34 But he also wrote that there is nothing absurd in the belief
‘that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end of
humanity’ and that mankind in seeking to steer its course towards the
future relying on scientific rationality ‘is falling into a trap ’ .35
W ittgenstein’s philosophy and also his life was a protest against
these trends and an effort to set an example o f ‘a changed mode of
thought and life’ which, if followed might provide a cure for what
he thought of as a sick time. But no rule can, I think, be laid down
for how to imitate his path.

S3 W ittgenstein 1958, p. 62. T he fullest statem ent by W ittgenstein h im self o f his

views o f philosophy is the chapter ‘Philosophic’ in T S 213 (the ‘Big T ypcscript’).
This chapter has now been published. (W ittgenstein 1989.)— O f great interest are
the pronouncements made by W ittgenstein on his philosophy recounted by G.E.
Moore in M oore 1954—1955 (particularly the third article). In the early 1930*s
W ittgenstein too, somewhat in the style o f the V ienna positivists, seems to have
thought o f his way o f doing philosophy as a great break with tradition. M oore III,
P- 26: 4He said that what he was doing was a “ new subject” , and not merely a
stage in a “continuous developm ent” ; that there was now, in philosophy, a “ kink”
in the “developm ent o f human thought” , comparable to that which occurred
when Galileo and his contemporaries invented dynamics; that a “ new m ethod”
had been discovered, as had happened when “chemistry w as developed out o f
alchem y” . It is perhaps significant that statem ents with this colouring are not
found in W ittgenstein’s own written work.
** W ittgenstein 1980, p. 63.
35 Ibid., p. 56. ‘Es ist z.B. nicht unsinnig, zu glauben, dass das wissenschaft-
liche und technische Zeitalter der Anfang vom Ende der M enschheit ist; dass die
Idee vom grossen Fortschritt eine Verblendung ist, wie auch von der endlichen
Erkenntnis dcr Wahrheit; dass an der wissenschaftlichcn Erkenntnis nichts Gutes
oder W iinschenswertes ist und dass die M enschheit, die nach ihr strebt, in eine
Falle lauft. Es ist durchaus nicht klar, dass dies nicht so ist.1
102 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

R EFEREN CES

Black, M ., A Companion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Cam bridge U niversity Press,

Cambridge 1964.
Carnap, R ., Der logische Aufbau der Welt. W eltkreis-Verlag, Berlin-Schlachtensee
1928.
— — . Logische Syntax der Sprache. Ju liu s Springer, W ien 1934.
Hahn, H ., Neurath, O ., Carnap, R ., WissenschafUiche Weltauffassung, Der Wiener
Kreis. H erausgegeben vom V erein Ernst M ach, Artur W olf V erlag, W ien
1929.
Haller, R., *W ittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy’. Austrian Philosophy: Studies and
Texts, ed. by J.C . Nyiri. Philosophia Verlag, M iinchen 1981.
Hilm y, S-, The Later Wittgenstein. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1987.
Janik, A ., Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger. R odopi, Amsterdam 1985.
M oore, G .E ., ‘W ittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930-33. I-IIL * M in d6 3 -6 4 , 1954-1955.
N yiri, J.C -, Am Rande Europas. Studien zur osterreichisch-ungarischen Philo-
sophiegeschichte. Akademiai K iado, Budapest 1988.
Russell, B., Our Knowledge o f the External World as a Field fo r Scientific Method in
Philosophy. Allen & U nw in, London 1914.
------ . The Autobiography o f Bertrand Russell, V olum e II. Allen & U nw in, London
1968.
W ittgenstein, L., Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner &
C o., London 1933 (2nd Edition).
------ . Philosophische Untersuchungen. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1953.
------ . The Blue and Brown Books. Eld. by R. Rhees. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1958.
------ . Notebooks 1914-1916. Ed. by G .H . von W right and G .E .M . Anscom be. Basil
Blackwell, Oxford 1979 (2nd E dition).
------ . Vermischte Bemerkungen— Culture and Value. Ed. by G .H . von W right in col­
laboration w ith Heikki N ym an. English translation by Peter W inch. Basil
Blackwell, Oxford 1980.
-------. ‘Philosophic’. H erausgegeben von Heikki Nym an. Revue Internationale de
Philosophie 43. 1989.
von W right, G .H ., ‘W ittgenstein in Relation to H is T im es’. Wittgenstein and His
Impact on Contemporary Thought, ed. by Elisabeth Leinfellner et al., pp. 73-78.
H older-P ichler-T em psky, W ien 1978.
 VI

A PILG R IM ’S PROGRESS

It was not easy for me to think of a way of responding adequately to

the kind invitation of the Editor of Philosophers on Their Own Work to
contribute ‘a realistic self-critical personal essay which should en­
able the reader to grasp your thoughts as a whole’. I am afraid that
my contributions to philosophy do not form m uch of a unity, either
as far as the development of my thinking or as far as my choice of
research topics are concerned. I have reflected a good deal on the
question w hat I, as a philosopher, am doing—about the aim and
nature of philosophy, so to say. Perhaps the ram bling character of
my philosophic itinerary was one reason why I was never able to
answer the question to my own satisfaction.
The best I can do here is therefore to try a brief account of one of
my journeys through the philosophical landscape. It has lasted for
nigh on thirty years, but I now think of it as essentially term inated.
The topic I have in mind is ‘deontic logic’.

I had my first training in philosophy in Helsinki in the mid-1930’s

under the guidance of a brilliant and impressive teacher, Eino
Kaila. I t was in the heyday of logical positivism and Kaila, who
had himself taken part in the meetings of the Wiener Kreis, im ported
the ‘new’ philosophy to Finland thereby effecting a great change in
the philosophic culture of the country. Its most lasting effect was a
strong interest in logic which has prevailed now through four
academic generations.
One of the opinions which I implicitly imbued as a student and
never questioned was that there is a deep conceptual gulf separat­
ing the world of facts from that of norms and values, the Sein from
the Sollen. This view was not only part of the ‘positivist’ legacy. It
was also characteristic of an intellectual 2Zeitgeist which had found
104 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

manifestation in H ans Kclsen’s ‘pure theory* of law and Max

W eber’s gospel of a ‘value-free science’. In Finland, Edvard Wes-
term arck’s ethical relativism and subjectivism loomed heavily over
the spiritual landscape. He was one of the intellectual glories of the
country and one was brought up to admire him. (Incidentally, I
never met W estermarck.)
A radicalization of the view separating Is from O ught was the
opinion that norms— and maybe value-judgments too— are neither
true nor false. Normative discourse was considered ‘a-theoretical’,
void of ‘cognitive meaning’. This view had, already before the
advent of logical positivism, been advocated with great acumen by
the Swede Axel Hagerstrom and was, under the somewhat m islead­
ing name o f ‘value-nihilism’ flourishing in Scandinavia in the years
of my philosophic apprenticeship.
If norms lack truth-value, how could logical relations, such as
e.g. contradiction and logical consequence, subsist between norms?
H agerstrom straightforwardly denied the possibility. The logical
positivists, on the whole, inclined to the same opinion. But in their
camp some groping efforts were also made to create a ‘logic of
imperatives’. The positivists were keen on logic—and perhaps logic
need not be confined within the boundaries of the true and the false.

In those early years I did not take much interest in the philosophy
of norms and values. My first research topics were induction and
probability and they kept me busy, roughly, from 1938 to 1948.
Then I turned to ‘deductive logic’. Very soon I m ade an accidental
discovery, viz. that the modal notions of necessity, possibility, etc.
exhibited a striking formal analogy with the quantifiers ‘air,
‘some’, etc. This led me to study modal logic, then still a rather
neglected subject. I had hardly embarked on it when I was struck
by an analogy between the modal notions and the normative no­
tions of obligation, permission, etc. It happened in the course of a
conversation about moral m atters with some friends at Cambridge.
It was easy to work the observation into a ‘system’. I hurried to
write a paper and sent it to Mind where it appeared shortly after
receipt. This was in 1951 and the paper was called ‘Deontic Logic’.
The name was a suggestion of my senior friend C.D. Broad.
I did not realize at first that I had been acting as midwife of a
new discipline. (Later I got to know that others too had been
engaged in a similar enterprise, but I think it is right to say that my
 A PILGRIM ’s PROGRESS 105

share in the work had been decisive.) In the mid-1950’s deontic

logic became established, and has since been cultivated by philos­
ophers, logicians, and philosophically minded jurists the world
over. A bibliography of the subject compiled by Amedeo G. Conte
and Giuliano Di Bernardo in 1977 lists 1460 contributions . 1 Since
then developments have continued— as far as I can judge— with
accelerated speed.

At the beginning I thought, naively, that deontic logic was a logic

of norms. It did not occur to me that this might be in conflict with
the view, which I have always continued to hold, that norms lack
truth-value. A few years later when I republished my Mind-paper
in Logical Studies (1957) I wrote in the Preface to the book that the
possibility of a logic of norms simply showed that the province of
logic transcends the borders of the true and the false; an opinion
which is, I think, shared by a good many logicians and philos­
ophers today.
I was never able comfortably to acquiesce to this view, how­
ever,— Some of the classics of a philosophy of norms, like Hager-
strom and Kelsen, had already noted th at deontic (normative)
sentences exhibit an interesting ambiguity. O ne and the same form
of words may be used both for giving a norm and for stating, truly or
falsely, that a norm has been given, e.g. belongs to a certain legal
order. In the first case language is used prescriptively, in the second
descriptively. Prescriptions, unlike descriptions, have no truth-value.
This ambiguity of deontic sentences had, moreover, been exploited
systematically by a Swedish philosopher of a younger generation,
Ingemar Hedenius. He spoke of ‘genuine’ and ‘spurious’ legal
sentences, the first being prescriptive and the second descriptive.
It then occurred to me that perhaps deontic logic was really a
logic of normative sentences in their descriptive interpretation,
expressing what I also called norm-propositions. This was the view I
took in Norm and Action (1963)— and continued to entertain for a
long time afterwards. In the end, some twenty years later, I came to
reject this view, too. Does this mean that we have to throw over­
board deontic logic as an empty game with logical symbols which
cannot be given a meaningful interpretation? Fortunately, it does not

1 Logica deontica c semantica, a cura di G iuliano Di Bernardo, M ulino, Bologna

106 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

mean this. But before commenting on my present position I shall say

a few words about things which took place in the meantime.

We must introduce here a little bit of symbolism OA and PA, for ‘A

is obligatory 5 and ‘A is perm itted’, respectively. W hat are the
‘things’ which norms pronounce obligatory or permitted? I had
already raised the question in my 1951 paper and answered thus:
these things are (human) actions. I was not then aware of the
distinction, familiar in G erm an philosophic literature under the
names Seinsollen and Tunsollen, between that which ought to be and
that which ought to be done. The answer which I had given to the
above question indicated that I conceived of deontic logic prim arily
as a logic of the Tunsollen {-Diirfen). I then took it for granted that
symbols for actions could be handled with the same symbolic tools
as those traditionally used for handling sentences (propositions).
This, however, was a questionable assumption and constituted a
challenge for me to scrutinize in further detail the logical structure
of actions and action discourse.
Actions normally manifest themselves in the production, some­
times also in the prevention, of changes ‘in the w orld’. A study of
the structure of action inevitably led to a study of change. T hus I
arrived at the vision of a hitherto unexplored hierarchy o f ‘logics’: a
Logic of Norms (‘deontic logic’) based on a Logic of Action based
on a Logic of Change. Action and change are dynamic categories and
may as such be contrasted with the static categories of state, thing,
property, and relation of traditional logic.
The departure from orthodoxy signalized by deontic logic was
perhaps not as radical as I saw it then, at the time when I wrote
Norm and Action. But it still seems to me that a further development
of deontic logic cannot ignore the study of its ‘sub-structure’ in
action discourse. This sub-structure is now better explored than it
was twenty years ago— but still, I should say, undeservedly ne­
glected. I hope, and believe, th at it will not long remain so.
As far as the bottom stratum of the hierarchy was concerned, a
logic of change, it soon turned out th at it already existed in the
more developed form of a ‘tense-logic’ or temporal logic. The
pioneer in that field had been A rthur Prior (1915-1968). He, in his
turn had been inspired partly by my work in modal logic .2 Later I

2 A .N . Prior, Pasts Present and Future, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1967, p. 20.
 A PILGRIM ’s PROGRESS 107

joined work in tense-logic also independently of my interest in

deontic logic. It has led me 3 to reflect on the logical scaffolding of a
dynamic world which is implicit in Hegelian or Dialectical Logic.
But this is another itinerary of mine, still in progress, and I shall
not attem pt to describe it here.

My efforts to build a logic of norms had thus taken me, first to a

logical study of action and, eventually, to that of change and time.
But this did not mean that I was, after Norm and Action, finished
with deontic logic. In the first instance there were some problems of
a formal logical rather than a ‘philosophical’ nature which con­
tinued to puzzle me.
One problem concerned permissions. Permissions are usually
related to choice. If an agent has been perm itted to do something
he is usually not compelled to do this thing but may either do or
abstain as he chooses. In particular, if he is allowed to do either one
of two things, it is normally understood that he may do the one but
also may do the other. A ‘disjunctive permission’ P(AvB) is thus
normally ‘conjunctively distributable 5 into PA and PB. ( V is the
symbol for ‘or’.) A permission of this kind I have called Free Choice
Permission .4 The ‘formalization’ in deontic logic of this notion is
connected with difficulties to which I know no entirely satisfying
solution. T he problem cuts deep into the logic and philosophy of
norms because it concerns the relation between permission and
freedom o f choice.
Another problem which is also awaiting an accepted solution
concerns conditional (hypothetical) norms. This problem gets p art of
its urgency from the fact that conditional norms are of utm ost
importance in legal contexts. Legal obligations usually arise under
certain conditions. This is also true of many moral obligations. An
example is promise-giving. One is seldom obligated, simpliciter, to
give a promise; but i f one has given one, one ought to keep it.
W hat is the correct expression for a conditional norm, i.e. what is
the expression in language which correctly reflects the logical form
here? One proposal is: ‘If p, then 0 q \ i.e. ‘I f it is the case that p it
ought to be the case that q \ In symbols: p —>0q. Another proposal

3 Beginning with my Eddington Memorial Lecture, Time, Change, and Contradic­

tion, Cambridge University Press 1969.
The term was coined in An Essay in Deontic Logic and the General Theory o f Action
(1968) and has since become current.
108 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

runs: ‘ It ought to be the case that if p then q or, in symbols,

0(p-> q).
T he first proposal makes the obligation conditional upon the
truth of a proposition. But this sort o f ‘hybrid’ between a proposi­
tion which is true or false and a norm which lacks truth-value is a
logical monster—at least under any normal interpretation of the
‘if-then’ relation. Things would be in order if une interpreted ‘Oq’
descriptively, as expressing the norm-proposition that it ought to
be the case that q. But then p —>Oq does not express a norm but says
that under a certain condition (p ) a norm to such and such effect
(Oq) exists. This norm is not, however, conditional but categorical.
T he second proposal, 0 ( p —>q), again encounters two grave
difficulties.— If it is the case that p and if the conditional norm
makes it obligatory that, ifp then y, then, surely, it (now) ought to
be the case that q. The conjunction of the condition and the
conditional obligation, in other words, seems to justify the ‘detach­
m ent’ of the unconditional obligation to perform the conditioned
action. I ought not to promise, but i f I have given a promise I
(then) ought also unconditionally to keep my word. But no respect­
able logic could allow an inference from p and 0 ( p —>q) to Oq. (This
is one reason why some people think that the form of a conditional
norm must, after all, be p —*Oq which would allow the detachm ent,
and not O (p ^ q ).)
T he second difficulty is caused by the provability, in any stan­
dard system of deontic logic, of the formula 0 ~ p —* 0(p-+q). This
seems to say that from a norm to the effect that it ought not to be the
case that p it ‘follows logically’ that there is also a norm to the effect
that it ought to be the case that i f —in spite of the obligation to the
contrary— it is the case that p then it is also the case that <7, where
V can stand for ju st anything which may be or not be.
This second puzzle is but a variant of a famous ‘paradox’ of
deontic logic which was first pointed out by the em inent Danish
jurist-philosopher Alf Ross. The paradox is as follows:
In standard deontic logic the formula Op —►O(pvq) is provable.
This seems to allow the following argument: If it ought to be that a
letter is mailed, then it ought also to be that it is mailed or burnt.
(This is a paraphrase of Ross’s famous example.)
Ross’s Paradox has inspired hundreds of papers— and the num ­
ber continues to grow. Some would perhaps say that it has been
discussed ad nauseam, or that the paradox is ‘innocuous’, or that
there is no ‘paradox’ at all. This may be true. But it is also true that
Ross’s observations cut deep into the philosophy and logic of norms.
The m atter, I should say, is much more interesting than the much
 A PILGRIM ’s PROGRESS 109

discussed Paradoxes of Implication in propositional and modal

logic. W hat makes Ross’s Paradox interesting is that it challenges
the very possibility of logical relations between norms— and there­
with the possibility of a (genuine) ‘logic of norm s’ which deontic
logic in origin was intended to be.
Hagerstrom had denied this possibility. Ross was a follower of
his. It was in the spirit of his m aster that Ross came up with his
Paradox. He modified his opinions later but never fully reconciled
himself to the existence of a ‘deontic logic’. Kelsen, after having
prided himself that his reine Recktslehre was the foundation of a Logik
des Sollens, came in his old age 5 to entertain the same drastic view as
Hagerstrom; he called his final position Normenirrationalismus. And
now I too, after a long and winding itinerary have come to the same
view: logical relations, e.g. of contradiction and entailm ent, cannot
exist between (genuine) norms.

But—as already indicated (above p. 105f.)— these findings should

not induce us to throw deontic logic overboard. W hat is needed,
however, is a re-interpretation and deepened understanding of the
nature and significance of this new branch of logic.
So what then is deontic logic? I shall try to answer the question
as clearly as I can within the brief space here at my disposal.
A normative code envisages, I shall say, an ideal state of affairs.
This ideal state obtains (in the ‘real 1 world) when everything which
the norms of the code pronounce obligatory always— i.e. as long as
the code continues to be ‘in force’— is the case, everything which
they prohibit never is the case, and those things which it permits
can be the case without obligations being neglected or prohibitions
violated. If this ideal state is not logically possible then there is
something ‘wrong’ or ‘rotten’ with the normative code itself. It
either imposes dem ands which cannot be all of them satisfied or it
permits things which cannot consistently with these dem ands be
realized. ‘Logic’ cannot exclude such dem ands from being m ade
and licences from being given (for example, by a legislator); but
giving them intentionally would surely be irrational, contrary to
reason, purposeless. It would be purposeless, since it would make it
impossible for the real world to approxim ate to the ideal— and this
approximation is surely w hat norms urge people to attem pt. If that

5 In his posthumously published Allgemeine Theorie der Normert, Hrsir. K. Rinc-

hofer u. R. Walter, Manz Verlag, Wien 1979.
110 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

to which norms urge us is, for reasons o f logic, unattainable, the

law-giver is certainly well advised, ‘in the nam e of rationality’, to
amend the norms— for example by derogating some or modifying
others.
For example: Let there be two norms, one to the effect th at it
ought to be the case that p and another to the effect th at it ought to
be the case that not-p. If they both belonged to the same code, the
‘ideal’ envisaged in this code would be a logical impossibility, since
it cannot be the case both that p and that not p . The contents of the
norms contradict each other logically— and therefore it would be
irrational, contrary to reason, to require that both norms be
obeyed. I shall say that the two norms are normatively inconsistent, if
their contents, what they enjoin, are logically inconsistent.
Next we introduce the auxiliary concept of a ‘negation-norm ’ (of
a given norm). The negation-norm of an obligation is a permission
with the opposite content. Thus, e.g., P ~ p is the negation-norm of
Op. The negation-norm of a permissive norm again is an obligation
to the contrary. Thus, e.g., 0 ~ p is the negation of Pp.
If a proposition logically entails another proposition, then the
first is logically inconsistent with the negation of the second. In
analogy with this one could say that a norm ‘normatively entails’
another, if the first is normatively inconsistent with the negation-
norm of the second.
The negation-norm of the norm which enjoins the mailing or
burning of a letter is a permission to leave the letter unmailed and
unburnt. This is normatively inconsistent with an order to mail the
letter. A person cannot order a letter to be mailed and also perm it it
to be left unmailed if he behaves ‘rationally’. In this sense an order to
mail a letter can be said normatively to entail an order to mail or
bum it. But this does not mean that, if an order to mail a letter has
been given, one could ‘deduce’ from this an order to mail or to bum
it. The second order can be there (exist); but whether it is or not
depends upon w hether it (too) has been given.
T he appearance of paradox with the formula Op—>0(pvq) is thus
due to a mistaken interpretation of this formula as expressing a
relation of logical consequence. It does not mean that a norm
logically ‘entails’ another, since logical relations of entailm ent can­
not exist between norms. Nor does it mean th at from the existence
of a norm can the existence of another norm be logically inferred.
W hat the formula says is simply that a ‘law-giver’ who ordains
something cannot consistently with this perm it the opposite of that
thing (together with something third), if he wants his legislation to
be rational.
 A PILGRIM’s PROGRESS 111

Dcontic logic, one could also say, is neither a logic of norms nor a
logic of norm-propositions b u t a study of conditions which must be
satisfied in rational norm-giving activity. It is strict logic because
the conditions which it lays down are derived from logical relations
between states in the ideal worlds which normative codes envisage.
These relations are not trivial—for one thing because their proper
expression and study presupposes a logical analysis, hitherto only
insufficiently accomplished, of action discourse and of temporal
change. For this and other reasons, deontic logic must, in my
opinion, be deemed a fertile and interesting new province of logic.

Has deontic logic also wider interest and value besides being in­
teresting qua logic? I think it would be difficult to deny that it
has— although I should myself like to be the last person to exaggerate
the im portance of deontic logic.
It is a fact that this logic has found extensive applications to the
analysis of legal and, to a lesser extent, also moral concepts and
discourse. Opinions on the value of deontic logic vary among
philosophers of law and morals— some estimate it very highly,
whereas others take a guarded or maybe even hostile attitude to it.
And, as we have seen, some em inent legal philosophers even dis­
pute the very possibility of a ‘logic of norm s5. But the liveliness of
the dispute which it has engendered already testifies to the intrinsic
interest of the subject m atter.

In the mid-century years and before, there was a tendency to

regard exact science as the paradigm of hum an rationality and as
the subject m atter most worthy of philosophic reflexion. The
tendency was by no means confined to logical positivism although
it is true that the positivists were its most forceful and influential
spokesmen. It was reinforced also by the im pact of some revolu­
tionary changes in the scientific world view connected above all
with the origin of relativity theory and quantum physics and with
the ‘foundation crisis’ in mathematics. This last, in turn, was
intimately connected with the revolution which was taking place in
logic after Frege.
Parallel with the eulogy to ‘scientific rationalism’ in philosophy
there was a tendency to relegate norms and values to a ‘sub-rational’
112 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

sphere of emotion and subjectivity. This tendency, too, found a

forceful articulation through logical positivism, but it had certainly
also been nourished, partly by ‘irrationalist’ trends in late 19th and
early 2 0 th century philosophy, and partly by the ‘cultural relativ­
ism ’ encouraged by the findings of social anthropology and com­
parative study of religion.
It was in the atmosphere of these tendencies and trends th at my
own upbringing and intellectual training took place. (Cf. above.)
This atmosphere no longer prevails. I suppose that one reason
for the change is the fact that the aspects of reality which were
relegated to the ‘sub-rational’ underground have given rise to
problems which threaten the very basis of civilization and even the
future of the human species. W ith these threats those aspects have
also acquired a new dignity as objects of philosophic thinking.
I think that deontic logic and the interest it has aroused in wider
circles than those of logicians partly reflects but also, in a modest
way, has contributed to what might be termed ‘a rehabilitation of
practical philosophy’6, i.e. to a renewed and deepened interest in
norms and values and the various forms of hum an action and
creativity. O ne no longer turns away from these matters as repre­
senting inferior forms of rationality— nor does one dismiss, as the
logical positivists tended to do, discourse about them as ‘a-the-
oreticar or even ‘meaningless’. This I would consider a hopeful
development in a world which, like ours today, is exposed to
destructive threats from forces which are antagonistic to the use of
reason— the faculty which distinguishes man from the rest of the
animal kingdom.

Postscript

(1992)

At the time when I wrote the above sem i-autobiographical account

I thought I had finished with deontic logic for good. O f the position
which I had then reached, after so many changes of my views, I
had given a full account in a paper called ‘Norms, T ruth, and
Logic’ published in the first volume of my Philosophical Papers (Basil
Blackwell, Oxford 1983). Basically, my views have not changed

I have borrowed the phrase from the title c f a work which is significant o f the
new trend: Rehabilitiemng der praktxschen Philosophic I—II, Hrsg. M. Riedel Verlag
Rombach, Freiburg 1972/1974. *
 A PILGRIM ’s PROGRESS 113

since then. But they have undergone several ‘supplem entary de­
velopments’. I should now say, for example, that the ‘oblique’
conditions of contradiction and entailm ent which have to be
observed in rational norm-giving activity constitute genuine stan­
dards of logical correctness. Thus I have, after a detour which lasted
some forty-odd years, come back full circle to the view which I
expressed in the Preface to Logical Studies (see above p. 105) that
Logic has a wider reach than T ruth. But I think the journey was
worth making.
 VII

A PHILOSOPHICAL LOG ICIAN ’S ITINERARY

My early logical preoccupations were in inductive logic. O ne of

their main topics was the concept of probability. Roughly speaking,
this period in my working life ended in 1951 when my book A
Treatise on Induction and Probability was published. But from time to
time I have later returned to these areas of research.
The core of traditional inductive logic are the well known
‘canons of induction’, invented by Francis Bacon and first system­
atized by Jo h n Stuart Mill. They are methods for ascertaining the
causes of given effects, and the effects of given causes. In my
treatm ent, the notions of cause and effect were replaced by the
more precise ideas of necessary and sufficient conditions. This
made it possible to restate and re-evaluate, in the exact terms of a
logic of conditions, the classical canons or methods of induction of
Bacon and Mill.
Another, more recent, branch of inductive logic is known as
confirmation theory. It studies, roughly speaking, the way in which
the accumulation of evidence affects the probability of generaliza­
tions from experience and other kinds of inductive hypotheses.
If I had to characterize briefly my own achievement in the field
of inductive logic I would do it as follows: I have tried to show how
the probabilifying effect of evidence on a given hypothesis is an
isomorphic reflection in numerical terms of a process of eliminating
members from a class of hypotheses initially competing with the
given one. This eliminative procedure is the logical core of M ill’s
canons. My aim can thus be said to have been a unification of the
two main branches of inductive logic: induction by elimination in
the tradition of Bacon and Mill, and induction by confirmation in
the tradition founded by the Cam bridge logicians J.M . Keynes,
C.D. Broad, and W.E. Johnson and later continued by C arnap and
others.
An interesting side-issue in this search for a unified theory is
constituted by the so-called Paradoxes of Confirmation. I have
 A PHILOSOPHICAL LO G IC IA N S ITINERARY 115

dealt with it also in later publications. My final statem ent on this

issue is a paper published in 1966.1

From inductive I then turned to deductive logic. It happened

during those years after the w ar when I was, first a visitor, and later
a professor at Cam bridge. I set myself the aim to show th at W itt­
genstein’s idea in the Tractatus> according to which truth in logic is
tautological, could be extended beyond the propositional calculus
to the calculus of properties and relations. Connected with this goal
was an idea that truth-tables might be used also in those extended
branches of logic for testing the logical truth (tautologicity) of
formulas.
T he program started promisingly with my showing that it could
be carried through for quantification in the realm of one-place
predicates .2 (In fact, Q uine had showed the same a little earlier but
I did not know of his work until later.)
I pursued my work into quantification theory for relations, and
eventually solved the problem for formulas containing not more
than two overlapping quantifiers .3 But for triple quantification the
problem was beyond my ability— and attacking it would actually
had led to an impasse.
However, a lasting fruit of all these efforts (also in blind alleys)
was the discovery of w hat is known as distributive normal forms of
formulas of the first order functional calculus. I also had the good
fortune of having a pupil, Jaakko Hintikka, who took research on
these normal forms much farther than I had done. In a certain
sense H intikka’s achievement may be said to vindicate my intui­
tions concerning the im portance of the notion of tautology for
clarifying the notion of truth in logic .4

1 ‘The Paradoxes of Confirmation’. In Aspects o f Inductive Logic, ed. by Jaakko

Hintikka and Patrick Suppes. North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam 1966.
‘On the Idea of Logical Truth. I.’ Societas Scientiarum Fennica. Commentationes
Physico-Mathematieae. Vol. 14, no. 4.
‘On Double Quantification.’ Ibid. Vol. 16, no. 3.
* Cf. Jaakko Hintikka, Von Wright on Logical Truth and Distributive Normal
Forms’. In The Philosophy o f Georg Henrik von Wright. The Library of Living
Philosophers. Vol. X IX . Ed. by P.A. Schilpp and L.E. Hahn. Open Court, La
Salle, III., 1989.
116 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

One day during the time when I was living at Cam bridge and
walking along the bank of the river Cam I was struck by the
following thought:
Let (the letter) A stand for a property, e.g. redness. And let E A
denote that there is, exists, something with this property, e.g.
som ething which is red. ~~E A then means th a t there is no thing
with this property or th a t nothing is A. ~~E —A again m eans th at
no thing is not A or, in other words, th at everything is A. For the
complex symbol —E~~ one could also have a symbol (abbrevia­
tion) U.
Now com pare with the following: Let (the letter) p represent a
(sentence which expresses a) proposition, e.g. the proposition that
it is raining. And let M p denote th at it is possible that p . ~ M p then
means that it is not possible, i.e. that it is impossible that p .
finally, means that it is not possible that not p or, in other
words, that it is necessary that p. For the complex we could
also introduce a simple symbol, say N.
W hat these simple observations am ounted to was that the modal
notions of possibility, impossibility, and necessity exhibited the
same pattern of interdefinability as the quantifiers ‘som e(thing)\
‘no(thing)’, ‘ev ery th in g )’. O f these latter concepts, the quantifiers,
there has existed, at least since the time of Frege, a well developed
formal theory. This theory, in fact, may be said to constitute the
very core of classical logic. O f the former notions, the modalities,
there also existed a logic. M odal logic had been extensively studied
by Aristotle and the mediaeval scholastics. But it had laid more or
less dorm ant for several hundred years and remained practically
untouched by modern developments after Frege. True, there was
the work of C .I. Lewis and J a n Lukasiewicz. But these logicians
had thought of modal logic as a kind o f ‘non-classical’ alternative to
the ‘classical’ tradition which had been revived in the work of Frege
and Russell. This, in my opinion, is an unfortunate idea. W hat my
observation seemed to indicate was that modal logic could be
developed, not as an alternative, but as a parallel branch to the logic
of the quantificational notions. Moreover, the analogy in basic
patterns between quantifiers and modalities made it possible to use
methods and techniques, known from the study of the former
notions, also for the study of the latter.
My enthusiasm about these discoveries was so great that I,— in a
couple of months and in almost total ignorance of the work of
others already in progress in a similar direction— wrote a small
 A PHILOSOPHICAL LOGICIAN S ITINERARY 117

book on the subject. It was called An Essay in Modal Logic and

appeared in the then newly started series ‘Studies in Logic and the
Foundations of M athem atics’ to which I had been invited to contri­
bute. It was published in the same year (1951) as my treatise on
induction and probability.
Since then modal logic has come back and grown into one of the
most intensely cultivated branches of contem porary logical study.
It is still in some quarters regarded with suspicion, and the unfor­
tunate label ‘non-classical’ is often attached to it. A forceful critic of
modal logic has been Quine. I think, however, th at the kind of
conservatism in logic which he represents will gradually fade away.
The modal notions are adm ittedly loaded with heavy problems of a
philosophical nature and will continue to cause controversy. But
the same also holds true, I would say, of the quantifiers and some
other more ‘established’ concepts in the science of logic.

The analogy with the quantifiers as regards patterns of interdefin­

ability and distributive properties can be extended from the strictly
modal notions to a whole family of related concepts. To this family
belong various epistemic and doxastic ideas such as those of know­
ledge and belief, certainty and doubt, verification, etc. Their logical
study is known as epistemic logic. The rudim ents of the analogical
relationships were described in my Essay. But their more detailed
and profound study has been the work of other logicians. A classic
in this new branch is H intikka’s book Knowledge and Belief. It was
published in 1960. A nother Finnish logician who has done excellent
work in this and other branches of extended modal logic is H intik­
ka’s pupil Risto Hilpinen.
Another off-shoot on the same ancestral tree of logical study is
deontic logic. It was born in the very same year as my Essay was
published.
Let A be a symbol for a (type or category of) action, e.g. the
action of smoking. And let P A denote that this action is perm itted.
y P A then means that the action in question is not perm itted. And
if not perm itted, presumably forbidden. ~ P ~ A would then mean
that it is forbidden not to do the action in question or, in other
words, that one ought to do it, that the action is obligatory. For
obligatoriness we can also introduce a simple symbol 0 as an
abbreviation of the complex
These observations turned out to be more controversial that I
first realized. Is it right to identify the not-perm itted character of an
118 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

action with its being forbidden? Is prohibition the same as the

absence of permission— and conversely permission the same as
absence of prohibition? These are in fact questions'of long standing
in the philosophy of law. At the time when I invented deontic logic
I was blissfully ignorant of them.
My work in logic after the Essay has to a great extent, though far
from exclusively, been in this new field of deontic logic or the logic
of norms, as it is also called. I have not been alone: A bibliography
published in 19775 already listed nearly fifteen hundred books and
articles, and it would not surprise me if the num ber had since then
at least doubled.
A main reason for my continued interest in deontic logic has
been that the subject, in spite of the fact th at it is by now an
established branch of logical study, remains problem atic not to say
controversial from a philosophical point of view. Since genuine
norms are neither true nor false, how can there exist logical rela­
tions such as, for example, contradiction and entailm ent between
norms? Deontic logic seems to signalize an extension of traditional
logic beyond the confines of truth and falsehood. It therefore consti­
tutes a challenge to the very notion of logical reasoning.
However, deontic logic has not only been for me a source of
philosophical concerns. It has also opened up vistas in yet other, so
far unexplored, directions.

Norms deal with hum an action. But what is an action? Roughly

speaking, an action is the production, intentionally by some agent,
of a change in the world. But w hat is change? For purposes of a first
approxim ation one could say that a change is a transition of one
state of affairs to its contradictory (opposite).
Let p represent a state of affairs. pT-~p shall then symbolize its
transformation, change, to the opposite state. I f this change is
brought about by action it is also called the destruction of the state in
question. The reverse change, ~pTp, if brought about by action, is
called the production of p . An example could be the closing and the
opening respectively of a window.
Not all action, however, is either productive or destructive. An
agent may prevent a state from vanishing, but also from coming to
be. In the first case he is said to conserve or sustain the state in

s See the essay ‘A Pilgrim’s Progress’, above, p. 105.

 A PHILOSOPHICAL LOGICIAN'S ITINERARY 119

question, in the second case to suppress it. T he symbols for these two
not-changes would be pTp and ~ p T ~ p .
Production and destruction, sustaining and suppressing I shall
call the four basic or elementary modes of hum an action. One can
construct a formal theory, an ‘algebra’ or a ‘logic’, for these four
modes and for the complex modes which are definable in terms of
them. This theory may be called a Logic of Action. It, in turn, is
based on a Logic of Change or of state-transform ations which is
essentially a logical theory for the above symbol T.
We thus get a picture of a hierarchy: a Logic of Norms (Deontic
Logic) based on a Logic of Action which is based on a Logic of
Change. In my book Norm and Action which appeared in 1963,
twelve years after my early writing on deontic logic, I made a first
effort to combine a logical theory of norms with a logical theory of
action and change.
Whereas deontic logic in the course of the years has evolved far
beyond its beginnings, the formal logical study of action still re­
mains, I should say, relatively undeveloped. But I do not doubt
that this state of affairs will be remedied with time. I have myself
made some contributions to this in later years .6 Among the work
of others, I should like to mention in particular that of K rister
Segerberg, who for a couple of years was professor of philosophy at
Abo Academy in Finland.

Action and change are w hat may be called dynamic categories. The
study of such concepts is a relative novelty in logic. Traditionally,
logic has been a study of the static^ of that which is, rather than of
that which becomes. (An exception was Hegel; I shall make a com­
ment on this later.)
One reason for the awakening interest of logicians in dynamic
categories has been action. This was how I was led to study them.
Another, more im portant reason, has been a growing interest, not
only in logic but also in science and philosophy generally, in time
and other concepts associated with temporality.
The great pioneer in the logical study of time was A rthur N.
Prior. He called the study ‘tense-logic’ and this has become the
established name for it. In my opinion ‘temporal logic’ is better.
Among all philosophical logicians, Prior is the one whose work I

6 ‘Action Logic as a Basis for Deontic Logic’. Normative Structures o f the Social
World. Edited by Giuliano di Bernardo. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1988.
120 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

felt most congenial to my own. (Significantly, Prior’s first book was

called The Logical Basis o f Ethics; it did not, however, anticipate
deontic logic.) The story of how my work on change-logic and his
on tense-logic converged, may be worth recounting here.
The symbol ‘7 ” introduced above is a kind of asymmetrical
conjunction which may be read ‘and n ex t\ After having worked out
and published a logic for it, I started to work with another asym­
metrical conjunction which I called ‘and then’. Its logic turned out
to be considerably more complicated. I was then Visiting Professor
at Pittsburgh. Prior was at the time visiting at UCLA and came to
Pittsburgh to read a paper. I had until then been completely
ignorant of his work in tense-logic. M eeting him— it was in 1966—
made me realize that w hat I had accomplished in the Logic of
Change (in and after Norm and Action) was but a small fragment of
the theory which Prior had already built for the Logic of Time.
Tense-logic may be regarded as another m em ber of that family of
‘logics’ which exploit the analogy with the quantifiers.— Let p again
represent some state of affairs, e.g. that it is raining, S p shall mean that
it is sometimes raining. ~ S p then says that it is not sometimes raining,
i.e. never raining, and ~~S~p that it is never not raining, i.e. always
raining. For S— we might introduce the abbreviation A.
T he temporal triad ‘sometimes’, ‘never’, ‘always’ thus exhibits
the same structural relationship among its members as the triad
‘possible’, ‘impossible’, ‘necessary’, or for that m atter, ‘perm itted ,
‘prohibited’, ‘obligatory’. O f all members of this family of analogi­
cally related concepts, the temporal triad has perhaps turned out to
be the richest in internal varieties.
Subsequent developments of tense-logic have also given birth to
a study of combinations of modal and temporal concepts. I have
made some modest contributions to this development in the form of
a logic of w hat I have termed diachronic and synchronic modalities.
(In the Essay I had actually initiated a combined study of the modal
and the epistemic concepts.) T he diachronic modalities deal with
what can and cannot at a given time happen at some future time. The
synchronic modalities concern that which could or could not have
happened as an alternative to that which actually happens at a
given time.

In traditional (‘classical’) logic two laws or principles occupy a

basic position. They are the Law of Excluded M iddle (or Third)
 A PHILOSOPHICAL LOGICIAN'S ITINERARY 121

and the Law of (Excluded) Contradiction. T he first says that any

given proposition is either true or false; the second that no proposi­
tion is both true and false.
The principles also hold good in a ‘norm al’ modal logic and its
various off-shoots such as, for example, deontic logic. These
‘logics’, as noted above, are often called ‘non-classical’. But this
seems to me a misnomer. I should myself like to define ‘classical
logic’ as a logic which accepts the two principles in question— and
label ‘non-classical’ a logic in which the one or the other of the two
laws is not (unrestrictedly) valid .7
In origin, the two laws are attributed to the founding father
himself of the study of logic, Aristotle. But Aristode also seems to
have entertained some doubts about them, and in particular about
the Law of Excluded Middle.
These doubts have also come to play a role in modern develop­
ments. Intuitionist logic rejects the Law of Excluded Middle. And a
recent line in logical research, known as paraconsistent logic, does
not unrestrictedly accept the Law of Contradiction. My own re­
search in later years has been much concerned with these non-
classical (‘unorthodox’) or deviant developments in logic.
It all started rather long ago. In 1959 I published an article
which in many ways has been seminal for my later work .8 Its name
was ‘On the Logic of Negation’. In it I exploited an observation
made by Aristotle to the effect that there is a difference between
denying that something has a certain property and affirming that it
has the negation of this property. To use Aristotle’s example be­
tween saying of a piece of wood that it is not white, and saying that
it is not-white. In the second statem ent is presupposed that the log
has a colour, different from white. In the first this is not presup­
posed. If instead of wood we speak of air, we could say that air is
not white, since it is colourless, but not that (its colour) is not-
white.
I made Aristotle’s observation a basis for distinguishing between
two kinds or types of negation. I called them weak and strong or,
better, external and internal. Internal or strong negation entails exter­
nal or weak negation, but not conversely. If something is not-white
it is not white, as our piece of wood. But if something is not white it
does not follow that it is not-white, as the case of air demonstrates.
I am not aware that the above distinctions had been made before
in modern logic. But later they have been noted independently by
’ Cf. above, the paper ‘Logic and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century’, p. 20fT.
'On the Logic of Negation’. Societas Scientiarum Fennica. Commentationes Physico-
Mathematicae. Vol. 22, no. 4. 1959.
122 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

several logicians, and also the terms which I coined have acquired
currency.

O ne can give to the topic negation a new twist by taking into

consideration the notion of truth.
Let the symbol V (from verum) stand for the phrase ‘it is true
th at’. Vp then says that it is true that e.g. that it is raining. p
denies this, and V~~p affirms the truth of the opposite, viz. that it is
;w/-raining. The two positions of the negation sign, before and after
the symbol for truth, now mark the distinction between an external
and an internal way of negating a proposition, between denying its
truth and affirming the truth of its contradictory. Falsehood, one
could then say, is the truth o f the negation of a proposition.
The advantage of this procedure is that we need not assume two
different concepts of negation, but can use the familiar (‘classical’)
notions of negation and truth for distinguishing between the two
different ways in which a proposition can be negated.
The challenge now becomes building a logic for this new symbol
V. This can conveniently be called a truth-logic. But, as we shall soon
see, there is in fact a plurality of ways in which such a logic (variety
of ‘truth-logics’) may be constructed.
Consider the two expressions V-~p and ~ Vp. T he first says th at it
is false that p and the second that it is not true that p . How are they
related? In classical logic they are equivalent. Falsehood and not-
truth are the same. We can write this down as a formula V~~p <->
~*Vp. This means that in classical logic any given proposition is
either false and not true or true and not false— as indeed the laws of
excluded middle and of contradiction prescribe.
Assume, however, that falsehood is stronger than not-truth, the
internal negation of a proposition stronger than its external nega­
tion. Then we have an implication V~p-> ~ Vp, but not its converse
~ V p-*V ~ p. This means that there can be propositions which,
although not true, are not false either. I f ‘true 5 and ‘false’ are called
truth-values, such propositions have no truth-value. They fall in a
truth-value gap. If we allow this, the Law of Excluded M iddle is not
valid. Not every proposition is necessarily either true or false. But
the Law of Contradiction holds good. Because the implication
V~p— Vp excludes that the proposition that p could be both true
and false.
Finally, assume that we reversed the implication and accepted
 A PHILOSOPHICAL LOGICIAN'S ITINERARY 123

~ V p-*V ~ p but not its converse. Now external negation is stronger

than internal. W hat does this mean? First of all it means that the
Law of Excluded M iddle holds good: every proposition which is not
true is false. But since we reject the (universal validity of the)
implication Vp we allow for the possibility that a proposi­
tion which is false is nevertheless also true. The Law of C ontradic­
tion, in other words, is not unrestrictedly valid. Truth-values may
overlap.
I shall call a logic which accepts V~p-*~-Vp but not ~ V p -* V ~ p
intuitionist-logic-like, and a logic which accepts ~ V p—>V~p but not
V~p-^>~Vp paraconsistent-logic-like. A logic of the first type also
holds that truth implies falsehood of falsehood and a logic of the
second type that falsehood of falsehood implies truth— but not the
other ways round.
The three types of logic, viz. classical, intuitionist-, and para-
consistent-like do not differ only in their base in propositional
logic. There are corresponding to them three types of predicate
logic and of modal (deontic, doxastic, epistemic, etc.) logic. O ne
can characterize the difference between the three types of logic by
saying that in classical logic the truth-values are exclusive and
exhaustive (o f‘logical space’), whereas in a logic of the intuitionist
type they are exclusive but not exhaustive, and in a paraconsistent
logic exhaustive but not exclusive. O ne can also construct logics in
which the true and the false are neither exhaustive nor exclusive of
one another.

The task of logic, one could say, is to describe and systematize the
principles used in argum entation, inference, and proof. The ade­
quacy and success of an attem pted systematization is, in the last
resort, not a m atter internal to logic but a m atter of the application
and uses of logic.
For most purposes classical logic is adequate. But not for all
purposes. For example, for reasoning with propositions which are
vague, the truth-conditions of which are not well-defined, a logic of
the intuitionist type may be better suited than classical logic. The
same may hold good in certain branches of mathematics, as Brouwer
thought. Also for dealing with some notoriously problematic
topics such as antinomies or propositions in fiction, a logic which
allows truth-value gaps may be more suitable than one which
insists that every proposition has a truth-value. A logic of the
124 LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN TH E 20TH CENTURY

paraconsistent type again may be useful or even needed for dealing

with situations in which one and the same subject-m atter can be
viewed as both falling and not falling under a given concept.
Examples of such cases are when we have to capture the conceptual
features of things in flux or in a process of coming to be and ceasing
to exist. Some, in my opinion, fundamentally correct intuitions
about this are embodied in dialectical logic in the tradition of
Hegel. It is also possible th at a logic which can accommodate
contradictory aspects of phenomena is in fact an instrum ent we
need in order to cope with the difficulties of a philosophical, i.e.
conceptual, nature which have become notorious in the scientific
study of the micro-world (quantum mechanics). T he several kinds
of logic, therefore, are not ‘rivals’ in the sense that one can claim to
be right to the exclusion of all the rest. They supplement each
other, and the way in which they are mutually related allows us to
speak of a systematic variety of the forms of thought which the
science of logic studies .9

9 This point is more fully developed in my paper ‘Truth-Logics\ in Logique et

Analyse 32. 1989.
 PART TWO

T H E T R E E O F K N O W LED G E
 VIII

T H E T R E E O F K N O W LED G E

Three M yths

We all know the saying that ‘knowledge is power’, attributed to

Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and statesm an. Bacon was
one of the great heralds of a new day for hum anity during the
im portant stage of development of European culture we have be­
come used to calling the transition between the M iddle Ages and
the New Era.
W ith the saying about the power of knowledge1, Bacon m eant the
following: if m an understands how to question nature methodically
and work on the answers, then he will also be in a position to
prevail over reality, i.e. exploit natural resources and guide the
forces of nature according to his plans and desires. T he questions to
nature are experiments. The answers are natural laws. Science as a
means of power, we call technology.
Bacon never doubted th at m an’s dom ination over nature would
be to the greatest extent a blessing to the individual as well as to
society. In A New Atlantis, he has depicted the happiness m ankind
would achieve with the aid of science. O ther thinkers of the same
period have also given literary form to similar dream s of a future
kingdom of happiness for rational man, the most well-known being
perhaps Thom as M ore’s Utopia and C am panella’s Civitas Solis.
Developments have in a convincing m anner reinforced the truth
in the saying that knowledge is power—in the sense the great
Elizabethan intended. But we have begun to doubt the conse­
quences of the progress of technology. T he obvious fact, in itself
self-evident, that knowledge can be equally well used to tear down as
to build up, has been one reason why not only mankind’s self-acquired
happiness, but also his self-inflicted suffering have acquired previously
unknown dimensions. The increased possibilities of technologically

I have in fact nowhere come across in Bacon’s writings the saying in the form
'hat has become familiar. In Novum Organum (lib.aph. 3) it says ‘Scientia et
Potentia humana in idem coincidunt’ or ‘Human knowledge and power coincide’.
128 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

controlling reality have also increased m an’s desire in a manner that

has become dangerous to his spiritual equilibrium. Technology, cre­
ated as the servant of man, has become his master.
As literary genres typical of their time, the rationalist social
utopias of the Renaissance and Baroque correspond to the present
nightmarish pictures of the future oflife in the technocratic society.
O ut of Bacon's New Atlantis and C am panella’* Kingdom of the Sun
have come Huxley’s Brave New World and O rwell’s 1984. It is also
illuminating that science fiction is largely gruesome reading.
So knowledge is power— but is it good for man to know? This is
the question I shall be discussing here. As is usual in m atters of a
very general and comprehensive nature, the question is vague. So
one of our tasks is to dem onstrate in which different ways it can be
understood and to which other questions it can be related.

The question whether it is good for man to know appears to be as

old as man as a being of culture. In the discussion round it,
Renaissance ‘science-optimists’ and the ‘civilisation-pessimists’ of
our day represent two extremes. Their contributions are more
interesting as expressions of the spirit of the time than as contribu­
tions to the solution of the problem. They are far too pointed, I
would say, to be truly wise.
The perspective of our question deepens when we recognize it in
some of the origins of contemplative writing and thinking in myth
and saga. There are at least three naive variations in grand style of
the theme of m an’s right to develop the rational aptitude within
him. I am thinking of the Old Testam ent story of the Tree of
Knowledge in Paradise, of the myth of Prometheus and the legend
of Doctor Faust.
The Book of Genesis in the Bible contains the tale of the golden
age, familiar in many quarters, when man lived in happiness and
innocence, freely able to enjoy the wonders of creation. But man
was forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, which God planted
in addition to the Tree of Life in the G arden of Eden. Should he do
so, he would— as it says— die the death. Should he eat of the Tree
of Knowledge, in other words, he would be deprived of the fruit of
the Tree of Life.
But man transgressed G od’s prohibition. So he was driven out of
Paradise and since then he eats his bread by the sweat of his brow
until he returns to the soil from which he has come.
Greek mythology also knows of a golden age in the childhood of
man and a god angered by the wretchedness of m an.2 Zeus wishes
to destroy the creatures he has created. But Prometheus feels pity
 THREE M YTHS 129

for them, steals the fire from Zeus and gives it to man. The
Promethean fire is prim arily a symbol of m an’s technological pro­
ficiencies, his ability to exploit the riches of the earth, to improve
his prosperity and increase his power. But it soon also becomes a
symbol of the striving of the hum an spirit for justice, freedom,
beauty and wisdom.
Zeus’ punishm ent of the defiant T itan became, as is known, that
he was to be chained to the rock and condemned to eternal tor­
ment. And Zeus took revenge on men, who had accepted the stolen
divine gift, by sending to them Pandora with the box out of which
all sorrows and suffering flew over the world.
It is said that in Pandora’s box there was one good thing: hope—
m an’s only inalienable consolation. In the Paradise myth, there is
no glimpse of light. But with C hristianity comes the hope that
banished man shall again be restored to favour in his F ather’s
house.
In impressive contrast to Prometheus in the Greek saga, a char­
acter of light, is M ephistopheles, the representative of the powers of
darkness in the Germanic story of Doctor Faust. W hen one thinks
of the colossal role the Faust character has played in western
literature, from the anonymous folk tale to the most lofty individual
expression of a view of life, it appears almost a joke of reality that
Doctor Faust really existed. Jo h an n Faust was a contemporary of
Luther’s. He belongs to the era when the new natural science,
which in Bacon’s time a century later was greeted by all advanced
spirits as the vigorous successor of decrepid Aristotelian scholastic
philosophy, was still hovering on the borders between the black
arts and rational knowledge. It is illuminating to the spirit out of
which modern science has appeared that Doctor Faust was said to
have treatied with the Devil in order to gain insight into the
mystery of nature and control over the forces th at provide pleasure,
wealth and power to man. The price of this knowledge which
brought power was the soul of the learned man, who, when Faust
had emptied the chalice of life, was made to suffer eternal torm ent
in hell.
It is easy to see that the three ‘m yths’— in future I shall call them
that— briefly retold here, have something to do with the question of
the relationship of hum an rationality to happiness and to goodness.

2 Descriptions o f a golden age and the origins o f man are very contradictory in
Greek mythology. Prometheus figures in several myths with partially varying
content.
130 THE TREE OF KNOW LEDGE

Significant truths about our problem can be read in these three

myths. So they are of interest to us here.
T he symbolism of the three myths also has other aspects. In the
story of the Tree of Knowledge, there is a profound and abstruse
sexual symbol. Sensuality and the relationship between male and
female are also prom inent ingredients in the Faust legend. I think
there is a connection between the sexual symbols of the myths and
the question we are concerned with here. Nevertheless, I shall not
attem pt to fathom out what this connection might be.
Similarities between the three myths have naturally been noted
before, particularly in comparisons between the legends of Prome­
theus and Faust. The myth of Paradise stands somewhat aloof on
the sidelines. T he comparison between the first two often applies to
the main characters after which the myths are nam ed. I do not wish
to dispute that they have m utually characteristic features. But the
comparison intended here, and which seems to me more interest­
ing, is not between Prometheus and Faust, but between Prome­
theus and Mephistopheles. Shelley pointedly says in his preface to
Prometheus Unbound that ‘the only im aginary being resembling in
any degree Prometheus, is S atan5. H e is then not thinking directly
of the Devil in the Faust dram a, but of w hat he calls ‘the hero’ in
M ilton’s poem about the Paradise which has been lost.
There is reason to point out that my mission in the question of
the three myths is entirely one for the philosopher. One can natural­
ly study them from many other points of view, that of the folklor­
ist, the historian or the psychologist. I shall be deliberately ignoring
those here. I think such a limitation both permissable and fruitful,
but should one choose that, then one has no claim to pronounce on
the ‘true’, in the sense of historically correct, content of the myths. I
wish once and for all to distance myself from any such claim. But
this does not prevent me from also occasionally— in passing—
making observations and conjectures on the historical and psycho­
logical background behind the myths.
So the three myths do not interest us as ethnographical facts, but
as topics for m an’s thinking on his destiny and his conditions. It is
hardly necessary to say that this theme has not gone unexploited. It
has recurred in great writing for over two thousand years. Some of
the most rem arkable existing memorials to the struggles of the
human spirit are variations on the themes of these three myths.
The great writer-philosopher on the myth of Paradise is, of
course, M ilton. Paradise Lost is about the Fall of M an and the role
the Tree of Knowledge came to play in clouding m an’s infant
relationship to God and turning him into a rebellious, sinful and
 THREE MYTHS 131

suffering creature. M ilton’s other Paradise poem, Paradise Regained,

is not in question with our problem .3
Aeschylus, the oldest of the great Attic tragedians, wrote three
plays on Prometheus, of which, however, only one, the first he
wrote, called Prometheus Bound, has been preserved for posterity.
The contents of the two lost parts of the trilogy, Prometheus Freed and
Prometheus the Bearer o f Fire, we know only from fragments; the rest is
guesswork. It is naturally in conscious opposition to the title of
Aeschylus’ remaining tragedy that Shelley called his great verse
dram a Prometheus Unbound. G oethe’s two verse works on the theme,
Prometheus and Pandora remained as im portant fragments. In Swed­
ish literature, above all others, Victor Rydberg has dealt with the
subject of Prometheus.
The life of Faust had inspired poetic im agination long before
Goethe. The Germ an ‘folk book’ th at provided the material for
Christopher M arlowe’s dram a Doctor Faustus was published in
1587. This folk book and M arlowe’s play in their turn provided
content and impulses for a large num ber of stage adaptations,
among them for the m arionette theatre. From one such adaptation
stems Goethe’s first acquaintance with w hat became his own poetic
talent’s greatest subject. G oethe’s Faust went through a long de­
velopment and a great many transformations, from the Ur-Faust of
his youth (1773-75) to the completion of the second part over half a
century later. In its final form, Goethe’s work is so rich in content
that it breaks all bounds of classification according to leading
themes of thought. In the abundance of content in the work,
therefore, the thread that interests us here can not always be clearly
discerned.
The intention of this historical literary sketch has been to nam e a
few works of literature which I have reason to stay with in what is
to follow. N aturally no complete account has been striven for in this
enumeration.
The three great myths in which cultural man, so to speak, has
collectively expressed his intuitions on the potential for good and
evil of rational ability, are thus at the same time the raw material
out of which some of the highest individual expressions of m an’s
thinking on the problem have been formed. It is natural, therefore,

Paradise Regained is about Jesus being tem pted by the Devil in the desert. It has
struck me how far behind Paradise Lost it stands when it com es to poetic imagery
dialectic tension. T he com parison close to hand w ith the Grand Inquisitor in
The Brothers Karamasov turns out to be uninteresting. O n the other hand, the
problem o f freedom in Paradise Lost is worth while comparing with a main them e in
Dostoyevsky.
132 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

that the observations on the subject I shall attem pt here also

connect with the three myths and their individualizations in poetry
and dram a. It is prim arily the latter I shall be commenting on. But
I wish at once to start by mentioning that the opinions of literary
critics and aesthetes on the writing woven round our three myths
concern us as little as the folkloristic and psychological back­
grounds to the myths themselves. O ur case is one for the moral
philosopher, not one for the aesthete or the scholar. And our aim is
to increase clarity on a question that is topical for modern man
today, most of all owing to the dominance of the technological-
scientific aspect of life in our times.

‘O f G o o d and Ev il ’

In my Swedish Bible, it says of the Tree of Knowledge that it was

pa gott och ant, which in ordinary language means that the knowl­
edge provided by the fruit of the tree could be to the benefit of man
or could harm him. But this is hardly the original meaning of the
myth. The thought is more likely to be that man who eats of the
tree learns himself to distinguish good from evil and achieves
knowledge o f good and evil. T hus in the English Bible, for instance,
it says ‘knowledge of good and evil’ and the German Bible says
‘Erkenntnis des Guten und B osen\ This meaning also appears in
the Swedish Bible in the serpent’s words to Eve, that he who eats of
the tree shall become ‘like God, knowledgeable on w hat good and
evil are’4
So part of the biblical version of the tale of a golden age is that
man in a ‘natural state' is ignorant of good and evil. As long as his
ignorance remains, he is happy. W hen he loses his ignorance, he
loses his happiness.
Are we to say of man in the state of nature that he is good? The
Bible does not pronounce on the m atter.3 It would probably be
truer to say that man ignorant of good or evil can be neither good
nor evil. However, in G od’s eyes there is this difference. M an is also
seized with desire to learn about it and thus be ‘like G od’. But this
is arrogance, hubris.
The Fall of M an does not consist of simply man defying G od’s
prohibition. Most of all, it entails that he ‘falls into sin’, i.e. becomes
capable of doing, and also often does what is evil. Not until the
knowledge of good and evil was there did sin come into m an’s life.
4 Sec also Gen. 3, 5.
1 C f however Gen. 1, 31.
 OF GOOD AND EVIL 133

A separate question is how profoundly and how hopelessly man

has fallen into sin. Is man who is aware of good and evil capable
only of evil if he follows his natural impulses? C an he also do good
with his own strength? O r is it perhaps that he can be ‘saved from
evil’ only thanks to the intervention of God? From these questions
arise the fearful problem of the Salvation of man.
In the Bible story of the Tree of Knowledge and the Fall of M an,
a great many things remain obscure. (To point this out is naturally
not an ‘im putation’— that would be philistine in this context.)
Among other things, one is not told clearly what m an’s offence was.
Did it simply consist in that he transgressed G od’s prohibition to
eat from the tree, or was it also an offence of m an to strive for
divinity in the knowledge of good and evil? We shall soon have
reason to return to this question.
In the New Testam ent, man is given the message ‘Be ye therefore
perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect’. This is
one of the most puzzling and difficult Christian dem ands. Is it
simply a moral dem and— th at man shall strive to be ‘as good as an
angel’? I think th at a one-sided moralistic interpretation of this
message leads to an anti-intellectual Christianity th at has to be
rejected. It is part of G od’s perfection that God knows and under­
stands everything. T he rational aptitude God im planted in man is
in Himself developed to the greatest flowering. If m an’s task is now
to become perfect, like God, then it must also be m an’s task to
develop his rationality beyond all boundaries.
Here we are faced with something that appears to be a paradox.
On the one hand man is to be ‘like God’, perfect also in his
knowledge. On the other hand, it was while he ate of the Tree of
Knowledge that man fell into sin. How can the one go with the
other?
It is round this problem that M ilton built his ‘heroic poem’ on
the lost Paradise.6 He asks his M use to sing:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
and his intention is to ‘j ustifie the wayes of God to m en’.
M ilton is an excellent representative of the great century of

I think that this is a true characterization. But it deserves perhaps pointing

out— to clear away any possible m isunderstanding— that M ilton him self does not
put the problem in the form o f an apparent contradiction between the dem ands o f
the Old and the N ew Testam ent. T h e m essage o f the N ew T estam ent is not
mentioned in M ilton’s poem.
134 TH E TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

rationalism. One may ask w hether such burning faith in the au­
thority of reason in scientific, political and religious m atters was
ever combined with such painful insight into the tragedy of hum an
self-sufficiency as in the great Puritan.
It is self-evident that M ilton the rationalist was deeply disturbed
by the question of why the Tree of Knowledge in particular should
be forbidden to man.

One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge called,

Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidd’n?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should thir Lord
Envy them that? can it be sin to know,
Can it be death? and do they only stand
By Ignorance, is that thir happie state,
The proof of thir obedience and thir faith?
The reasons with which Satan in M ilton’s poem wishes to con­
vince Eve on the necessity to eat of the tree must have been
experienced as profoundly convincing by M ilton himself. Never
does M ilton’s rhetoric grip us more strongly than when he puts it
into S atar/s mouth. The Serpent says to Eve:
Queen of this Universe, do not believe
Those rigid threats of death; ye shall not Die:
How should ye? by the Fruit? it gives you Life
To Knowledge.
W hat is the value of m an’s happiness if it is bought at the price of
his ignorance of the excellence of the good life and the baseness of
evil? W hat is the value of good, if m an does not know how to evaluate
it? ‘For the good unknown, sure is not had, or had/ And yet
unknown, is not had at all.’ And how can he escape evil if he does
not recognize what is evil? (‘ . . . if what is evil/ Be real, why not
known, since easier shunned?’) T he prohibition to eat of this
'Sacred, Wise, and Wisdom-giving Plant, M other of Science’ seems
all too absurd to be binding.
How will M ilton then explain that this prohibition nevertheless
exists? He tries— if I understand him rightly— to think like this: the
offence that led to the Fall of M an was not that man ate of the Tree
of Knowledge, but that he defied a prohibition issued by God to
test his obedience. It was almost chance that the prohibition came
to adhere to that tree in particular. It could have applied to any­
thing else whatsoever. The Fall of M an, therefore, has no connec­
tion with the question whether it is good for man to know, to
develop his reasoning.
This answer to our question is very unsatisfactory. First, it does
 OF GOOD A N D EVIL 135

not solve the paradox. Never mind th at the loss of the happiness of
Paradise was exclusively a punishm ent for m an’s disobedience and
not for his curiosity as such about knowledge. T he fact remains that
God on the one hand had forbidden man to eat the fruit of the Tree
of Knowledge and on the other hand had enjoined him to strive for
perfection and thus also rational insight into good and evil. It is
preposterous to forbid actions while simultaneously dem anding the
carrying out of them.
Secondly, the answer is unsatisfactory because it disengages the
question of the Fall of M an from the question of the value of
knowledge and reason to man. H ere M ilton goes too far in his
rationalism. If it were pure chance that God tested m an’s obedi­
ence by forbidding him to eat of the Tree of Knowledge in particular,
then the Bible myth is not only illogical from the C hristian point of
view, but also trite. I do not think that we can explain away w hat is
illogical here. W e scarcely have reason even to try to do so. An
interpretation of the Bible free of contradictions is no longer a
pressing task to enlightened man. But I do think we have reason to
respect the profundity, however illogical, of the myth.
I would say M ilton was right in that the prohibition to man to
eat of the Tree of Knowledge cannot be based on the view that the
rational aptitude in m an would be an evil aptitude and that the
striving to develop th at aptitude to the highest conceivable perfec­
tion would be hubris. And I would like to add that reason insepa­
rably belongs together with the image of God in m an and th at
therefore a striving for perfection which ignores reason is inade­
quate. O n the other hand, I do not wish to say that it would be
sufficient for m an’s perfection or ‘salvation’ that he develops his
rationality and that all other perfection will arise as a consequence
of his increasing ability to reason.
Thus it could not have been an offence th at m an wished to become
‘like God, knowing w hat good and evil are’. O n the other hand, it
could have been an offence that man, after having eaten of the Tree of
Knowledge and having begun to develop the rational aptitude within
him, imagined himself already to be ‘like G od’. ‘Nor was Godhead
from her thought5says M ilton about Eve, after she had eaten of the
fruit. This is m an’s special hubris. T he Tree of Knowledge, forbidden
or not, is therefore a dangerous tree for man to eat of.
Understood in this way, the myth of the Tree of Knowledge is
not only a tragic story of m an’s disobedience to God. It is also a
warning rem inder of w hat is hazardous in the condition of man.
The Tree of Knowledge provides not only knowledge o f good and
evil. It is also for good and evil— and the faulty translation in the
136 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

Swedish Bible unintentionally expresses a profound truth. The

rational aptitude in man has double potential; one potential for
good, i.e. m an’s growth towards the ideal, and one potential for
evil, i.e. the hubris of m an’s self-divination or fancying himself as
God. Which potential becomes reality in an individual m an’s life
depends on how he makes the most of his talents, i.e. develops and
makes use of his reason. M an who eats of the T ree of Knowledge is
therefore taking great risks. As long as he is an ignorant being, he
runs no moral risks whatsoever. He lives beyond good and evil, as
do the soulless animals, and it is ju st as meaningless to talk about
his Salvation as about his Dam nation. Only after he has become
aware of the distinction can these concepts be applied to him.
Into the paradoxical contradiction between forbidding the eating
of the Tree of Knowledge and the dem and to become perfect as
God, I would read an inkling of the twofold possibilities of hum an
rationality and a warning against the moral risks man takes when
he starts relying on the decisions of his reason alone. This double
potentiality of knowledge— for good and for evil— will be a leitmotiv
of what follows.

T h e T ragedy of the F ir e -B r in g e r

Prometheus became a character in more recent European writing

thanks to the movement that has appositely been called the
Romanticism of the Age of Enlightenment. W hat was more natural
for an age with a passion for the power of enlightenment to free
m an from religious and social fetters, than to recognize in the hero
of Greek mythology a symbolic representative of its own highest
strivings? Prometheus is the rebel, the defier of an order based on
lies and denying man his natural freedom. Prometheus teaches
man to rely on his own ability to think in order to expose the lie.
And he teaches him to realize the absurdity of resigning himself to
bids of political power and a moral and social convention that has
no basis in the ‘n atu ral’ order of things, i.e. the order of reason.
The Prometheus them e’s first great writer, Aeschylus, was not a
rationalistic optimist in the style of Shaftesbury or Shelley. And yet
Prom etheus’ gift to man, as the romantics of the Age of Englighten-
ment saw it, is perhaps best described in the Greek tragedian’s
words. He lets the T itan chained to the rock say7

7 Translated by Phillip V ellacott, Penguin 1961

 TH E TRAGEDY OF THE FIRE-BRINGER 137

F or m o r ta ls in th eir m ise r y , h e a r n o w . A t first

M in d le ss, I g a v e th e m m in d a n d r e a so n .

In th o se d a y s th e y h a d ey es, b u t sig h t w a s m e a n in g le ss;

H ea rd so u n d s b u t co u ld n o t listen ; a ll th eir le n g th o f life
T h e y p a sse d lik e sh a p e s in d r ea m s, c o n fu se d a n d p u r p o se le ss.
O f b rick -b u ilt, su n -w a r m e d h o u se s , or o f c a rp en try ,
T h e y h a d n o n o tio n ; liv e in h o le s, lik e sw a r m s o f a n ts,
O r d e e p in su n le ss cavern s; k n ew n o c er ta in w a y
T o m ark o ff w in ter , o r flo w ery sp r in g , or fru itfu l su m m er;
T h e ir ev ery a ct w a s w ith o u t k n o w le d g e , till I c a m e .
I ta u g h t th e m to d e te r m in e w h e n sta r s rise or se t—
A d ifficu lt art. N u m b e r , th e p rim a ry sc ie n c e , I
In v e n te d for th em , an d h o w to se t d o w n w o rd s in w r itin g —
T h e a ll-r e m e m b e r in g sk ill, m o th e r o f m a n y arts.
I w a s th e first to h a r n e ss b e a sts u n d er a y o k e
W ith trace or sa d d le as m a n ’s s la v e s, to ta k e m a n ’s p la c e
U n d e r th e h e a v ie st b u rd en s; p u t th e h o rse to th e ch a r io t
M a d e h im o b e y th e rein , a n d b e an o r n a m e n t
T o w e a lth a n d g r e a tn e ss. N o o n e b efore m e d isc o v e r e d
T h e sa ilo r ’s w a g o n — fla x -w in g e d craft th a t ro a m th e sea s.
S u ch to o ls a n d sk ills I fo u n d for m e; m y se lf, p o o r w r etch
L ack ev e n o n e trick to free m e fro m th is a g o n y .

. . . S o h e r e ’s th e truth in o n e w ord:
A ll h u m a n sk ill a n d sc ie n c e w a s P r o m e th e u s’ gift.

How then can one understand that Prometheus, this 'type of the
highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the
purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’, as
Shelley says, be both punished by Zeus for his ventures and forced
to suffer the cruellest torments? C an one see anything in the fate of
Prometheus except a disturbing injustice, the victory of brute
strength and violence over justice and freedom? ‘Strength’ and
‘Violence’ are also the names of the two servants of Zeus, who in
the introductory scene of Aeschylus’ dram a are welding the T itan
to the rock.
It is probably true that the romantics of enlightenm ent in general
were far too optimistic to be able to take Prom etheus’ punishm ent
altogether seriously. The trium ph of violence is only a transient
episode in the history of the world. When Shelley’s Prometheus is
freed of his chains, it is not— as in Aeschylus— because he has been
reconciled with his god and has subdued his defiance. But nor does
he return to man with the intention of taking revenge on the tyrant.
For when the realm of truth and beauty has been installed on earth,
man is to be magnanimous enough to forgive all previous suffering
and injustices.
138 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

When, of Shelley’s Prom ethean man, ‘whose nature is its own

divine control’, it is said he shall be
E q u a l, u n c la s se d , tr ib e le ss, a n d n a tio n le ss,
E x e m p t from a w e , w o r sh ip , d e g re e , th e k in g
O v e r h im self; ju s t, g e n tle , w ise . . .

then this is not only an echo of the slogans of the French Revolu­
tion. It is also an anticipation of the M arxist dream of a stateless
and classless thousand year realm that was to be the fruit of the
Revolution of the proletariat against capitalist society. Shelley is
one of the earliest ideologists of the English labour movement. And
it is right to see in western socialism one formulation of the Pro­
metheus theme on m an’s possibilities of rationally controlling his
situation in life.
It is interesting to compare Shelley’s Prometheus with G oethe’s.
Both writers speak in defence of hum an nature against gods hostile
to man. But Goethe had a more realistic view than Shelley of the
‘natural’ conditions of life for man. So his Prometheus bears more
pain than Shelley’s. ‘H ier sitze ich, forme M enschen,’ Goethe has
him say, ‘nach meinem Bilde/ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,/ zu
leiden, zu weinen, zu geniessen und zu freuen sich’.8
Suffering and happiness are the Promethean m an’s inseparable
companions. H e can rid himself of suffering, only on condition that
he submits to a power th at also puts an end to his happiness as a
free, creative being. M an ’s pain is therefore not an injustice, aimed
at arousing compassion for his destined lot, or resentm ent of the
powers that tram ple him underfoot. And it is counterbalanced a
thousandfold by the pride he feels over everything he has done, by
his own strength, with no help from the gods, a pride that speaks in
the words:
Ich k en n e n ic h ts A rm e r e s
U n te r d er S o n n ’, a ls e u c h , G o tter .

H a s t d u n ic h t a lle s se lb st v o lle n d e t,
H e ilig g liih e n d H erz? 9

The Swedish poet Rydberg’s (1828-1895) Prometheus is very

unlike both G oethe’s and Shelley’s. He is neither rebellious nor

8 Here I sit, making men in my own im age, a race that shall resemble me, a race
that shall suffer and weep, and know joy and delight.
Prose translation by D avid Luke, Penguin 1964.
9 I know o f no poorer thing under the sun than you gods!. . . . Did you not
accomplish all this yourself, oh my holy glow ing heart?
 THE TRAGEDY OF THE FIRE-BRINGER 139

defiant, nor is he a preacher of the glorification of man. The

Prometheus theme of the enlightenm ent romantics: the contradic­
tion between god and m an is transformed by Rydberg into an
antithesis between power and justice, between the is of selfish
arbitrariness and a timelessiy viable ought. This is a rem arkable and
complete reversal of the situation. W ith Rydberg, Prometheus be­
comes in actual fact the spokesman for ‘the Eternal G od’ against an
inadequate ‘naturalistic’ man.
But Rydberg’s Prometheus is not only a cham pion of justice. He
is also a m artyr. In quite a different way from that of the romantics
of enlightenment, for the Swedish poet, the suffering of the T itan is
a painful reality. While in Rydberg the idea of justice is central to
the myth, the injustice of Prom etheus’ punishm ent also becomes
more tangible. Rydberg is alien to the idea that the punishm ent the
T itan endures because of his love of hum anity was to some extent
deserved. His Prometheus is guiltless— and he has to be that if the
struggle between him and Zeus really is a struggle between justice
and violence.
Although Rydberg is not able to adm it that Prometheus bears
any moral guilt, he implies in an extremely interesting way the
exact circumstance th at has caused us to bring the value of Pro­
metheus’ gifts under discussion. This occurs when the T itan de­
scribes to Ahasverus w hat he has done for man:
the fire I bore down at dawn of time
from Olympus the envied, the scholar
used to light his torch, bearing it
jauntily through night and mist.
As he advances, false gods flee
from altar smoke, the gruesome ghosts,
disguised illusions in holy dress.
And thus saving enchained souls,
he also calls forth from mountains
other thralls, a powerful Cabiric tribe,
unfeeling, bearing no shame for their
slavery, so that man may be free,
breathing fire from lungs of metal,
labouring arduously with energy and heat,
that man may have pause to think and dream,
for there lies the true calling of his being.

The core of these poetic-rhetorical flourishes is approxim ately

the same as what Aeschylus says in his more direct way in the
quoted words translated from his dram a. T he ‘he’ Rydberg men­
tions in the quote is the scholar, the scientist, whom Rydberg gives
a double role: with enlightenm ent he saves hum an souls from false
140 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

ideas, and he improves m an’s external conditions of life with inven­

tions. Rydberg’s Promethean m an is both a theorist and a techni­
cian rolled into one. But what is most interesting to us in this
context are the ‘C abiri’. This is Rydberg’s poetic clothing for the
machine, the soul-less servant of man, which does not have to be
ashamed of its slavery and frees hum an energy for higher purposes,
what the poet calls ‘to think and dream ’. In that, man realizes the
highest potentials in his nature.
It is no trivialization of the poet’s idea if we express it in sober
prose, as follows: for Rydberg, the break-through of industrialism
was the greatest event of the time, a result of the Promethean
aptitude in man. T h at idea is utterly correct, but Rydberg probably
had no inkling that this was where the obscure point in Pro­
m etheus’ mission lay. O n the other hand, it could be said that one
of the poet’s creations did have an inkling—Ahasverus, the ‘n atu ­
ralist’, who gave up his faith in the binding power of duty and was
resigned when faced with the necessity of w hat was fact. Ahasverus
replies to Prometheus:
The Cabiri, in their powerful thralldom,
that you have called forth for the good of man,
have not made life easy for the sons of Adam,
for now man is in the thrall of these thralls.

Rydberg was certainly profoundly aware that the industrializa­

tion of society also had its darker sides. In ‘The Cave Song’, in
which, characteristically, only Ahasverus, no longer Prometheus, is
the spokesman, his awareness of this takes on a painfully pessimis­
tic note. But Rydberg has not hit upon the idea of combining the
doubtful consequences of the victorious march of science and tech­
nology with the question of purity in Prom etheus’ struggle for the
freedom of man. W hat is the value of freedom if its use leads to a
new slavery for man? As soon as this question is asked, we begin to
have some inkling that the tragic content of the Prometheus myth
lies far deeper than simply in the trium ph of violence over justice.
Here one’s thoughts are led to the concepts of hubris and nemesis,
to the awesome philosophy of equilibrium in Greek dram a. Is
m an’s enslavement to the machine, i.e. to his own inventions for the
purpose of tam ing the forces o f nature, a nemesis that follows on
arrogance? And wherein lies m an’s arrogance, his hubris?
It is illuminating that the thought of hubris, which neither
Goethe, Shelley nor Rydberg attaches to the Prometheus symbol, is
clearly part of the ancient myth, and also in the greatest ancient
work of art based on the myth, Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy. The
 TH E TRAGEDY OF TH E FIRE-BRINGER 141

Prometheus of the saga bears not a little similarity to Odysseus.

Cunning and pride are the seamy sides of their wisdom and self-
confidence. It is told of Prometheus that he not only stole the fire of
Zeus, but also cheated him of the best part of m an’s sacrificial gifts.
He cut up an ox and p ut the meat and edible parts in one sack, the
bones in another. He soiled the first sack with dirt and the second
he smeared with fat to make it look more tempting. T hen he asked
Zeus to choose. Zeus chose the sack of bones. Thus the best part fell
to man and the rubbish to the gods.
Prometheus’ trickery in order to deceive the gods was, of course,
offensive. But this hum an weakness in him can scarcely justify a
nemesis of the kind the myth deals out to Prometheus and which
Ahasverus in Rydberg’s poem foreshadows for the hum an race
made happy by Prometheus. Prom etheus’ hubris must be sought
more profoundly than in his individual actions. His offence cannot
have been only that he stole the fire from the gods or that he
deceived Zeus into choosing the wrong sack. It m ust also and
primarily have been that he gave men means of power which they
are unable to use correctly, and that he taught them to appreciate
themselves more than the gods, the crown of creation higher than
the creator.
Prometheus has taught man to summon from nature forces he is
unable to steer and which overwhelm him. The position of the
children of Prometheus is the same as the apprentice’s in Goethe’s
ballad, ‘The Sorcerer’s A pprentice’, who when he cannot control
the forces he has invoked, complains:
Herr, die Not ist gross
Die ich rief, die Geister,
Werd ich nun nicht los.
At which the M aster replies:
In die Eckc
Besen! Besen!
Seid’s gewesen.
Denn als Geister
Ruft euch nur, zu seinem Zwecke,
Erst hervor der alte Meister.10
If it is really true th at enlightened m an runs serious risks of
ensnaring himself in his own ideas, Prom etheus’ actions are an

10 Sir, I’m in a terrible mess. T h e spirits I sum m oned, I cannot get rid of. . . .
Begone with you, Broom! Broom! T o the corner of the room! For to this end you
shall not be called out as spirits by anyone except your old Master.
From prose translation by David Luke, Penguin 1964.
142 TH E TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

over-estimation of himself and thus receive their natural punish­

ment. However, it is not precluded that man, as he has been duly
castigated for his arrogance, could be allowed to continue to use his
reason. Something in that style m ust have crossed Aeschylus’
mind. The most credible reconstruction of the lost parts of his
trilogy indicates that Prom etheus’ liberation occurs in the spirit of
compromise between Zeus and the family of man. T he T itan ’s
suffering was a w arning that m an does not rise against the gods
unpunished. His liberation was a sign of grace to man, so to speak,
that with the consent of the super-god above, he can continue to
cultivate the aptitudes Prometheus has aroused in him.
A warning to m an similar to w hat we thought we could read into
the story of the Tree of Knowledge in the G arden of Eden, is thus
also part of the myth of Prometheus, although later generations
have been liable to forget this in their enthusiasm for the Fire-
Bearer’s good deeds to m an and the grandeur of his mission. T he
fact that it has been difficult for more recent poets and thinkers of
Europe to heed the w arning is perhaps connected with a feature in
the construction of the ancient myth, which there is reason here
finally to consider:
In the myth of Prometheus, two powers stand against each
other—an super-rational divinity wishing to decide over m an
according to his own lights, and a rebellious m ankind wishing to
take his destiny into his own hands. The role of the Titan is to help
m an and give him confidence. It would be unnatural for us to look
on the destiny of Prometheus without taking his side, which is
fundamentally our own. (This also applies to the myth in Ryd­
berg’s re-interpretation, for in that Prometheus becomes a symbol
for w hat is ‘higher’ in m an in the struggle against the selfish and
iniquitous inclinations in his own ‘baser’ nature.) But if Prome­
theus were not the friend of m an, a representative— as Shelley
says—of w hat is highest in man, but only the enemy of the gods,
who with his dazzling gifts wishes to tem pt m an over on to his side,
then we have reason once again to put our choice of side to test, and
then the value of his gifts becomes questionable. If we interpret the
Prometheus myth in this way, we find a d ram a in which m an is no
longer the equal opponent of the divinity, but an insertion or a
pawn in a trial of strength between two superhum an powers. But in
this new interpretation, the defier of gods is no longer the Pro­
metheus of Greek mythology, but the M ephistopheles of the G er­
man Faust saga.
 IN LEAGUE W ITH THE DEVIL 143

In League w it h t h e D e v il

T he Faust saga could be called a Christian version of the Pro­

metheus theme. To understand why this re-writing could be called
‘C hristian’, we m ust take a look into the background of ideas th at
make Faust interesting to us.
Enlightened people no longer speak of the C hristian Middle Ages
as the Dark Ages of the spirit of man. We have learnt to look with
respect, not just on the art of the M iddle Ages, but also on its
intellectual culture. Scholasticism cannot be dismissed as hair­
splitting of the ‘how many angels can find room on a pinhead’ kind
of question.
O ur new appreciation of the spirituality of the M iddle Ages,
however, must not lead us astray into overlooking the profound
differences between our own and the intellectual culture of scholas­
ticism. The old conception of the M iddle Ages as an era of lack of
spiritual freedom contains a large portion of truth that cannot be
discounted.
Scholasticism is a cultivation of m an’s rational aptitude ad ma-
jorem gloriam Dei, not ad majorem gloriam Hominis. T he freedom
of thought is to explain and praise the works of God, not to serve
the hum an hunger for knowledge and hum an need for self-
assertion. Thought, however, is not an obedient servant, but an
im pertinent rebel against alien masters. Testimony of this can be
found throughout the M iddle Ages. The heresies of the spirit are far
older than the Reformation or any of the movements called pre-
Reformation. I do not think a single great thinker of the Middle
Ages escaped accusations or suspicions of heresy. M any of them
had to endure great unpleasantness for the sake of their opinions.
The history of scholastic philosophy for modern readers acquires
much of its excitement from the fact that it is a story of the
tight-rope walk of hum an thought on the borders of forbidden
realms.
The Devil rules over those realms, trying to tem pt man over the
border to retain him for himself. It has not escaped his sharp eyes
that man is easily led when he gives free rein to his mind and
craving for knowledge. So thought is his potential ally within man.
The Devil wants man to develop his rationality. But he does not
desire this— as did Prometheus— because he feels friendship or
compassion for him, but because he wishes for m an’s destruction.
The Devil holds out the prospect of the delights awaiting man,
the Crown of Creation, should he use his strength to make himself
into the M aster of Creation. Creation— except man— is nature. To
144 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

rule over creation entails knowing the secrets of nature and being
able to command her forces. It is when man strives for this dom ina­
tion that he most easily falls victim of the m achinations of the
Devil.
T he most difficult task of scholastic science— a task on which it
finally foundered— was to assign knowledge of nature a fixed place
in relation to the revealed truth of God. The ideal was to have a
physical science that could be considered to have already ex­
hausted the truth about nature, and which therefore could not be
thought to offer any unpleasant surprises in the future. The natural
philosophy of Aristotle came close to the ideal, though it was
disquieting that the doctrines of the system did not always m atch
the testimony of the senses. Whom should then be trusted: Aristotle
or the senses? We know what the professors in Pisa thought about
the matter, when Galileo let bodies of varying weights fall from the
top of the leaning tower to dem onstrate that time of fall is indepen­
dent of w eight.11 They considered the result of the experiment a
semblance. The learned gentlemen were, of course, unprecedentedly
silly. But we m ust regard their hidebound views in the right pers­
pective. Superficially, this was a battle between different teachings
of physics. M ore profoundly, it was a question of whether man will
lose his soul when he allows his ideas of the world to be formed by
his own judgem ent and reason.
We understand that the idea of an alliance between the natural
scientist and the Devil was perfectly natural within the framework
of the mediaeval Christian view of the world. The truth manifested
in scientific experiments and which sets fruit in technical inventions
may not be ‘real* truth, but ‘a delusion of the Devil.5 Experimental
natural science comes close to black art, sorcery, magic.
The relationship between religion, magic and science is an in­
teresting topic both in itself and from the point of view of the
history of ideas. As it also has some significance to our subject, a
few words on the topic are relevant here.
The question of the m utual relation of religion and magic at
primitive cultural stages does not concern us now. W hat is of
weight is that at the stage of the history of western culture preced­
ing the appearance of m odem science, religion and (black) magic
were regarded as opposites. This conception also includes, along­
side all kinds of obsolete dross, a truth of universal validity.
One is substantially on the wrong track if in religion and magic

11 T his story is considered to be a fiction, ‘Se non e vcro, e ben trovato\ one
might say.
 IN LEAGUE W ITH THE DEVIL 145

one sees two competitors in the market of hum an superstition—

although such a view also contains a grain of truth. M ore fruitful is
seeing in the historical manifestations of religion and magic— often
mixed with each other in a confusing m anner— an expression of
two opposite hum an attitudes. Simplifying a little, one could say the
following: religion is submission, an admission of the smallness of
man in face of powers on whose grace he is dependent. A religious
attitude, as I understand it, does not need to contain anything that
can be justifiably called superstition. M agic again involves a belief
that the non-humari forccs in life can be influenced, that man— at
least to some extent— has power over them. A magical conception of
how this power is effective, however, is, contrary to a scientific
conception of the m atter, a superstition.
This view of the relationship between religion and magic is not
original It can be found in scholars of religion from Schleiermacher
to Frazer and Soderblom. It is also subject to a great deal of debate,
in which the ethnographical and historical religious m aterial n atu r­
ally plays a great part. But ap art from questions offactual connec­
tions between the phenom ena touched on, I think it clarifies
matters to insist on the ideal-typical contrary nature of the two
attitudes, here called the ‘religious’ and the ‘magical’.
Science can also be placed in relation to the nam ed ideal types.
We then see that the widest gap is not between religion and magic
on the one side and science on the other— but between science and
magic on the one side and religion on the other. Science and magic
have a common profession of faith: the belief in m an’s ability to
subdue ‘the powers’. Magic is pre-science. Science is magic
rationalized, cleansed of superstition.
As with religion, magic is not something th at occurs only at w hat
are called primitive cultural stages. D uring the Renaissance, the
branch of mathematics with the Arabic name of algebra was still
almost indistinguishable from Cabalistic number-magic. D uring
the Baroque period, European astronom y was still closely con­
nected with astrology, and European chemistry was right up to the
Age of Enlightenm ent largely synonymous with what the Arabs
called alchemy.
In comparison with us, the Greeks were from the start immensely
more rational. The problem of rationalizing magic into science
scarcely existed for them. This is not only due to the fact that our
science clearly stems from a weightier legacy of magic— from the
Arabs— than ancient science, but is also due to its original relations
to religion being different. Science’s delivery from its womb in
magic is in Europe associated with the striving to justify science to
146 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

religion. It has been a m atter of showing that the scientific attitude,

in contrast to the magical attitude, is not a presum ption or hubris
opposed to religion’s dem and for humility, and that scientific truth
is not incompatible with religious faith. The great thinkers of the
Baroque period accepted this— in the optimistic assurance th at
rationalism and religion could be integrated into a great philo­
sophical system, as with Leibniz, or a grandiose poetic vision, as
with Milton. A hundred years later, this task already appeared
considerably more difficult, and then a distinguishing line between
religion and science was being sought rather than a synthesis of
both. If we look at the situation today, we surely m ust adm it that
the problem has been taken back to the starting point. Attem pts to
justify science to religion have failed, and the hostility between the
two powers seems to be ju st as evident as it was before the Renais­
sance; the great difference, however, being that now it is science
that has the upper hand and the apologist’s task has been transfer­
red over to religion which, by means of philosophy and poetry,
seeks to excuse its existence to the majesty of science.
This will have to suffice as background to Faust. It should now
be clear in what sense the Faust saga can be called a Christian-
western version of the Prometheus myth.
In its popular form, the story of Doctor Faust is a fairly simple
one, with none of the latent profundity that characterizes the sagas
of Antiquity in which Prometheus occurs. Faust, the practiser of
black art and astrology— in modern terminology, a scientist, makes
a pact with the Devil. The conditions are th at the Devil shall serve
the doctor in his magical-scientific activities in life in return for
Faust serving the Devil after death. T he story presumes th at the
pact is fulfilled and that in the course of time the soul of the learned
man falls to the Devil. From a Christian point of view, this was
naturally a great misfortune and the arrogant doctor is depicted as
a w arning example.
The thematic simplicity of the popular Faust story still charac­
terizes the first significant reworking of the theme—C hristopher
M arlowe’s dram a. M arlowe’s Faustus also becomes prey of the
Devil and has to suffer eternal torm ent after death. Faustus is
damned. But when the poet pronounces his sentence, behind the
words lies unm istakable compassion for the condemned doctor.
Marlowe, himself a full-blooded representative of the Renaissance’s
enthusiasm for and curiosity about life and the world, could not
escape seeing in Faustus a kindred spirit, who had indeed sinned by
allowing himself to be tempted over borders perm itted to man, but
who, moreover, in his undaunted eagerness to investigate the for-
 IN LEAGUE W ITH THE DEVIL 147

bidden realms, was a good representative of his time and its highest
aspirations in the fields of knowledge, power and beauty. Can the
being be truly evil who says:
Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art,
Wherein all nature’s treasure is contained.
Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,
Lord and commander of these elements.
The answer must be that he who says this probably has evil in
mind towards Doctor Faustus, but w hat he is urging Faustus to
do— investigate nature in order to rule and command over the
elements— in itself is not an evil, but rather something that is part
of m an’s natural destiny.
But at the same time as Faustus with M arlowe becomes the
object of our hum an sympathy, he becomes a problem. I f his
striving is right, how shall we then understand that his pact with
the Devil is reprehensible? Is it an inner necessity that he who gains
the whole world must lose his soul? W ith this question, already
touched on in connection with the myth of Prometheus, we have
come back to the starting point for the Faust-problem in Goethe.
It is ju st as well to mention at once Goethe’s reply to the
question, which is an em phatic No. Faust can make his pact with
the Devil and gain the world without being dam ned. To support his
opinion, Goethe is forced to revise the actual story completely. T he
plot of G oethe’s Faust is immensely more complicated than that of
the folk tale and M arlowe’s. First in Goethe, the symbolism of the
saga is raised to a level, which in profound and unified tension can
be measured against that in the corresponding Greek myth.
Here I must remind the reader of the intrigue in G oethe’s Faust,
which in actual fact is fairly involved. The prologue of the dram a is
enacted in heaven, to which the Lord has summoned M ephis-
topheles. God asks the Devil about Faust and is told of his uneasy
demand for knowledge, enjoyment and power. T he Lord then says
that despite all his errors, Faust will finally find clarity. Mephis-
topheles suggests a wager with the Lord that Faust will fail if the
Devil is allowed to guide him.
Was wettet Ihr? den sollt Ihr noch verlieren,
Wenn Ihr mir die Erlaubnis gebt,
Ihn meine Strasse sacht zu fuhren.12

12 W hat will you wager that you do not lose him ,

Supposing always you will not demur
About my guiding him in paths I choose him?
Translation from Faust I & II, by Philip W ayne, Penguin 1949, 1959.
148 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

At which the Lord replies:

Solang* er auf dcr Erde lebt,
So lange sei dir’s nicht verboten,
Es irrt der Mensch, solang1 er lebt.13
But trusting in m an’s goodness ‘deep dow n’, he agrees to the
wager and gives Mephistopheles a free hand:
Nun gut, es sei dir iiberlassen.
Zich diesen Geist von seinem Urquell ab,
Und fuhr’ihn, kannst du Ihn erfassen,
Auf deinem Wege mit herab,
Und steh’ beschamt, wenn du bekennen musst:
Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange,
1st sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.14
The Devil then goes to seek out the doctor in his study and
laboratory and offers him his services.
Ich will mich hier zu deinem Dienst verbinden,
Auf deinen Wink nicht rasten und nicht ruhn;
Wenn wir uns driiben wiederfinden,
So sollst du mir das gleiche tun.13
Here then is the pact between Faust and the Devil being pro­
posed in the form familiar from the popular story. But Goethe’s
Faust does not agree. He thinks that M ephistopheles can help him.
But he refuses to believe that the Devil could catch him in his toils.
Ward eines Menschen Geist, in seinem hohen Streben,
Von deinesgleichen je gefasst?16
he asks. In the question, the reason for F aust’s optimism is also
implied, the striving, the ‘high endeavour’ of the hum an spirit. As
long as man does not stop contentedly to enjoy the fruits of his
13 You shall have leave to do as you prefer,
So long as earth remains his mortal dwelling;
For man must strive, and striving he must err.
14 Let it be so: to you is given the power
T hat may seduce this soul from his true source,
And drag him down with you, in fatal hour,
If you can wholly bend him to your force.
But stand asham ed when called on to confess:
A good man in his dark, bewildered course
Wi!i not forget the way o f righteousness.
Then here below in service Pll abide,
Fulfilling tirelessly your least decree,
If when we m eet upon the other side
You undertake to do the sam e for me.
16 W hen was a mortal soul in high endeavor
Grasped by your kind, as your correlative?
 IN LEAGUE W ITH THE DEVIL 149

work, but strives on in dissatisfaction, then he can be sure of

escaping dam nation. The convention with the Devil th at Faust
finally seals with his blood is therefore no pact, but a wager. The
wager is valid as long as Faust passes the test of never ceasing in his
striving.
Werd’ich beruhigt je mich auf ein Faulbett legen,
So sei es gleich um mich getan!
Kannst du mich schmeichelnd je beliigen,
Dass ich mir selbst gcfallen mag,
Kannst du mich mit Genuss betriigen—
Das sci fiir mich der letzte Tag!
Die Wette biet’ ich!

(M) Topp!

(F) Und schlag auf schlag!

Werd’ich zum Augenblicke sagen;
Verweile doch! du bist so schon!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zu Grunde gehn.
So Faust hurls himself into life’s adventure with M ephistopheles
at his side. He seduces Gretchen and m urders her brother. He is
initiated into the secrets of magic and dances with the witches in
the Harz M ountains on W alpurgis Night. He visits the Fair Helen
(of Troy) in the underworld and begets a son— a precocious and
soon snatched away incarnation of G erm anic will-power and H el­
lenic striving for beauty. He becomes C om m ander to the Em peror
and Governor over vast areas, restlessly active even in old age, with
grandiose plans for conquering from the surging sea a piece of
cultivatable land for man.
As is known, Faust never pronounced the word to the Augenblick
(the fleeting hour) that would lead to his dam nation according to
his agreement with the Devil. Only thanks to a m isunderstanding

17 If I be quieted with a bed of ease,

T hen let that m om ent be the end o f me!
I f ever flattering lies of yours can please
And sooth my soul to self-sufficiency,
And make me one o f pleasure’s devotees,
Then take my soul, for I desire to die:
And that’s a wager!
(M) Done!
(F) And done again!
If to the fleeting hour I say
‘Remain, so fair thou art, remain!’
T hen bind me with your fatal chain,
For I will perish in that day.
150 TH E TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

of Faust’s last words in the death scene does M ephisto think he has
captured his prey. But higher powers snatch it out of his hands, and
Faust’s uneasy soul reaches, after life, its symbolic repose with God.
It may seem slightly prosaic, from observations or scenes in the
perhaps most many-sided and perhaps most beautiful work of
poetry in world literature, to return to our question of knowledge
and goodness. But the road is not long and the application excep­
tionally direct.
Goethe’s view is clear. The power that hum an knowledge pro­
vides is not as such an evil. It becomes an evil if man in his delight
at ‘wie herrlich weit wir es gebracht’ [how marvellously far we have
come] stops to enjoy the fruits of his work without realizing its
incompleteness or feeling the yearning for something better. Then
man perishes. As long as his unease haunts him, he has hope.
It is probable that Goethe, had he lived, would have recognized
the break-through of industrialism and the trium phal march of
machine-technology as an expression of w hat is ‘F austian’ in west­
ern man. But if he had looked into our century, would the poet have
been able to keep his faith in the salvation of m an through activity
alone? The answer is not easy to fathom out, nor perhaps all that
interesting. But it is interesting th at the problem for us seems to be
more difficult than it was during the trustful days of enlightened
humanism. W estern man still has far to go to the serene rationality,
which Goethe’s Faust yearns for towards the end of his life in the
words:
Noch hab’ich mich ins Freie nicht gekampft.
Konnt’ich Magie von meinem Pfad entfernen,
Die Zauberspriiche ganz und gar verlernen,
Stund' ich, Natur, vor dir ein M ann allein,
Da war's der Muhe wert, ein Mensch zu sein.18
It is not a falsification if we here take ‘magic’ to mean, not
unscientific opinions on the causal connections in nature, but as a
reckless desire to rule over powers with no clear idea of the reason­
able purpose of m an’s dom ination of nature. It applies even more
to our time than to G oethe’s that we have not fought our way ‘ins
Freie’ [in the light] in our relations to nature, and that we have not
learnt self-control in the use of the ‘open sesame’ of science to

,a I ’m left to struggle still towards the light:

Could I but break the spell, all m agic spum ing,
And clear my path, all sorceries unlearnirg,
Free then, in N ature’s sight, from evil ban,
I ’d know at last the worth o f being man.
 KNOWLEDGE AS A FORM OF LIFE 151

satisfy our whims and desires. And the more strongly the awareness
of our limitations forces itself on to us, the more doubtful it would
be that the poet was right when he thought the Lord would calmly
allow man to lend a finger to the Devil without him taking the
whole hand, or that Faust’s restless striving was sufficient guaran­
tee for his final salvation. O n whether one is entitled to such
optimism or not, we m ust still seek to form an opinion.

KNOWLEDGE AS A FORM OF LIFE

The question of the value of m an’s rational aptitude can be put in

two ways. There has been a glimpse of each way of putting it in the
previous pages. But we have reason to distinguish them even more
clearly from each other and to say a few words on them separately.
The question can apply to the value of knowledge as an instrument
in order to satisfy various needs and wishes. O r it can apply to the
value of m an’s striving for knowledge as a form or way of life, i.e. as a
striving to know and understand for the sake of knowing and
understanding in themselves and for no other purpose.
When the instrum ental value is put to debate, the question is
nearly always one of knowledge as a means to happiness. W hat is
called rationalistic optimism and pessimism is usually considered
as taking a stand on that question in particular. The optimists of
reason of the Renaissance and Enlightenment praised rationality,
i.e. science, primarily as an instrument of happiness for the individual
and for society. The pessimists of civilization of our day deny this
value primarily with reference to the misfortunes that two world wars
and the consequences of them have entailed for mankind.
It is fairly obvious that scientific progress has had tangible
consequences both fortunate and unfortunate for mankind— but
also that these consequences cannot be summarized in a simple law
of proportionality. If we ask who is right, the pessimist or the
optimist, we must therefore answer that both are right— and both
wrong. The dream of the optimists of a ‘brave new world’ has
shown itself to be a dream come true in as far as technological
improvements and potential sources of happiness are concerned.
Effective medicines, swifter means of conveyance, increased
prosperity on a wide scale— as Francis Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci
and their equivalents put on their list of desirable things— have
since become reality. The fact that this dream was nevertheless an
illusion is because science, with great im partiality, has also paid
152 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

attention, apart from what was on the philanthropist’s list of de­

sires to w hat the Devil put on his— new ways of killing people,
spreading lies, controlling opinions, poisoning everyday life with a
thousand new needs and ambitions. The com plaint of the pessi­
mists about the decay of the times is justified when it draws
attention to the devilry complementary to the blessings of scientific
rationalism. But it becomes unjustified querulousness when it
forgets those blessings themselves.
O f the two illusions, the pessimist’s is undoubtedly the more
foolish. The dream of a brave new world is anyhow a driving force
for the mind and will to strive towards something better than what
already exists. The illusion of the good old days is only a confession
of our inability to keep up with developments. It is Faust's forbid­
den ‘verweile doch, du bist so schon’ [remain, so fair thou art,
remain!] in its most trivial and repugnant form.
The question of knowledge as a way of life remains. Aristotle
calls m an a rational animal. A better definition could not be
provided. Reason, rationality, is undoubtedly the feature that most
clearly and profoundly distinguishes man from (the other) animals.
One can say therefore that m an’s striving for rational perfection is a
striving to realize ‘himself’, his ‘own being’, his ‘true nature'.
Knowledge as a way of life is for man the most singular way of life,
the one in which his hum anity most clearly finds expression. So it is
not unnatural to think as Aristotle did that the ‘theoretical life’, i.e.
growth in knowledge of the world and insight into vital questions is
also the highest and purest happiness of man.
I mentioned previously that the Christian dem and for perfection
must be considered to include a dem and for rational perfection.
And that the prohibition to cat of the Tree of Knowledge must then
be reasonably understood to be a warning to man not to think that
the perfection he has to work on has already been achieved. M an is
to be like G od’. But he must guard against self-divination, i.e. the
illusion of perfect self-satisfaction.
O ne may well ask now— does man fall more easily victim of this
illusion when he strives for knowledge and education than when he
strives, for instance, for wealth and influence? Is truth more flatter­
ing and therefore more dangerous to possess than, for instance,
power? Is the educated m an more easily self-righteous than the rich
or powerful?
I do not think these questions can be answered in the affirmative.
Anyone who gives an affirmative reply belittles knowledge as a
form of life in a way that is reminiscent of the irrationalist’s unjus­
tified belittling of knowledge as an instrum ent of happiness.
 KNOWLEDGE AS A FORM OF LIFE 153

But also if enlightened m an no more easily than, for instance,

powerful man does not stop in the ‘verweilc doch!’ of self-
satisfaction, then his situation in another respect is more full of risk.
O ne can namely say this— to allow yourself to be flattered by truth
is a greater evil than to allow yourself to be flattered by power. T he
flattered man is an object of self-deception. He thinks he is some­
thing he is not. The man who is pleased with himself because he is
wise, thus dem onstrates that he is not even wise. His self-satisfaction
in that way destroys its own foundation. The man who is pleased
with himself because he is powerful, does not thus dem onstrate that
he is less powerful. Such self-satisfaction need not underm ine its
own foundation. And thus, I think, we can say:
- that knowledge and education do not make man more easily
self-satisfied than, for instance, wealth and power,
- but that enlightened m an’s self-satisfaction is a greater evil
than, for instance, that of the wealthy or the powerful. Enlightened
man ‘ought to know better’. His arrogance in knowledge is a double
self-deception and therefore more odious than the arrogance of the
powerful in power. T he hubris of the brain is the greatest of all.

The time has come to summarize the observations we think we

have made in our reflections on the Promethean aptitude in man.
I have tried to show that however one puts the question of the
value of rationality, the answer points in two directions. Knowl­
edge is equally an instrum ent for happiness and unhappiness, for
good deed and devilry. Knowledge as a form of life can be the
highest, but also the most destructive for the individual.
I imagine it is this doubleness in m an’s rational potentials which
gives the great myths round our subject much of their profundity
and beauty. They are all tragic, either in the sense— as in the
Paradise myth and the Faust saga— that they show us man torn
between the two poles of light and darkness, or in the sense— as in
the Prometheus myth— that they depict a struggle of m an for a
fundamentally just cause, but blinded by self-overestimation.
W hat can we learn from these insights into m an’s condition? At
least two things, I think. The first is to reject a rationalism which
looks for the value of reason and truth in various possibilities to
improve m an’s external conditions of life, and which holds that
reason alone can make man and society perfect. T he second is to
reject an anti-rationalism which blames reason for m an’s misfor­
tunes, and which believes that of mankind only the child and the
savage can be blessed. A desire to suppress the yearning of Pro­
metheus and Faust in man is to wish to maim his hum anity, or rob
154 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

him of freedom and—from a religious viewpoint— to cut off his

most intim ate ties with the Divine. All prospects of happiness as
reward for such self-denigration are illusions, which man is capable
of exposing as long as his mind works without prejudice. Anti-
rationalism is the self-betrayal of humanity.
T he struggle against anti-rationalism is more imperative at times
when the life of the individual and of societies is poisoned by
ideologies that either work against or are incompatible with the free
growth of rationality in man. The struggle against rational optim ­
ism is again topical in times when life is threatened by the super­
ficial and apathetic influence of the ‘wie herrlich weit wir es
gebracht1 mentality. But each battle has perm anent topicality
throughout the history of the world.
 IX

H U M A N ISM AND T H E H U M A N IT IE S

It seems appropriate to start with a few remarks about the two

terms which occur in the title. Although both words, ‘humanism*
and ‘hum anities’, have Latin roots, neither of them has a straight­
forward equivalent in classical Latin. Cicero uses studia humanitatis
as a name for the intellectual pursuits best fitted for a gentlemanly
education, or for developing what he calls a m an’s humanitas. Read­
ing the historians and the poets was a main ingredient of such
studies. In 19th century Germany humanistische Wissenschaften estab­
lished itself as a common nam e for the historical and philological
disciplines. O ne also speaks of the humaniora— in English, the
Humanities. I think this a useful term. It has, it seems, no very
firmly established connotation. Here I propose to use it for the
totality of disciplines which study hum an nature and the achieve­
ments of man as a being capable of culture. T hen it covers also the
social sciences and the broad field of cultural anthropology.
The term ‘hum anism 5 too seems to be a 19th century G erm an
invention (Humanismus). It was originally used for referring to the
Renaissance current in literature and scholarship, the representa­
tives of which in Italy had, at the time, been known as umanisti. The
pursuits of the umanisti had meant a revival of interest in the classic
Greek and Latin authors. Accordingly, ‘hum anism ’, or ‘neo­
hum anism ’, became a name also for the second return to the
Ancients in the search of standards of beauty and style which took
place in late 18th and early 19th century Germany.
W ith the humanism both of the Renaissance and of the Enlight­
enment was also connected a certain view of man, of his potentiali­
ties and their proper cultivation. Sometimes this view found
articulation in a philosophy, sometimes it existed only as an im pli­
cit attitude to life and society. For this value-loaded view too the
name ‘hum anism ’ has become current. W hen, for example, one
speaks to-day of an existentialist or of a socialist humanism, what
one has in mind is a philosophy of life— related maybe to views
156 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

entertained by hum anists of the Renaissance or by some neohu­

manists, but independent of a scholarly interest in ancient history
or literature. Similarly, when one speaks of the humanism of the
Ancients, one is thinking not so much of their contributions to
hum anistic studies as of a certain philosophic interest in man and
concern for hum an values.
In the title of this paper, ‘hum anism ’ refers to an attitude to life,
an explicit or implicit philosophical anthropology. By ‘the hum ani­
ties’ again I shall understand the scholarly study of man as a being
of culture. In spite of this disparity of meaning, there is a connec­
tion between hum anism and the humanities which is not only
historical and accidental but also philosophical and essential. I
hope this will be clear from what follows.

The life of primitive man is a struggle with nature. M an is, so to

speak, at the mercy of his natural environment: immediate supply
of food, protection against climatic changes and wild beasts— these
are his basic needs. Behind the operation of natural forces man
fancies the hand of benevolent or inimical super-natural beings,
whom he fears and tries to soothe. T he germ of a hum anist attitude
was laid the moment when man stopped to consider his potentiali­
ties in the fight with nature and to vindicate his freedom in face of
the gods. In the myth of Prometheus, who taught man the crafts
and the use of fire, we see this moment reflected in the folklore of a
singularly gifted nation. It was in ancient Greece that the germ was
first developed into a rational attitude to man and the world.
It has become tradition to describe early Greek rational thought
as a philosophy of nature or even as a proto-science. Its grand idea
was the conception of the universe as a kosmos or lawful order.
‘N ature’s law’, its arche or guiding principle, also applies to man
who is a mikrokosmos. H ealth is the natural state of the human body.
By a profound medical analogy the good life for man and society
was thought of as a state of health, i.e. agreement with the princi­
ples governing the kosmos. This, I should say, is the core of the
hum anist attitude as it appears in Greek culture.
It almost goes without saying that, on this view, natural law does
not mean simply a universal regularity in the factual course of
events. The law of nature is also a standard to which things must
conform in order to be in accord with their ‘nature’. Applied to
hum an affairs, this means that the good life pursues the natural
 H UM A N ISM AND TH E HUM ANITIES 157

order of things as an ideal or norm. It is worth noting that the

Greek word physis like the Latin natura and our ‘n ature 1 has a
double meaning. It means nature in the restricted sense of external
reality, but it also means the essence or order of things.
The idea that ‘the nature of nature’ is a lawful order can rightly
be said to constitute the foundation and backbone of w hat we too
should call a ‘scientific’ view of the world. But the semi-normative
understanding of it, characteristic of Greek thought, is not a scien­
tific idea in our sense. The contributions of the Ancients to what we
understand by natural science and by humanistic scholarship were
not of impressive magnitude. Their great contribution to rational
thought was rather the early formation of a hum anist attitude. This
partly explains why later currents in history which have become
known as ‘hum anist’ have almost invariably looked to Greek and
Roman antiquity as a source of inspiration and wisdom.

During the Christian civilization of the M iddle Ages the hum anist
inheritance of the Ancients was by no means entirely effaced. But
times were hardly favourable to its further development. N ature
lost its positive value-load and therewith its interest to the inquir­
ing mind. The intellectual energies of man were directed towards
the divine, to objects of pure thought beyond the evidence of our
senses. It is no accident that some centuries of the M iddle Ages
came to be a golden age of logic— nor that this noble discipline
should, with the turning of the tide in history, have fallen into a
disrepute from which it has been rescued only in the last one
hundred years.
When viewed against the background of the M iddle Ages, the
Renaissance— to quote Jacob B urckhardt’s famous words— m eant
a rediscovery of man and of nature. But nature rediscovered was
rather different from the kosmos of the Greeks. It was not so much a
lofty ideal to be im itated by man as a brute force to be subjugated
by him. M an, the crown of creation, is ciord and com m ander of the
elements’— to quote M arlowe’s dram a about Doctor Faustus. The
aim of a science of nature is to make it possible for man to exploit
nature’s resources and put its forces in the service of hum an ends.
A prescientific form of this ‘Faustian spirit’ of W estern man is the
magic of the M iddle Ages and the Renaissance. W ith the Italian
utnanisti, in particular Ficino and Pico della M irandola, begins a
rationalization of it. In the philosophic program of Francis Bacon
158 THE TREE OF KNOW LEDGE

this process is consummated. W ith Bacon’s nam e is associated the

slogan ‘knowledge is power’. Knowledge, for Bacon, m eant in the
first place knowledge of the causes of natural events. Causes are
found by making experiments. Experimenting means studying the
course of events under simplified and controllable and thus in a
sense ‘artificial’ or ‘unnatural* conditions. This kind o f ‘violence on
nature’ is alien to the typically Greek mind. To W estern science it
is fundamental. The experimentalist spirit may be said to be the
mode of intellectual curiosity most typical of W estern man. It had
guided the alchemists in the search for the Stone of W isdom which
was supposed to bring power and riches. It made Leonardo dream
of the construction of aircraft for the conquest of space. These
endeavours had still to wait a few more centuries for their success­
ful fulfilment. O f more im mediate reward was Vesalius’s vivisec­
tion on the tissues of the living body or Galileo’s study of the laws of
free fall by means of sloping planes— thus artificially ‘diluting’ the
force of gravitation.
Experimentally founded causal knowledge provides the possibil­
ity of producing or suppressing events in nature by m anipulating
their causes. G earing natural processes for the sake of attaining the
desired and avoiding the shunned is of the essence of scientific
technology. It would certainly not be right to say that the only or
even the main motive force for the erection of the lofty intellectual
fabric of modern natural science had been the wish for technologi­
cal applications. But it is certain that natural science has continued
to nourish the dream of a scientific technology in the service of
man. W ith the advent of the great social change called the indus­
trial revolution, this dream has become more and more of a reality
with profound effects on hum an life at all levels.

T he rediscovery of nature and of man— still to use B urckhardt’s

characterization of the Renaissance— also posed a new problem. I
shall call it the Problem of M an’s Place in N ature. For the Greeks
this was no problem. The blend of fact and ideal which is charac­
teristic of their conception of the cosmic order tended to slur over
problems which become intriguing when the notion of natu re’s law
has developed into that of a factual ‘iron necessity’ governing the
course of all things.
In his so-called ‘O ration on the Dignity of M an’ the Renaissance
hum anist Pico della M irandola had expressed the idea that m an,
 H UM ANISM AND TH E H U M A N ITIES 159

alone among G od’s creatures, has no fixed place in the great order
of things. It is up to man himself to choose his place, w hat he will
be: beast or angel or something in between. In the terminology of
mediaeval scholasticism Pico’s idea am ounts to saying that in man
existence precedes essence— a formula for hum an freedom familiar
also from m odem existentialism.
Pico also wrote a treatise against astrology. It is false and un­
worthy of men, he says, to believe th at hum an destiny is predeter­
mined by the constellations of heavenly bodies and other ‘signs in
the sky’. Astrology, however, was a strong influence at the time, a
lingering variety of protoscientific magic. Pico’s attack on astrology
was met by a counter-attack by no less than Johannis Kepler, one
of the founding fathers of m odern exact science. Kepler was deeply
convinced that hum an affairs depend on the m utual positions of the
stars. We may think this a most unscientific view. But, abstracting
from the element of superstition in it, this is also a conviction that
man has a fixed place in the cosmic order, that hum an affairs too are
governed by inexorable laws of the universe. To have this convic­
tion may be to overlook something essential about man. But it can
hardly be labelled a superstition. It would be more right to call it
an implicit philosophy of man which has been continuously
nourished, since the days of Kepler, by the victorious progress of
science.
The positions of Pico and Kepler typify two stands on the ques­
tion of m an’s place in the w orld-order.1 O ne could call them a
humanist and a naturalist attitude. It goes without saying that the
opposition between them is also relevant to the question of the
place of the Humanities in the totality of the Wissenschaften.

Renaissance humanism had acted as a catalyst or midwife for an

exact science of nature. This new science, moreover, promised man
domination over nature. But it did not teach m an the mastery over
himself of which Greek hum anism may be said to have been in
search. The rediscovery of man to which Renaissance humanism
contributed was not so much the establishing of a self-searching

For the comparison and contrast Pico-K eplcr I am much indebted to the
excellent introduction by R olf Lindborg to his translation into Swedish o f Pico’s
O ration’. R olf Lindborg, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Om mdnniskans vardighet,
Publications o f the New Society o f Letters in Lund 71, Lund 1974.
160 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

attitude as the liberation of artistic and intellectual energies from

the constraints of received religious authority. It inaugurated a
process of secularization which has, since then, been steadily pro­
gressing.
M an’s search for himself had still to await a new wave in the
movement of hum anist thought. This wave was the hum anism of
the Enlightenment. Ju st as Renaissance hum anism belongs in the
setting of the troubled times of religious reform, neohumanism
must be seen in connexion with the great social upheaval of the
French Revolution and the consequent unrest o f the Napoleonic
era. The lesson taught by the external dram a of the time could
perhaps be summarized as follows:
M an unleashed from received secular and spiritual authority is a
beast, who has to be tam ed before he can make proper use of his
freedom. The tam ing of the beast is the education of man to a
dignified and enlightened hum an being. In Germany, the home­
land of the hum anism of the Enlightenm ent in much the same sense
in which Italy had been the cradle of Renaissance humanism, the
two hum anist catchwords of the time were Bildung and Erziehung.
Like their Italian precursors the Germ an neohum anists looked to
the Ancients for their ideals of beauty and culture. But this tradi­
tional ‘hum anist nostalgia’ was now coupled with a much more
profound classical scholarship and a new understanding of hum an­
ity’s past. The study of history and languages and hum an mores was
placed on a new footing early in the 19th century. Gradually, what
we call the social sciences too established themselves on the
academic stage.
The humanism of the Enlightenm ent thus gave origin to a scho­
larly study of man and his society, deserving the name ‘scientific’ in
the German sense of wissenschaftlich. The 19th century is the era of
the great classics in the Humanities. Niebuhr, Ranke, and M omm­
sen were the Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo of historiography;
Wilhelm von H um boldt, Jacob Grimm, and Rasmus Rask those of
the study of language; M arx, Durkheim and W eber those of
sociology.

The developments which led to the birth of the humanities did not
by themselves much affect our views of m an’s place in nature, A
revolutionary im pact on these views, however, came from 19th
century natural science— chiefly from Darwin and the theory of
evolution. The upheaval in ideas brought about by D arw in’s theory’
 HUM ANISM AND THE H U M A N ITIES 161

is com parable only to the effects which the Copernican system and
the subsequently emerging view of the infinitude of the universe
had had on the hum an world-perspective two or three centuries
earlier.
In the footsteps of Darwinism followed a deterministic natural­
ism which in many ways can be regarded as a reaction against the
libertarian idealism of the era of neohum anism and the French
Revolution. The humanities, though bom in the atm osphere of
idealism could not fail, in their growth to m aturity, to be affected by
the prevailing climate of naturalism . The question W hat is m an’s
place in nature? is from now on paralleled by the question How are
the humanities related to the natural sciences, the scientific study of
man to the scientific study of nature?
Two confronting positions on this last issue m irror the attitudes
of Pico the humanist and Kepler the natural scientist. It is interest­
ing to note that in the two major figures who have most profoundly
influenced our understanding of man and society, M arx and Freud,
the two attitudes strongly intermingle. It has become the fashion to
speak of two Marxes: M arx the hum anist who put emphasis on
m an’s possibilities of em ancipating himself from exploitation and
slavery and of overcoming alienation, and M arx the historical
materialist who in the evolution of society saw the working of ‘iron
laws’ concerning the interplay of productive forces and productive
relations. It is usual to connect the two attitudes with the young
and the m ature M arx— and there is some truth in this. But the more
interesting fact about M arx is that the two attitudes are both
present, implicitly, in his work as a whole. Therefore all those for
whom M arx continues to be a source of inspiration— philosophers,
social scientists, and the exegetes of various socialist creeds— are
likely always to fall back, now on one, now on another of the
potentialities inherent in this strangely contradiction-loaded thinker.
Something similar holds true of Freud. His theorizing largely fol­
lows the pattern of 19th century ‘naturalist’ medicine and psychol­
ogy with their implicit determ inist view of man. T h at Freud’s
insights can be given a very different— and from the point of view of
therapy probably much more fertile— interpretation is evident from
modern trends in psychiatry and w hat is nowadays sometimes
called ‘hum anist’ psychology.

The polarization implicit in these giants of thought is explicit in op­

posed trends in 19th century philosophy of science. The philosophy
162 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

of the naturalist trend is known as positivism. Its early protagonist

was Auguste Comte. Comte saw in the emergence of a science of
society the last stage in an evolutionary process of liberation of
rational thought, first from the tutelage of religion and then from
the illusions of metaphysical speculation. M athem atics and astro­
nomy with the Ancients, physics since the Renaissance, chem­
istry and biology since the Enlightenm ent had already entered the
‘positivist’ stage. Now it was the turn of the humanities. The older
and more m ature members in this ancestral tree set the pattern for
the younger members. Thus m athematics for physics, physics for
the other natural sciences, and the natural sciences for the social
sciences. For the last Comte also uses the name physique sociale. The
uniform line of descent is a w arrant of the U nity of Science. It is
illuminating to com pare Comte as the philosophic herald of a new
science of man with Bacon as a herald of a new science of nature.
Neither one of the two visionaries made a contribution to the actual
progress of science. Com te’s understanding of history and society is
as poor compared to M arx’s as is Bacon’s understanding of physics
compared to Galileo’s. Both Comte and Bacon were imbued with
belief in the usefulness of science as an instrum ent of hum an
progress. The French positivists’ famous characterization of the
aim of science as savoir pour prevoir pour pouvoir is the technological
spirit in a nutshell. W hen applied to natural science it means m an’s
mastery of nature. When applied to the hum anities it does not,
however, mean anything which could reasonably be called m an’s
mastery of himself. The slogan rather suggests a use of scientific
knowledge about men for purposes of m anipulating hum an beings
for various ends and goals. Whose ends and goals— and m anipula­
tion by whom? These questions have obvious answers when we
deal with a technology based on natural science. For the social
technology based on knowledge of hum an beings they constitute a
grave and open problem.

I do not think one can answer these questions without also chal­
lenging the philosophy of science which m ade it urgent to raise
them. The challenge was actually made towards the end of the last
century in the form of a reaction against positivism. The reaction
aimed at defending the autonom y of the hum anities in relation to
the natural sciences. Various efforts were m ade to capture the
essential differences between the two types of inquiry and in par­
 H UM ANISM AND TH E HU M A N ITIES 163

ticular to tell wherein the peculiar character of the humanities

consisted. W indelband described the difference with the terms
nomothetic and ideographic: in the study of nature we look for generali­
ties and laws, in the study of m an and hum an creations we are
interested in the individual and unique. Dilthey exploited the dif­
ference between explanation and understanding (Erklaren and Ver-
stehen). The natural sciences explain phenom ena by subsum ing
them under laws; in the Geisteswissenschaften we try to understand
their meaning and significance.
This early hermeneutic or interpretative philosophy of the human­
ities was, however, an episode rather than the beginning of an era
in the history of thought. Soon positivism made its return— this
time equipped with the powerful methodological tools of modern
mathem atical or symbolic logic. In its heyday between the two
wars, logical positivism thought that it had swept the philosophic
stage clear of metaphysical rubbish once and for all and laid the
foundation of a wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. T he enthusiasm was
soon tempered, but a lasting im pact of the new positivism came to
prevail in the diverse currents and trends which can be subsumed
under the elastic label o f ‘analytical philosophy’. Heterogeneous as
this phenomenon is, it is still possible to speak of a characteristic
climate of opinion in philosophy, ultimately inspired by the positiv­
ism of the Vienna Circle and by what used to be called the C am ­
bridge School of Analysis. This climate has long prevailed in the
English-speaking countries and in Scandinavia and is making
headway, it seems, also on the European continent. In this tradi­
tion great contributions have been made to logic and the study of
the foundations of mathem atics, and to the methodology and phi­
losophy of the natural and other ‘exact’ sciences. But I should say
without hesitation that the contributions to the philosophy of the
humanities have been remarkably poor. This fact reflects, I think, a
Zeitgeist which is uncongenial to hum anistic thought and study.

The failure of behaviourism, positivism, logical empiricism, and

other ‘naturalistic’ trends in the philosophy of science to provide a
satisfactory philosophic basis for the humanities is, in my opinion,
due to something I should call conceptual poverty. T he phenom ena
which the humanities study have features of their own which
distinguish them logically from the typical objects of study in the
natural sciences. A prim ary task of a philosophy of the humanities
164 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

is to try to capture and do justice to those features. The task can

perhaps be completed only through a long process of change and
m aturation in an intellectual climate of opinion. W hat I can do
here is only to indicate a direction in which I think we should
proceed in the search for a more adequate philosophy of the human­
ities than any which has so far been suggested.

10

I characterized the humanities as the study of man as a being of

culture. This suggests that the phenom ena which the hum an sci­
ences study are, somehow, ‘cultural’. W hat this means, however,
can be understood only if we first pay attention to another, more
basic, feature of hum an phenom ena. This is their intentionality.
Saying that intentionality is a characteristic of phenom ena con­
nected with hum an culture is, roughly, saying that those phe­
nomena have a meaning. A special case of this is linguistic meaning.
Another is when the meaning is something aimed at or pursued
through the phenomenon in question. In the first case, the bearer of
meaning is a ‘text’, i.e. a docum ent of language. In the second case
it is either the action of some individuals or groups or a practice or
an institution of society. These two types of meaning, moreover, are
closely interwoven. The subject m atter of a text is often intentional
phenomena. Indeed, without the records which texts provide, a
m ajor part of hum anistic study would be strictly impossible. M an­
kind would then have no recorded history. But more than this; all
forms of hum an life which can be called instituted and the perpe­
tuation of which is called, in a wide sense, ‘tradition’ depend on the
fact that man is a speaking creature. Were not man a being of
language, he would not be a being of culture either— and he would
literally have no history different in character from that of any other
zoological species.
However, we must not exaggerate the uniqueness of man's position
in the animal kingdom. Intentional, meaning-carrying phenomena
are not exclusively human. Nor are they necessarily language-
dependent. It is not anthropom orphism to attribute to a dog fear of
punishm ent consequent upon some mischief. But it would be
anthropom orphism to attribute to it remorse at having snatched a
piece of meat from the butcher’s shop. This is so because remorse is
a much more developed form of intentional reaction than fear— and
probably one which is inconceivable without language and inter­
personal relations under rule.
The recognition that intentionality and language are characteris-
 H UM ANISM AND THE H U M A N ITIES 165

tically even if not exclusively hum an will help us see, why the
conceptual frame of physics, chemistry, or biology is not sufficient
for an account of hum an phenom ena in their fulness. In order to
understand man as a being of culture concepts are needed which
simply have no application to, say, mice and rats, not to speak of
inanim ate objects. Therefore it is a mistake to think th at the con­
cepts which suffice for describing and explaining physico-chemical
reactions or even sub-hum an forms of animal behaviour could,
either by themselves or as a reduction basis for complex logical
constructions, exhaust the conceptual store of the humanities.
To make this statem ent is, of course, not to prove it true. A
philosopher of a positivist orientation would probably also agree
that intentionality is a characteristic of everything connected with
hum an culture. But he would deny th at intentional phenom ena are
irreducible to non-intentional ones. In defence of his view he might,
for example, put forward a behaviourist theory of meaning.

11

Intentional phenom ena have to be understood and, when this is con­

nected with difficulties, interpreted. U nderstanding their meaning or
significance precedes any attem pt to explain their existence or
origin; this is one difference between intentional and non-inten-
tional phenomena. It is therefore not inappropriate to call the
humanities hermeneutic or interpretative disciplines.
Calling the hum anities hermeneutic and saying that meaning is a
characteristic of the phenom ena which they study is also to touch
on a grave philosophic problem. W hat is meaning? This question
has been very much at the centre of 20th century philosophy. No-
one could dispute, I think, th at the philosopher whose thoughts in
the area were most influential and most original was W ittgenstein.
He had no clear and simple answer to offer. But from w hat he has
said about intentionality, language, and meaning useful hints can
be got also for that which was not W ittgenstein’s im m ediate con­
cern, viz. a philosophy of the humanities.
A basic thought of W ittgenstein’s is that a ‘private language" is
impossible. Language is essentially a ‘social affair’. The same holds
true also of extra-lingual meaning— at least on the hum an level.
Saying that meaning is a social affair has two im portant im plica­
tions. The first is that meaning is something which is handed down,
‘tradited’, within a community and therefore has to be learnt and
taught. The second is that meaning is intimately connected with
166 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

action. To learn a first language is not to be given a catalogue of

names of objects and perhaps some rules of correct speech. It is to
grow up to take part in the life of a community, to learn'‘how to do
things with words’: calling persons, asking for objects and for help,
reacting to commands and warnings, answering questions— at a
later stage also describing things and events and speaking about
w hat is not immediately at hand in space and time. In order to
understand the meaning of actions and words, one must therefore
either be another m em ber of the same community or otherwise
become familiar with, i.e. learn to participate in, its ‘culture’ or
ways of life.

12

Both understanding what intentional phenom ena mean and ex­

plaining why they occur makes reference to rules. J u st as we cannot
understand speech without mastering the rules of linguistic prac­
tice, we cannot grasp the significance of or the reasons for most
hum an actions without knowing the conventions and regulations,
say, for greeting people, honouring the dead, driving and parking
cars, getting commodities against payment, transacting one’s daily
business in the role of official, employer or employee, teacher or
student, child or parent, etc. Also most hum an wants and needs—
with the partial exception of those which we share with other
species of the animal kingdom— get articulated in the set frame of
societal rules and institutionalized patterns of behaviour.
O ne can make a useful distinction between rules which define a
practice and rules which prescribe what ought to or may or must
not be done, between constitutive rules and regulative rules, as one
sometimes calls them. Then one can give a sum m ary characteriza­
tion of the way rules relate to explanation and understanding of
behaviour by saying that constitutive rules make us understand the
meaning of actions— e.g. how bowing to a person can be a way of
greeting him— and that regulative or prescriptive rules explain why
actions are done— e.g. that I stopped my car because the red light
appeared.

13

I shall now advance a thesis which I am sure many will find

controversial but which I think is true and, moreover, crucial for
understanding the methodological status of the hum anities and the
 H UM ANISM AND THE H UM ANITIES 167

relation of the humanities to the sciences of nature. T he thesis goes

as follows:
Ju st as natural, i.e. non-in ten tional phenom ena are ‘governed’
by natural laws, i.e. principles which tell us either w hat will invari­
ably or in statistical average be the case under in principle recur­
rent and repeatable circumstances, in an analogous m anner
intentional phenom ena are ‘governed 5 by normative rules which
tell us what people under given circumstances are (or were) ex­
pected or allowed or practically necessitated to do. I am, in other
words, pleading for w hat might be called a ‘methodological p ara­
llelism’ between natural laws on the one hand and laws and other
societal rules on the other hand. I am inviting the reader to see the
difference between the humanities and the natural sciences in the
light of the difference between the factual and the normative,
between rules which state how things in fact go and rules which
ordain how they should go according to the conceptions of those
who instituted the rules.

14

It might be objected that w hat I have said holds true at most only
for those humanistic disciplines which are in a strict sense his­
torical.— U ndeniably the normative web which gives a meaning to
the actions of individuals and regulates life in society sets the frame
of reference for any account of hum an affairs we call ‘history’—
from naive chronicle and narration to the most ambitious attem pts
at understanding the significance of events and explaining their
connections.
Consider narration. An account which limits itself to telling ‘wie
es eigendich gewesen 5 in the most straightforward sense of this
debatable slogan will primarily be about the individual and collec­
tive actions of men: how they built and organized their communi­
ties, how they cultivated the land, how they traded, waged wars,
worshipped and observed various ceremonies— also of the decisions
and heroic deeds of great individuals at momentous stages in the
peoples’ lives. Even if such a story is being told quite naively in the
sense that it does not aim at explaining anything, it would not be
intelligible unless it described the agents’ actions in terms of the
institutionalized behaviour-pattem s which alone give the actions a
‘meaning’.
History, however, is not only chronicle, it is also ‘explanation’.
We want to know why the actors on history’s stage performed as
168 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

they did— how their actions were motivated by their personal aims
or by their duties in assigned roles as kings or governors or priests
or judges, say. W e also w ant to estimate the significance of their
actions to later developments, i.e. to see how w hat they did— for
whatever reasons— in its turn became a factor in the motivational
background for the actions of other people. We can call such
explanation ‘causal’ if we wish. But ‘causal’ does not then mean
‘nomothetic’. T he historian does not unravel laws which made
events inevitable. He interprets what took place as adequate re­
sponses within given institutional frames to the aims and ends
towards which hum an action was directed. Sometimes what hap­
pened will appear inevitable in retrospect— as a practical necessity
under the circumstances, but not as a causal or natural necessity
under the im pact of a universal law.

15

Someone who agrees to this may yet argue that it only shows how
different history proper is from the non-historical study of man as a
being of culture in the social sciences or in linguistics and philology.
Do not the non-historical humanities aim at the discovery of law­
like regularities of various forms of hum an behaviour: economic,
political, religious, etc., in much the same way as the natural sci­
ences investigate law-like regularities among natural phenomena?
M aybe it is vain to look for universal laws in history, but surely
there are laws of economics, for example. This we need not deny.
But I would m aintain th at the situation with regard to laws in
economics is not as like the situation in, say, physics as some wish
to think and not as unlike the situation in historical research as it
may appear. Also in the overtly non-historical study of human
phenomena there is implicit an essential element of historicity. Not
to have recognized this is, I think, a valid criticism which can be
levelled against much of contemporary research in the social sci­
ences. I shall try to illustrate what I mean with a very simple
example.
Suppose someone wanted to explain the fact that all silver coins
vanished from circulation and only paper money remained in the
m arket during, say, the temporary occupation of country X by
power Y in an armed conflict, by reference to what is known as
G resham ’s law. To say that coins ceased to circulate because there
is a law to the effect that, when two kinds of money of unequal
exchange value are available for payments, the one of inferior value
 HUM ANISM AND THE HUM ANITIES 169

tends to drive the one of higher value out of circulation— to quote

the standard formulation— sounds to my "logical ear* like a joke
and I hope that my readers, upon consideration, will share my
feeling. Com pare this with the following case:
Suppose we explain—to paraphrase a famous example—the burst­
ing of a watcrpipe during a frosty night by reference to the law th at
w ater expands when it freezes. If one is curious one can ask why
water expands when it freezes. But whether or not this question is
raised and can be answered, one will understand why the pipe
burst— and if one is incredulous one can make experiments and
watch the result. One need only accept the law as fact in order to
adm it that it has explanatory force.
It is different with G resham ’s law. It has no explanatory power o f
its own. Unless we understand why ‘b ad ’ money should tend to drive
‘good’ money out of circulation, mere reference to the fact that it
does so does not make w hat happened a whit more intelligible. To
understand why ‘bad’ money drives ‘good’ money out of circulation
is easy enough, however— but to understand why water should
expand when it freezes is not at all easy. If people fear that the
paper money issued by the occupying power will be declared
valueless once the occupation is over, whereas silver coins will at
least retain their metal value, then it is clear that people are
reluctant to give away what they have in silver and maybe even
anxious to buy up coins in exchange for paper money at a nominal
over-value. This is a thoroughly understandable motivational mech­
anism. We have seen impressive examples of its working. To have
drawn attention to this is a merit for which Gresham deserves to be
remembered. But even if nobody had ever thought of this as a ‘law’
of economic behaviour, we could readily have explained in an
individual case why ‘b ad’ money drove ‘good’ money out of circula­
tion. W hat is required is only familiarity with the institution of
money and the idea of a market— and, one could add, with ‘hum an
nature’, i.e. the needs and wants of normal men in a society which
knows these institutions.
In order for so-called laws of economic, political, and other forms
of social behaviour to have explanatory force, we m ust first under­
stand why they are valid, i.e. we must know the institutional frame
within which behaviour in accordance with the law is an adequate
intentional response to the challenge of a given situation. There­
fore, when the institutional frame changes previously valid laws
may loose their applicability to otherwise similar situations. Thus,
for example, it has often been noted that the laws of ‘classical’
market economy cannot be expected to hold good for the strongly
170 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

‘m anipulated’ market characteristic of late capitalist societies, nor

for rigidly planned socialist economies.
In this difference in the nature and role of ‘laws’ one of the deep
differences between the natural and the hum an sciences manifests
itself. And for reasons connected with this I would claim th at the
so-called non-historical behavioural sciences are not really ‘non-
historical’. Theorizing about economic and other forms of social
behaviour means devising conceptual schemas which can be used
for the analysis and interpretation of phenom ena in given historical
situations— such as, for example, present-day W estern industrial­
ized society. The use of theory in the hum an as well as in the
natural sciences is for explaining and making us better .understand
the world in which we live. But since the world men build for
themselves, i.e. social reality, changes as they go on building it, its
explanatory principles— and not only our knowledge of them— will
change too in the course of this process.

16

I shall conclude with a return to the question which arose with

Renaissance humanism concerning m an’s place in the world-order.
We are now in a position to assign both to Pico the hum anist and to
Kepler the scientist a due share in the truth. But the greater share
belongs, I think, to Pico.
By saying that m an has a place in the world-order we could mean
that human actions and institutions can be explained in terms
which are extraneous to the individual agents and to the institu­
tions in question themselves. M aybe some hum an phenom ena have
a spontaneity which defies explanation; and the same may hold
true for some natural phenom ena. But by and large this is not the
case— neither in nature nor even with man. Events in nature have
causes and what men do and achieve has reasons in terms of which
we understand and explain them. T o this extent we may say that
Kepler was right against Pico.
But in a most im portant sense we can also say that m an’s place
in the world-order is not fixed, if by ‘fixed’ we mean determ ined by
factors which are extraneous to hum an action. There are, of course,
biological aspects of hum an life, which makes m an’s position in this
sense fixed too: environm ental conditions of tem perature, composi­
tion of the atmosphere, possibilities of nutrition, etc. But the phe­
nomena specific to man as a being of culture are different. The
factors in the terms of which we interpret and explain those phe­
 HUM ANISM AND TH E H U M A N ITIES 171

nomena are the creation of man himself: the level of knowledge and
technology, the educational institutions, the force of custom and
tradition, the normative fabric of the legal order. O nce these factors
are ‘instituted’, their determining influence on individual action may
extend to minute details of life and even seem like ‘iron necessities’.
But it would be a fatalistic m isunderstanding not to realize that
they are m an-m ade and therefore subject to change effected by man
himself.
T he destiny of men therefore is not written in the stars— either in
the literal sense Kepler had in mind and we regard as superstitious,
or in the extended sense which alone makes K epler’s idea worth
taking seriously, viz. that the achievements of men are the predeter­
mined results of forces over which man has no control. If one calls
the place of man in the order of things ‘fixed’ at all, one should
remember that the one who fixed it was man himself—though by
no means always those men whose actions now are guided and
whose freedom is restricted by the rules of the ‘fixers’. The possibil­
ity is always open that men will refuse the order under which they
live and re-fix their place in the world.
 X

IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY

We usually associate rational thought and action with such attrib ­

utes as consistent reasoning, well confirmed beliefs, and an ability
to predict and, maybe, control the course of events in nature
around us. We may justly regard science, as it has evolved from the
late Renaissance and Baroque periods to the present day, as the
ultim ate achievement of rationality satisfying these requirements.
Chiefly thanks to its explicative and predictive powers, Western
science has yielded an immense technological pay-off with profound
effects on hum an life. To the extent that these effects have been
beneficial and welcome, they have also enhanced the prestige of
science and of the type of rationality embodied in scientific thinking
and practice.
It is becoming increasingly obvious, however, that the trans­
formations of life effected by science and technology are not exclu­
sively beneficial. The industrial state is facing serious problems due
to pollution and poisoning. The new lifestyle has psychological
repercussions in the form of alienation and stress. Moreover, there
is the threat that the world’s natural resources will not suffice for
the needs of growing populations and, last but not least, there is the
threat from weapons of unparalleled destructiveness.
These worries of mankind have challenged reflective minds to
question the im pact of scientific technology on life, and therewith
also the value of the type of rationality which science represents.
‘The rationality debate’ is one of the main themes of contempo­
rary philosophy, sociology, and social anthropology. The debate
has perhaps been more confusing than clarifying, but at least it has
taught us that hum an rationality is a multidimensional thing pos­
sessing many aspects other than those which have reached their
fullest m aturity in W estern science.
For my purposes here I shall exploit a facet of this m ulti­
dimensionality which in the English language is conveyed by the
words rational and reasonable. An argum ent can be rational but its
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 173

premisses and conclusions may be unreasonable. A plan may be

rational, but its execution not reasonable. W hat, then, is the differ­
ence? As I see it, rationality when contrasted with reasonableness
has to do, primarily, with formal correctness of reasoning, efficiency
of means to an end, the confirmation and testing of beliefs. It is
£ 0a/-oriented— though in a sense somewhat broader than M ax
W eber’s notion of Zweckrationalitat. Judgem ents of reasonableness,
again, are value-oriented. They are concerned with the right way of
living, with what is thought good or bad for man. T he reasonable
is, of course, also rational— but the ‘merely rational’ is not always
reasonable.
A science in search of the reasonable we encounter in our intel­
lectual ancestors, the ancient Greeks.

Discussing ‘Greek science’ in a general way risks bias and over­

simplification. Yet the risks are worth taking for the sake of coming
to a better understanding, if not of the Ancients, then of ourselves.
The mental attitude underlying Greek science and speculation is
a belief that the hum an mind is capable, on its own, of deciphering
the logos of things—-just as the Renaissance pioneers of modern
science were convinced that ‘the book of n ature’ lay open to be read
and understood by hum an beings. O ne could call this a belief in the
intelligibility of the natural order of things. It is, I should say, the
common rational foundation of anything which is properly called
‘science’, whether in the Greek or in the W estern sense.
For the Greeks the natural order was a eunomia, i.e. a lawful and
just order. Their universe was a kosmos and, as such, good and
beautiful. The birth of Greek science is simultaneous with a pro­
found change in their society, viz. the transition from aristocratic
feudalism to the law-regulated order of life in the polis. It has been
said that their conception of the world order was in origin a
projection onto the universe of the idea of the legal order in a
human community. By a curious re-projection of thought, this
order was then conceived of as an ideal pattern which the law of the
state had to imitate and reflect.
Not only the state but also the hum an individual is, ideally, a
mikrokosmos in harmony with the universal order. This holds good
both for the body and for the soul. Thus the moral and spiritual
life of man has an ultim ate foundation in the eunomia ruling the
universe. To try to understand the world order was to look for
174 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

landmarks or guidelines for the right way of living and of organiz­

ing the hum an community. To attain such understanding was to
attain wisdom rather than knowledge; it was, as has been said, to
attune one’s life to its ‘n atural5 conditions.
If this picture of Greek science is even nearly correct, then some
might wish to conclude that the Greek image of a science was based
on an enormous confusion. The alleged confusion is between laws
as norms regulating hum an conduct and laws as descriptions of
factual regularities in nature.
But such criticism is essentially unjustified. In order to confuse, a
distinction m ust already exist. And the Greeks simply did not
distinguish, as we do, between law as norm and law as description.
Their view of nature as a lawful order cannot be adequately ex­
pressed within a conceptual frame which observes these distinc­
tions. O ur view and theirs are incommensurable. This means, as far as
I can see, that we cannot (fully) understand ‘Greek science’. Saying,
as indeed I did, that the Greeks conceived of nature as a lawful
order to which hum an life m ight become attuned, is not strictly
accurate, since it requires us to understand the idea of n atu re’s law
in a way which is both norm and fact. This we cannot do— and
therefore the idea is, to us, a ‘confusion’.
If w hat I stated about incommensurability is right, it has an
im portant consequence: there is no possibility of ‘retu rn ’ to the
‘Greek way of thinking’— for example a return to a view of the good
life or of a ju st society as a ‘microcosmic’ reflection of a cosmic law.
Yet within our society are tendencies— I would myself label them
anti-rational— to fancy that something like this is possible and
maybe even needed for a solution to our dilemmas. But this is
self-deception and false romanticism. Innocence once lost cannot
be regained.

Some ten thousand years ago a profound change took place in

m an’s way of life. This was the origin of agriculture. In this change,
a form of hum an rationality manifested itself very different from the
one which was later to flower in Greek science. It was the goal-
directed use of reason for foreseeing changes and regularities in the
course of events in nature and for taking measures to utilize, control
and steer those events for hum an purposes. The transition to
agriculture also m eant that the m anufacture and use of tools was
greatly enhanced. A new type of man evolved, the artisan or homo
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 175

faber. Among his skills were not only the m anufacture of tools,
arm our and weapons, but also the construction of the more perm a­
nent abodes and protective enclosures required by the new form of
food production.
By technics one can understand the production of artefacts of any
kind, and by techniques the skills needed for these productive activi­
ties. And one could make a distinction between technics and technol­
ogy. Technology, one would then say, is technics and technical skill
based on scientific knowledge, knowledge of the logos of the techne,
i.e. of the rational principles underlying the art which the artisan-
technician practices.
T h at there can be highly developed technics w ithout scientific
underpinning is well attested. T h at there can be refined science
without technological pay-off is also obvious. Greek science is an
example. I shall hazard a play on words and say th at Greek science
embodied the rationality of homo sapiens but not that of homo faber.
The first is wisdom, the second skill.
One could also refer to this dualism with the words ‘n ature’ and
‘a rt’. Ancient science contemplates the natural; technics has to do
with the artificial. For this reason mechanics, which can rightly be
called the very root-discipline of modern science since the Renais­
sance, was not in the Ancient tradition a science of nature, i.e. of
the natural, but was concerned with artefacts such as the lever
which could force heavy loads to move in, for them, ‘un n atu ral’
directions. It is characteristic that the Greek term for mechanics,
mechanike techne derives from a word ([xr|xcxvr|) which in origin
means ‘cunning’ or ‘trick’. Tricks may be extremely useful to know
and practise, but they were not worthy objects of study by the
kaloskagathos or Greek ‘gentlem an’, who in the lawful order of
nature saw a guideline for the right way of living.

So-called Arabic culture occupies a middle and also a m ediating

position between Greco-Roman and W estern civilization. O ne of
its outstanding features is the role played in it by magic.
The practice of magic is a goal-directed activity. Its aim is to
conjure up or placate the ‘powers’ which govern the natural pro­
cesses or lie dorm ant in material stuffs so as to make them benevo­
lent or subservient to various hum an ends and wishes. Alchemy,
astrology, the cabbala, are forms of magic which flourished in the
orbit of Arab culture and which made a strong im pact on spiritual
176 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

life in Europe during the first formative centuries of w hat was to

become distinctly W estern science.
Was this magic of the Middle Ages ‘science? Did it rest on a
belief in the intelligibility of the world order to the inquiring
mind— like Greek philosophy or modern natural science?
These questions are difficult to answer. But surely in the magic of
the Middle Ages we can discern a craving both for sympathetic
attunem ent of hum an affairs to principles governing the universe
and for techniques to control and master the ‘forces’ in nature. In
the first feature ‘magical science’ resembles Greek science, in the
second, ours.
W ith a view to this second feature, medieval magic has been held
to be a precursor of modern science. There is about as much truth
and as much falsehood in this as there is in the view of the Ionian
cosmologists as early natural scientists. Basically all three: Greek
philosophy, medieval magic, and modern science, are incommen­
surable manifestations of hum an rationality. I am sure we cannot
in our conceptual categories fully understand the mind of the magi
or the wisdom of the Presocratics. But to the extent that we can, or
think we can, discern an aim common to ours and to one or other of
those earlier efforts to understand ‘was die Welt im Innersten
zusam m enhalt’ (what is inside the world and holds it together), as
Goethe put it in Faust, we can also compare them with regard to
failure or success. It is a fact that magic and the new science both
hold forth a promise of ‘mastery of nature’ or, to use modern
jargon, ‘technological pay-off. (Greek science did not promise the
same.) And who would deny that science has fulfilled this promise
far better than magic? This, we say, is because magic was largely
based on false beliefs about nature and therefore represents an
inferior form of rationality to ours. But this is not an entirely fair
verdict. Because the ‘beliefs’ we entertain simply cannot be com­
pared with those of the magicians.

The birth of the new science, the ‘scientific revolution5 of the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is one of the greatest wonders
in the spiritual history of mankind. The spectacle is marvellous also
in its colourful mixture of sources of influence: the revival of the
Ancient, the survival of magic, the breakthrough of the M odern.
Kepler, more than anybody else, is an embodiment of this mixture.
But also with the author of the Principia, the crowning achievement
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 177

of the ‘new philosophy’, we recognize the same ideological ingre­

dients although more distinctly separated than with the author of
the Mysterium Cosmograpkicum. Newton has indeed been called the
Last of the G reat Magi; but he preferred not to hand over his vast
am ount of speculative writings to the printing press.
The revival and final breakthrough of heliocentric astronomy,
the great advances in mathematics, and the acquisition of an
entirely new conceptual framework for mechanics were the three
major contributions of the era to the body of scientific knowledge
and the creation of a new world-picture. Here we are not im­
mediately concerned with it but with its underlying methodology or
‘image of a science’. The articulation of this image is the merit, above
all, of three men, viz. Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and Rene
Descartes. I shall here distinguish three principal traits of this image:
The first is the new view of the m an-nature relationship, in fact a
new conception of nature. N ature is object, man is subject and agent.
M an faces nature as (‘detached’) observer, but also as m anipula­
tor. The strict objectification or, as it is also called, reification of
nature entails a sharp separation of fact and value, of description
and prescription. Values belong in the realm of the subject— they
cannot be ‘extracted’ from a study of natural phenomena; the laws
of nature may be ‘iron’ and ‘inexorable’— but they give no gui­
dance for the good or right life.
A nother significant feature of the new science has to do with the
relation of a whole to its parts. M aterial bodies and natural proces­
ses can be ‘analysed’ into component parts, from the properties of
which one can then ‘synthetize’ the properties of the whole. Galileo
describes this beautifully as his metodo resolutivo and metodo compositivo.
The ‘parallelogram of forces’ is the prototype example of ‘resolu­
tion and composition’. Totalities or wholes which are am enable to
this method for explaining their properties and efficacies are also
called meristic. Such a ‘meristic methodology’ is profoundly charac­
teristic, not only of classical physics but also of every science
modelled in its image, including classical associationist psychology.
The third feature I wanted to emphasize is experiment. The great
theoretician of the experimental method, though not a great ex­
perim enter himself, was Francis Bacon. For Bacon, experiment was
above all a systematic search for causes through the reproduction
and suppression of which we can control their effects. It is thus
expressive of a manipulative attitude in relation to nature. This
attitude was foreign to Greek science, but highly typical of medieval
magic. The experimentalist spirit can therefore be regarded as a
legacy of Arab culture to Western science.
178 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

The element of Zweckrationalitdt inherent in magic was thus also

present in the form of rationality which the new science repre­
sented. Right from the outset this was connected with expectations
of technological pay-off. The technological ethos of modern science
has never been so eloquently proclaimed as by Bacon. The first
theoretician of the experimental method also deserves the title of
M aster Philosopher of Technology.
This technological aspect of scientific rationality has a natural
link with the Judaeo-C hristian view of m an’s place in the world
God had created. In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis it is
said that God created man in his own image and gave him dom ina­
tion over the beasts of the land, the fish of the sea, and the fowl of
the air, and over all the earth. T he new science of nature could be
seen as a divine gift to man to help him exercise the domination
entrusted to him by God himself.
It is instructive to compare the C hristian justification of m an’s
‘mastery of nature’ with the myth of the Greek hero of technical
rationality, Prometheus. The T itan stole the fire from the gods and
gave it to m ankind and taught m an to use this gift for his arts or
technai. But the gift of Prometheus was a theft— and thus the benefit
which mankind drew from it had an illicit foundation. The ‘Prome­
thean spirit’ when anim ating hum ans is akin to hubris. It induces
men to exceed the metron or measure for w hat befits the right way of
life. Hubris means the upsetting of a natural balance or harmony
which is then restored in inexorable divine nemesis. T he myth of
Prometheus has through the ages challenged W estern poets to
gainsay and protest against unjust gods— but also to contemplate
the limits of m an’s power to discipline the forces ‘let loose’ by his
arts. Its wisdom presents a challenge also to us moderns who share
neither the Greek feeling for the natural nor the Christian submis­
siveness to the divine.
It is understandable, however, that the C hurch as guardian of
the Christian tradition and values was apprehensive of the revolu­
tion in ways of thinking and world-view brought about by nascent
science. The infamous proceedings against Galileo epitomize in the
enlightened opinion the retrograde character of the teachings of the
Church in an era of recessive antiquity and progressive modernity.
And yet it seems right to contend that the ultim ate trium ph of
the new science came about, not in spite of the resistance of the
church, but in alliance with the forces of Christian religion, C atho­
lic as well as Protestant. This has little, if anything, to do with the
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 179

Christian attitude to technology, but much with the Christian

attitude to magic which in the transitional centuries between the
M iddle Ages and modern times played a bewildering role in the
spiritual life of Europe. M echanistic science rested on an objec­
tified, ‘de-spiritualized’, view of nature which stood in sharp con­
trast to the magicians’ idea of a nature populated by ghost-like
forces which sorcerers and witches could command. T he new sci­
ence therefore was a welcome ally in fighting heresies and exorciz­
ing the inferior ghosts, leaving the one superghost, the Christian
T rinitarian God, sovereign ruler of the universe.
But, as so often happens, there was from the beginning a latent
tension between the allied parties. W ere Christian faith and values
at bottom compatible with the evolved form of rationality which
science represented? I think myself th at there is an ‘incom m ensur­
ability’ between the two which is, often mistakenly regarded as an
incompatibility. However, science, or better: scientific rationality,
has surely been a contributive force to the secularization of W estern
society and therewith to the gradual erosion, the withering away of
the influence of religion. The last great battle between science and
religion— faintly reminiscent of the Renaissance battle between ‘i
due sistemi del m ondo’—was the battle over Darwinism. The
afterm ath to it which we are witnessing today (‘creationism ’) can
hardly be taken seriously.
A more serious problem for us today than the crumbling of
Christian faith is the value vacuum which has followed in the wake of
the secularization of modern society. To its creation, too, scientific
rationality has no doubt contributed. In a culture dom inated by
scientific rationality and its technological achievements, other
forms of the spiritual life of m an tend to atrophy and be rated as
inferior. ‘W hen God is dead everything is perm itted.’ W hat can
show that this is not so? Certainly not science.

The technical pay-off of nascent mechanical science was soon no­

ticeable, although to begin with hardly very spectacular. However,
neither Bacon nor, to the best of my knowledge, any other early
prophet of the technological blessings of the new science envisaged
that these developments would in the end have a profound im pact
also on ways of life and on the entire social fabric. W hen this
im pact began to be felt around the end of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth, this did not happen as a
180 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

consequence of spectacular new developments in contemporary

science. Neither the invention of the mechanical loom nor that of
the steam engine resulted from ‘research and development’ in
anything remotely similar to the modern meaning of the term. (It
has been said, and probably rightly so, that science owes more to
Jam es W att than W att himself owed to science.) Yet it is an
undeniable fact that it was the scientific revolution of the late
Renaissance and Baroque period which ultimately triggered the
industrial revolution approxim ately two centuries later.
The industrial revolution was basically a change in the mode of
production of commodities. The social change consequent upon this
was a transition from agrarian to industrial society. This presum ­
ably is the greatest single change in the life of men and their
societies which has occurred since the transition to the agrarian
form of life thousands of years ago.

W hen discussing the Industrial Revolution and the problems to

which it has given rise, one m ust never forget how recent and still
unaccomplished the phenomenon is. It started in England not
more than 200 years ago. The transformation of society from pre­
dominantly agrarian to predom inantly industrial is in many Euro­
pean countries a change within living memory. In most countries
the process has barely started and we do not yet know whether it
will in the end embrace the entire globe. Presumably it will— even
though pockets of ‘agrarian backwardness’ may remain in remote
places ju st as ‘prim itive’ tribes of hunters and gatherers continued
their lives untouched by the agrarian revolution.
It is not in the least surprising that the transition to the industrial
mode of production should be connected with grave problems of
adaptation. In its early days, industrialization threatened a class of
people, the workers, with a modern form of slavery. This prospect,
vividly depicted by M arx and Engels, is, I think, no longer present,
at least not in Europe— thanks to the adjustive counterforce of
organized labour. But there is another ‘slave revolt’ in the offing.
Nature, conquered and enslaved, kicks back on its master, tech­
nological man. The erosion of land, the pollution of air and water,
the threatening depletion of non-renewable natural resources—-
these are the environm ental problems with which the industrial
state has to cope. But they are not its only problems. There are
others, equally or more serious, of a psychological and social na­
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 181

ture. The erosion of traditional values nourishes a sentim ent of the

‘meaninglessness’ of life and, in the ‘ordinary citizen’, also of alien­
ation and powerlessness in relation to the impersonal bureau­
cratic machinery which controls and regulates our daily routine.
In view of these evils and threats to the well-being of man, one
may ask whether the lifestyle promoted by science-based technology
in combination with the industrial mode of production is biologically
suitable for man. Einstein once expressed the same concern: ‘Die
Tragik des modernen M enschen liegt— allgemein gesehen— darin:
er hat fur sich selber Daseinsbedingungen geschaffen, denen er auf
Grund seiner phylogenetischen Entwicklung nicht gewachsen ist .’ 1
(The tragedy of modern man lies— generally speaking— in this: he
has created living conditions for himself for which, because of his
phylogenetic development, he is not adequate.) Is this tragedy
destined for permanence? If so, the end can hardly be anything else
than the self-destruction of the hum an species— whether all at once
in a nuclear holocaust or after centuries of disintegration and
disorder more like the ‘heat-death’ which physicists imagine is the
ultimate fate of the whole universe.
I think it is good to be conscious of the realism of these apocalyp­
tic prospects. Animal species originate and pass away— surely homo
sapiens will not be an exception to this ‘law of nature5. T he words of
the Psalm, teach us to num ber our days, that we may apply our
hearts unto wisdom, have a meaning not only for the individual but
also for mankind as a whole.
Speculating about the prospects of survival, however, is not very
rewarding. It is of more interest to consider the repercussions
which industrialization and further technical developments may
have on institutions and forms of social organization. It is worth
asking, for example, whether dem ocratic government and indi­
vidual liberties will survive the transform ation of lifestyle. T he
ideals of democracy and freedom which have evolved in W estern
civilization rest on two presuppositions. O ne is that the average
citizen can form his own opinion on public issues relating to his
own long term interests. The second is that he can survey the
consequences of his actions and commitments well enough to take
full responsibility for the uses he makes of his freedoms. It is
questionable whether these presuppositions can be satisfied in a
society in which decisions become increasingly dependent on the
opinions of experts and in which the effects of individual action

1 A. Einstein, Uber den Frieden. Weltordnung oder Weltuntereang, ed. O . N athan and
H. Norden, Bern, 1975, p. 494.
182 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

upon society at large become increasingly hard to perceive and

difficult to predict. T he complexities in industrial society may be
such that dem ocratic participation in government deteriorates into
an empty formality of nodding assent or voicing a protest to incom­
prehensible alternatives, and that individual freedom is either re­
stricted to conformism with the inevitable or takes the form of
irresponsible, nihilistic actions of self-assertion.
Also worthy of attention is the fact that sophisticated technology
greatly enhances the possibilities for ruling elites to control the
doings and m anipulate the opinions of those over whom they
exercise power. This, too, runs contrary to real democracy and
freedom. I do not think, however, that the industrialization of
society will favour personal dictatorships of the ‘atavistic5, retro­
grade type in the W estern world such as those we witnessed in
Europe between the two W orld W ars. The danger is rather some­
thing which I would call the ‘dictatorship of circum stances5, the
autonomous impersonal forces of rapid technological developments
and the self-perpetuating necessity of economic growth and expan­
sionism. It is the imminence of this dictatorship which makes us
ask whether the form of rationality represented by science and
technology has not had repercussions on life which are far from
reasonable.
I shall presently add some comments to this theme, but first let
us once again return to developments in science.

At an early stage of its development the new physics already

challenged Cartesian ideals of intelligibility. O ne such challenge
was the notion of ‘action at a distance5 in Newton's theory of
gravitation. It continued to cause conceptual discomfort almost
until the advent of the relativity theory. A nother difficulty was
caused by the rivalry between the corpuscular and the undulatory
theories of light. W hen the second eventually became established, it
satisfied Cartesian dem ands only as long as the light waves were
thought to be propagated in the hypothetical medium called the
ether. W ith the abandonm ent of the ether hypothesis, the intelligi­
bility of the conceptual framework of physics was again in the
danger zone. The era of w hat has since been known as ‘classical’
physics was coming to an end and the threshold of something
essentially new had been reached. The transition is marked by two
of the greatest achievements in the history of science: the origins of
relativity and quantum physics.
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 183

It is probably right to say that physical theory has not yet fully
recovered from the shock presented in particular by quantum
theory to old patterns of intelligibility. For example, the so-called
Copenhagen Interpretation, which still seems to be favoured by the
majority of theoretical physicists, is in substance an acknowledge­
ment of the fact that a self-consistent and complete theory of the
microworld which satisfies the requirements of classical physics
simply cannot be provided. Instead one has to work with com­
plementary but m utually exclusive conceptual schemas such as the
particle-wave dualism of micro bodies. The Heisenberg uncertainty
principle again seems to shatter another core idea of classical
physics, viz. the strictly reified conception of nature and separabil­
ity of the observer from the observed.
As is well attested, Einstein himself refused to abandon hope that
the classical ideals of intelligibility could be vindicated. Various
efforts, partly in his footsteps, have been made over the years to
‘reconcile’ the complementary aspects of the interpretation of
micro-phenomena to a better unified whole— but none of them
seems to have gained wide acceptance. Later developments have
further confused rather than clarified the situation. Perhaps the
most spectacular puzzle, from a conceptual point of view, is con­
nected with the famous experiment of thought, sometimes referred
to as a ‘paradox’, of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen and its actualization
in the debate stirred by the Bell Inequalities. It poses a difficulty for
the understanding somewhat reminiscent of the discomforts once
caused by Newtonian action at a distance. Changes experimentally
induced in the state of some entities seem to effect instantaneous
changes in other entities locally separated from the first though
belonging to the same ‘system’. This presents a challenge to the
meristic postulate of Cartesian intelligibility and it has been sug­
gested that the challenge can only be met by a holistic conception of
what David Bohm calls an ‘unbroken wholeness’ irreconcilable
with the classical idea of decomposition of totalities into indepen­
dent units from the efficacies of which the order of the whole can be
recomposed.
It is obvious that most theoretical physicists are puzzled by the
present conceptual situation in their subject. Few, however, indulge
in speculations about the ultimate consequences of the breakdown
of the conceptual patterns of classical physics. Serious philosophers
of science also appear reluctant to let themselves into the maze. But
it is striking that an increasing num ber of imaginative minds,
including some with qualified scientific training, see affinities be­
tween, on the one hand, an emergent holistic methodology of
184 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

science and the abandonm ent of the subject-object separation of

the ‘classical5 reified concept of nature and, on the other hand, the
wisdom embodied in the mythologies of ancient religions and the
teaching of mystics about nature, consciousness, and a non-
deterministic and non-mechanistic interlocking of the links in the
G reat Chain of Being.

10

Perhaps the persistence, since the 1920’s and 1930’s, of a ‘founda­

tion crisis’ in the science of nature is connected with the fact that,
whereas theory seems crippled, experimental physics and its tech­
nological applications have flourished as never before in the second
half of the century. A whole new world of subatom ic phenomena
has been disclosed and continues to be explored. It is less likely that
this penetration into the subatom ic will eventually give us the
‘ultim ate constituents’ of m atter than that it will give us ever new
insights into the microstructures as long as the enormous expendi­
ture required for research is thought, justified by the resulting
technological pay-off. It is worth quoting here what Rene Thom
recently wrote: ‘la description du reel . . . ju sq u ’au plus fin detail
perceptible, est . . . sans autre limite que celles que fixe la societe
par ses allocations budgetaires. Cet etat de choses n ’est pas sans
repercussions graves: les scientifiques, pour justifier leurs demandes
financieres, sont amenes a prom ettre a la societe . . . de plus en
plus d ’avantages immediats ou a venir. Pour entrainer l’adhesion
collective, ils sont amenes a se solidariser avec les tendances les
plus inquietantes, voire les plus suicidaires de l’hum anite.’ (The
description of the real world in the finest perceptible detail is
limited only by society with its budgetary allocations. This state of
affairs is not without serious repercussions. Scientists, to justify
their financial dem ands, are led to promise society more and more
benefits, immediately or in the future. To achieve collective adhe­
sion, they are led to join forces with the most disturbing, indeed the
most suicidal, tendencies of m ankind . ) 2
It is also tempting to see a connection between the Grundlagenkri-
sis in physics and the fact that the biggest push forward in science
in our century has been in the life sciences. The centre of gravity of
the scientific world-picture, it is sometimes said, has shifted from
physics to biology. But one should rather say that it has shifted to

2 ‘Im becillite et delire’, Le Monde, 2 Ju ly 1984.

 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 185

the borderland between the two; or speak about an ‘invasion5 into

the life sciences from ‘below’, from w hat used to be the sciences of
non-living nature. Term s of relatively recent origin such as
‘biophysics’, ‘biochemistry’, or ‘molecular biology’ are more telling
than lengthy explanations. Greatest of all the novelties has been the
study of the hereditary mechanisms of the species, starting with the
rediscovery of M endelian principles and the discovery of m utations
at the very turn of the century, and culminating in the unravelling
of the molecular basis of the chromosomes, the double helix of
DNA, shortly after the middle of the century.
The technological pay-off of these developments has also been
spectacular. Medicine, traditionally concerned with the curing of
disease, is becoming increasingly involved in the m anipulation of
the hereditary basis of life. As is well known, this raises serious
issues of medical ethics, and of the ethics of science in general.
The progress of biological science in our century has been a
trium ph for that image of science and type of scientific rationality
which took shape with Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo. Echoing
Descartes, the great pioneer of scientific physiology, Claude Ber­
nard long ago spoke of the living organism as ‘une machine qui
fonctionne necessairement en vertu des proprietes physico-
chemiques de ses elements constituants’ (a machine which neces­
sarily works by virtue of the physico-chemical properties of its
constituent parts).3 This, in a nutshell, expresses the meristic view
of life phenom ena in the perspective of a reified conception of
nature. W hat was still for Bernard a programme, one hundred
years later looks like a breakthrough and the ultim ate victory of
Cartesian rationality in the scientific study of life.

11

Will developments in biological science, too, term inate in a founda­

tion crisis? The question is worthy of consideration.
The m ainstream of progress to which I briefly alluded has been
in what might be called, with an extended use of the term, ‘micro­
biology’. (By this I mean an approach to the study of life phe­
nomena from the microlevel.) I see no reason for thinking that this
particular approach is heading towards a ‘crisis’. But the situation
may be different in w hat I propose to call ‘macrobiology’. By it I

3 In his classic work, L introduction a Vetude de medecine experimentale, Paris, 1865,

p. 161.
186 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

understand, roughly, the integrative activity of the genes, the de­

velopment of the egg to a united and diversified whole, the m echa­
nisms of regeneration of a wounded organism, and the interaction
of the organism with its environment. W ithout wishing to belittle
obvious progress also in this area, the conceptual situation in
macrobiology is certainly very different from that in ‘microbiology5.
One can note expressions of concern for this by leading contempo­
rary biologists. Even such a staunch protagonist of the physico­
chemical approach to life phenom ena as Jacques M onod adm its
that ‘les problemes . . . de la mecanique du developpement posent
encore a la biologie de profondes enigmes. C ar si Pembryologie a
fourni d 5admirables descriptions du developpement, on est loin
encore de savoir analyser Pontogenese des structures macroscopi-
ques en termes d 5interactions microscopiques.5 (The problems of
the mechanism of development raise profound enigmas for biology.
For, if embryology has furnished some adm irable descriptions of
development, we are still a long way from being able to analyse the
ontogenesis of macroscopic structures in terms of microscopic
interaction.)4
Maybe further advance of research on the microlevel w ilt grad­
ually also solve some of the open problems of the macrolevel.
Leading biologists view the prospects here with varying degrees of
optimism. But there seems to exist wide agreement that after the
breakthrough achieved in the m id-century the problem-situation
has changed. The question is, to quote Sydney Brenner, ‘whether
the problems of developmental biology could be solved by one
insight like the double helix5. W hatever the answer, one could say,
quoting the same source, that ‘all the genetic and molecular biolo­
gical work of the last sixty years could be considered as a long
interlude5 and that now ‘we have come full circle— back to the
problems left behind unsolved5.5 It is obvious to an outside observer
that there is a groping for various ‘holistic methodologies5going on
in the biological and also in the environm ental sciences. ‘Systems
theory5 is one of the tools to which great hopes are attached. Its
usefulness and value is still unproven, it seems to me. But it is
interesting to note the similarity of trends in microphysics, on the
one hand, and in macrobiology on the other, towards new ideals of
scientific intelligibility. It is natural that such trends which concern

4 J. Monod, Le hasard et la necessite. Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie

modeme, Paris, 1970, p. 111.
5 From a recorded conversation with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in H.F.
Judson, The Eighth Day o f Creation: The Makers o f the Revolution in Biology, London,
1979, p. 209.
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 187

the conceptual apparatus, the ‘way of thinking’, rather than the

investigation of facts, should be slowmoving— and also th at they
should be heralded by visionaries and prophets whose stammerings
may be worth listening to although we cannot yet endorse them as
true.
Would such a holistic world-view, if it were to emerge, represent
a new form of scientific rationality? Perhaps in the sense that it
would have a less close tie to the goal-directed, m anagerial
rationality of control and prediction. Its technical pay-off would
presumably be smaller than that of science in the spirit of Bacon
and Descartes. But it may instead encourage a shift in the view of
the m an-nature relationship from an idea of domination to one of
co-evolution— and this may be to the advantage of the adaptation
of industrial society to the biological conditions of its survival.

12

An alliance with Christian ideology helped the new science to

establish itself. But science also contributed to the gradual erosion
of religion. Secularized national states became dom inant powers. It
was soon obvious that they too had a vested interest in the prom o­
tion of science, not for fighting heresies, but for enhancing the
well-being of the population and the power of the state.
It is remarkable, however, that it took a relatively long time
before science became firmly integrated into the social fabric of the
new type of society to which the Industrial Revolution gave birth.
Perhaps the fact that the inventions which set the industrial wheel
in motion were relatively unsophisticated even from the standpoint
of the science of their day contributed to the view, long prevailing,
of science as an elitist preoccupation and luxury rather than as a
major ‘productive force’ in economic and social developments.
The great change in attitude of state power to science came only
in the second half of the century. The Second W orld W ar paved the
way for it. Advanced scientific technology and also developments in
pure science rendered services of decisive im portance to the war
machine— culminating in the atomic bomb. It is a doubtful glory
which science earned for itself by virtue of the fact th at many of its
most prom inent representatives were engaged in an enterprise
which subsequently has resulted in a mortal threat to the entire
hum an race.
In the short run, certainly, science has greatly profited from its ac­
knowledged importance to the material basis of life in industrialized
188 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

national states. Financial support for science is now in most coun­

tries of quite a different magnitude from before the war, and the
num ber of people engaged in research and scientific training has
increased enormously. Welcome as these developments may be to
the scientists, there is also a danger connected with them. Science
runs the risk of becoming a hostage of state and industrial power.
The state is not, as the Church once was, an authority whose
claims to know the truth science might challenge. The secularized
state in the West simply makes no such claims. The obedience of
the scientific community to national interests is secured, not by the
Inquisition, but by the Treasury. Science needs money, and big
science big money, and this has to come mainly from sources the
prim ary interest of which is not the search for truth for tru th ’s sake
but an expectation of return on invested capital. ‘Science policy’ is
a novel concept in the state household. The expert advice needed
for it is provided by the scientific community, but the goals are set
and the decisions taken by others. This means that scientific re­
search is directed to goals external to science itself. The goals are,
on the whole, only vaguely defined in terms of national security and
the well-being of the citizens. T he very vagueness of the goals is apt
to camouflage the ways in which science becomes adjusted to them.
However, the greater promise of pay-off, in the form of marketable
commodities or public utilities, a research project can offer, the
better chances does it have to get a substantial share of the financial
cake. And since the technological pay-off of science in the tradition
of Cartesian-Baconian rationality is much more sure than research
guided by holistic methodologies and a co-evolutionary view of the
m an-nature relationship, it follows that incomparably more effort
and money will be invested in the former than in the latter type of
research— perhaps to the detrim ent of the autonomous develop­
ment of science itself.

13

H ardly a day passes now when one cannot read in the papers the
fresh pronouncem ent of some statesm an, industrial leader, or even
scientist emphasizing the necessity for the nation to keep abreast
with scientific and technological developments. The benefits of
leading the race and the disasters of lagging behind are painted in
vivid colours. W hat then are these benefits and disasters?
The first are vaguely referred to as improved standard of living
or material well-being. But in countries like those of the West, in
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 189

which the material standard has since long surpassed any level
needed for comfortable living and freedom from the hard necessi­
ties of incessant toil for the daily bread, this argum ent has with time
become so hollow that it may well be doubted whether any intelli­
gent person can still take it seriously. It is true that there are
problems, even grave ones, relating to the well-being of the popula­
tion in industrial societies. But these problems are not due to
insufficiencies in the use of high technology for the production and
marketing of commodities. They are rather the embarras de richesse of
a new lifestyle.
It is easier to understand and take seriously the threats conse­
quent upon a backlash. In the integrated network of commercial
and industrial relationships, weak competitive power and low pro­
ductivity automatically lead to a weakening of the nation’s ability
to assert itself on the political level. In relations between partners of
very unequal strength this may constitute a threat to national
independence and security.
It has long been obvious that the m aterial resources of small or
even medium-size nations are insufficient to m aintain pure research
at the highest level in the experimental sciences. Jo in t ventures
based on co-operation between nations have become necessary.
The earliest and probably best example in Europe is CERN. But it
and similar measures in European research policy have not been
able to prevent a brain drain over the years to the power in the
West which not only is strongest in material wealth but also enjoys
the advantage over its European partners of being one national
state. Even more than in pure research, this advantage has shown
itself in industrial research and development: in the creation of
giant laboratories or the building up of concentrated areas of
technological inventiveness such as the famous Santa C lara Valley.
The prospect of industrial backlash due to insufficient concentra­
tion and co-ordination of innovative resources alarms the political
and industrial leaders of Europe. There is an awakening awareness
that the threats to national independence and self-assertion conse­
quent upon decline can be met only by jo in t inter-European efforts
at a scientific and technological revitalization of our continent.
There can be little doubt that the idea is thoroughly realistic in
the sense that an enhancement of the industrial and technological
capabilities of Europe will also enhance the possibility of Europe
asserting itself both as a competing and as a balancing force be­
tween the power control of the West and of the East.
The realism of these aspirations and hopes granted, the following
question remains open for reflection: Will the industrial revitaliza-
190 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

tion of Europe facilitate the adaptation of men to the lifestyle of

industrial society or will it, on the contrary, aggravate the symp­
toms of discontent and maladjustment?

14

My view of this question is pessimistic. I simply see no reason for

thinking that further industrial developments will help society to
overcome its internal grievances. But I can see several reasons for
thinking that the evils will get worse. O ne could condense these
reasons into a single word, inertia. M ore specifically: the inertia of
the wheel of technology kept in motion by science. This is also
spoken of as the ‘technological im perative’. It is of course not the
only force moulding societal developments in industrial countries—
but I think it is the most deepseated (relatively autonomous) and
strongest one. Therefore the self-perpetuating push forward with
which technological progress feeds the industrial mode of produc­
tion, in combination with the threats to the national interests
consequent upon backlash, holds society in an iron grip from which
there is no escape in sight. An attem pt would be a leap into
uncertainties and risks which no responsible leadership can pos­
sibly afford. The technological ‘arms race’ m ust continue.
The competitiveness of the race and the rigidity of its directed-
ness will for the time being make it increasingly difficult to cope
adequately with the environmental and social problems engen­
dered by the changed lifestyle. I doubt w hether even the prospect of
a complete deforestation of C entral Europe, or any other ecological
disaster which is now in the offing, could stop or even appreciably
modify the industrial processes of which it is a side-effect. Threats
caused by industries are likely to be met by counter-technologies
rather than by changes in production; shortage of natural resources
again by the manufacture of new artificial m aterials and by further
release of the energies of the atom. The threats to security arising
from criminality, sabotage, and terrorism will be countered by a
tighter control and surveillance of the individual and by more
efficient use of the coercive powers of the state.
A problem confronting industrial society— perhaps even more
serious than the problems relating to environm ent and resources—
has to do with labour. I am not now thinking prim arily of the
problems of unem ployment in the traditional sense. W hat I have in
mind are the long-term consequences of the automation and robot-
ization of work which electronic technology— the technology of the
 IMAGES OF SCIENCE AND FORMS OF RATIONALITY 191

com puter and the microprocessor—will have. We are on the

threshold of a new era in the industrial revolution. The am ount of
work actually performed by humans will— even assuming a steady
increase in productivity— in all probability drastically decrease. If
this is not to result in mass unemployment, it requires a profound
reorganization of labour. It is difficult to imagine how this could
happen in W estern societies where labour relations on the whole
are based on contractual agreements between employers and em­
ployed. The change seems to require drastic state interference for
the protection of the rights of individuals to a fair share in the
supply of labour opportunities and in the means of m aintaining a
satisfactory standard of living. But there is also another aspect to be
considered.
Shortening the necessary time for work means a corresponding
growth of so-called free time. How will it be used? In some cases
undoubtedly for creative activity, the cultivation of hobbies, and
the study of edifying subjects. In other cases it will no doubt deepen
the feeling of estrangem ent and the aimlessness of life, particularly
for those whose chief enjoyment lies in consumer goods produced in
increasing abundance by an expanding industry. Will not these
latter be the great, great majority? In the materialist atmosphere of
contemporary consumer society it is difficult to see how it could be
otherwise. But this alienation of man in industrial society, first from
nature and then from labour, also breeds dissatisfaction with the
existing order of things, desperate outbreaks of revolt, and cries for
new objects of worship. In these sentiments, already all too notice­
able, I see the greatest dangers to the cohesion of our societies and
to traditional W estern forms of government.

15

My vision of the future of technological and industrial society is

admittedly not very bright. But even if one does not believe that
these are the prospects, one cannot deny the dangers. It is un­
worthy of rational man to let himself be lulled into unconcern for
the future. The possibility of complete annihilation, too, m ust be
faced with courage and dignity. M oreover, awareness of the d an ­
gers is a precondition of being able to cope with them. Such
awareness exists today and is increasing. It exists at a popular level
in the form of various ‘movements’ protesting at the direction of
developments and groping for a new lifestyle and values which will
legitimize it. It exists in more articulate forms in the growing
192 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

consciousness of scientists of their co-responsibility for the uses of

scientific knowledge. And it exists, finally, in the form of tendencies
within science itself towards a changed image of the scientific
enterprise and towards new types of understanding which are, not
less rational, but maybe more reasonable from the point of view of
what is good for man.
 XI

DANTE BETW EEN ULYSSES AND FAU ST

One of the most moving and also most enigmatic passages in the
Divine Comedy is D ante’s encounter with Ulysses. It is described
in the twentysixth Canto of the Inferno. We are now in the region
called Malebolge, deep down on the ladder of sin where treacherous
councellors suffer eternal punishment. T he place is full of flames
and in each flame a hum an being is enclosed. D ante is struck by
one flame which is cloven at the top and asks his guide Virgil, who
is burning in it. Virgil answers that it is Ulysses together with his
companion in the war against Troy, Diomedes. They suffer, we are
told, for the stratagem with the wooden horse which deceived the
Trojans and brought about the fall of the city.
Dante i n great excitement asks permission to speak to the flame.
V irgit aoes not grant him his request, although he thinks it
laudable— ‘degna di molta loda’— and agrees to address the
approaching flame himself. Virgil now asks Ulysses to tell him
where he went to die. Ulysses from inside the flame tells his
interlocutors the following story:
After he had left Circe, who held him captive for more than a
year, neither affection for his son, nor veneration for his old father,
nor love for his faithful Penelope could restrain his burning desire
to get to know the world and every vice and valour of which m an is
capable (‘divenir del mondo esperto, e degli vizi hum ani e del
valore’). Thus he set out on another voyage with the few surviving
companions from his previous travels. They sailed westwards pass­
ing through the strait of G ibraltar, where Hercules had placed his
pillars as a sign that m an should proceed no farther (‘acrid che
l’uom piu oltre non si m etta’). Neglecting the prohibition Ulysses
urged his men to follow him to explore a world where no hum an
being had as yet put his foot. ‘C onsider’, he exclaimed, ‘that you
are not destined to live like brutes, but to aspire- after virtue and
knowledge’ (‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, M a per seguir
virtute e conoscenza’). And so they continued across the waters,
194 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

making their oars wings on a flight which no-one had dared to

undertake before them. Finally, after months of travel, they sighted
a coast with an enormous mountain. A wind blew up from the land,
hit the ship, whirled it round three times, the vessel was sucked into
the depths— ‘and over us the booming billows clos’d 5. Thus
perished the horror-stricken Ulysses and his crew. Here the tale
ends; upright and with dignity the flame then moves away from its
stupefied audience.
This version of how Ulysses ended is not known from elsewhere
and may well be D ante’s invention. The cliff which Ulysses
approached before his shipwreck could have been the m ountain of
Purgatory; the description of its location fits D ante’s conception of
geography. If this was so, interpreters may ponder over the sym­
bolic significance of its inaccessibility for the pagan adventurer. I
shall not develop this theme here.

Dante was obviously shaken by the tale Ulysses had told him. In
the Homeric adventurer he must have recognized if not himself, at
least a kindred soul. D ante was also in search of a world which no
living man had visited before. Like Ulysses he was curious about
the things he witnessed. The questions he constantly puts to his
companion testifies to this. Therefore he was, so to speak, ‘doubly
curious’ about Ulysses whose curiosity had led him to disaster.
W hat is new with D ante’s conception of Ulysses is, in the first
place, that he adds a new dimension to the Homeric hero’s guilt.
Traditionally, Ulysses was censured for cunningness and treacher­
ous behaviour. In the Latin tradition in particular, he was an
evildoer as he had brought about the fall of Troy. We should
remember that the leading survivor among the Trojans, Aeneas,
was regarded as a sort of ‘protofounder’ of Rome, the city which
was destined to become the acknowledged capital of W estern
Christendom. T h at the author of the Aeneid should think Ulysses
deserving of eternal punishm ent is not in the least surprising. The
author of the Commedia does not, at least not in words, question the
grounds of the verdict as presented to him by his guide through
Inferno. But w hether or not D ante thought these grounds sufficient,
he placed the unhappy sufferer in the fires of Hell in a new perspec­
tive by adding to his load of guilt unlimited curiosity, unrestrained
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as an end in itself.
W ith this change of perspective D ante in fact transformed the
 DANTE BETWEEN ULYSSES AND FAUST 195

Homeric figure completely and gave him a symbolic significance

which he did not possess in the Greek tradition but which has since
been prom inent in W estern poetry and thinking. This by itself is a
major achievement of D ante’s. As one commentary on the Ulys-
sean tradition observes , 1 Dante turned Ulysses, the centripetal,
homeward bound traveller who finally settles down in peace after a
life full of restless search, into a centrifugal adventurer who never
comes to rest but constantly moves on in search of the new and as
yet untried. He is a spiritual kinsman of two other illfated fictional
seafarers, the Flying D utchm an and C aptain Ahab in Melville’s
immortal novel. In Tennyson’s words a ‘gray spirit yearning in
desire/to follow knowledge like a sinking star/beyond the utm ost
bound of hum an thought’.
I am by no means the first to note that Dante, by making Ulysses
a symbol of m an’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge, was in fact
heralding the great changes in the spiritual climate of Europe
which were to take place in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
‘Ulysses’ voice’, it has been said, ‘— as D ante gives it life speaks
prophetically for the spirit of the Renaissance ’ .2
Not too long after D ante wrote, his Ulysses transformed found an
incarnation in flesh and blood in a figure who was then himself
going to be transformed into a symbol maybe even more congenial
than the Greek hero to the spirit of our W estern Civilization. This
incarnation was an infamous G erm an, Doctor Jo h an n Faust, who
lived in the turbulent early decades of the Reformation. D ante’s
centrifugal Ulysses is an anticipation of Faust— not so much of the
man as of the symbol.

The idea that it is not befitting for m an to know every truth and
that unrestricted pursuit of knowledge may be sinful is deeply
ingrained in our Judeo-C hristian religious tradition. Its earliest
expression is the myth of the Tree of Knowledge with its Forbidden
Fruit in the first book of the Bible. In the C hristian moral teaching
of the M iddle Ages curiositas is deemed a sinful disposition. Saint
Augustine prays that God save us from it, and Saint Thom as too
condemns it.
The idea that there are truths beyond hum an grasp which man

1 W .B. Stanford and J .V . Luce, The Quest fo r Ulysses, Phaidon Press, London,
1974, p. 189.
2 Ibid.
196 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

should not aspire to get to know is related to certain ideas about

authority and revelation. One could speak about the A uthority of
the (Revealed) W ord— an idea which in its turn has its roots in an
archaic view of the relation between language and reality. Words
have a natural meaning. To understand this meaning is to possess
the truth. Such understanding, however, is not given to common
men but is mediated by interpreters who are accepted as trustw or­
thy by those who exercize the authority. In the orbit of Christian
mediaeval culture this authority got its weight partly from the fact
that it was ancient, handed down since times immemorial, but
partly also from the fact that, if challenged, it could mobilize in its
support the worldly power of the Church.
It was this view of authority in m atters of knowledge and truth
that was contested by awakening science during the Renaissance.
Not agreement with the W ord marked opinions as true, but agree­
ment with the contingent facts of a N ature which lay open to
inspection by the inquiring mind. The challenge did not concern
only the authority of the Christian tradition but also that of the
Ancient writers whom the umanisti of the time were busy reviving
and trying to reconcile with their inherited creed.
The conflict between the old and the new view is epitomized in
the encounter— as told to us— between Galileo and the university
professors in Florence who refused to look in the telescope and see
the revolving moons of Jupiter, on the ground that Aristotle had
shown such bodies to be impossible, ‘an authority whom not only
the entire science of Antiquity but also the venerable Fathers of the
C hurch acknowledge’.3 This was three hundred years after Dante.
The learned men who bowed to authority unwittingly ridiculed
their own party in a conflict which had by then deteriorated into
one between truth and naked power.

Even though D ante’s centrifugal Ulysses can truly be said to herald

a new spirit which eventually, after centuries of struggle, came to
prevail in our W estern World, it would be a great mistake, I think,
to regard D ante himself as an early partisan of this spirit. D ante is
firmly rooted in the culture of the C hristian M iddle Ages. His work,
one feels tem pted to say, is the consumm ation and crowning
achievement of this culture. At a moment when the potentialities
inherent in the seed had reached their climax and doubts and
3 Q uoted from Brecht, Leben des Galilei, pt. 4.
 DANTE BETWEEN ULYSSES AND FAUST 197

cleavage were already beginning to affect the plant, D ante’s Com-

media presented a vision of the supranatural realm which C hristian
spirituality has tried to fathom, more loaded with symbol, more
beautiful and profound than any ever attempted either before or after.
No reader of the Commedia can fail to be impressed by the
violence with which D ante condemns signs of corruption and decay
in the Church and his w rath at the factionism which was ravaging
the political life of practically every town in Italy. This factionism
had made Dante himself an exile from his beloved Florence.
But as a critic of his times Dante is aiming at restoration not at
reformation. This is true not least of his political thinking. It is
essentially a plea for an order in which the Pope and the Em peror
reflected two aspects of the same universal body political, a Civitas
Dei. Dante is yearning for an ideal which was threatened with being
lost; he is not looking forward to the new world which a reborn
Ulysses might yet discover.

W ith the rise of science and the secularization of society it became

part and parcel of intellectual morality that the search for knowl­
edge and truth should not be curtailed by prohibitions. It became
conventional to distinguish sharply between the pursuit and pos­
session of knowledge on the one hand and its application and use
on the other. M any philosophers proclaimed knowledge an intrin­
sic good and something worth pursuing as an end in itself. T here­
fore one who pursues and finds it cannot be held responsible for the
doubtful or even evil use which others m ight make of his findings.
This moral position can be upheld as long as one is reasonably
sure that bad use of acquired knowledge does not constitute a
potential threat to the very basic conditions of hum an well-being or
even to the self-preservation of the race, and as long as one retains a
faith that enlightenment will also contribute to the moral progress of
humanity, make men more ‘humane’—as the revealing phrase goes.
This faith and assurance was for a long time characteristic of the
ethos of W estern civilization. It had a decisive breakthrough at the
time of the French Revolution and it culminated in the century of
European world-domination which ended with the 1914—1918 war.
It was greatly reinforced by 19th-century evolutionistic ideas in
nearly all fields of study and it nourished a widely spread optimistic
belief in progress through science, technology, and the rational
organization of hum an institutions.
198 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

This faith in the basically blissful, beneficial consequences of

m an’s pursuit of knowledge no longer stands unchallenged, how­
ever. Doubts about it have come to loom heavily over cultural debate
in this century. They found an expression, for example, in Edm und
H usserl’s last work, the posthumously published Die Krisis der
europaischen Wissenschaften. It was written before the apocalyptic
prospects conjured up by the nuclear arms-race, genetic technol­
ogy, and large-scale autom ation and robotization of work had be­
come reality for us. Today, half a century later, H usserl’s concerns
have assumed im mediate urgency. It can no longer be taken for
granted that ‘those who lead us into new realms of scientific knowl­
edge’ are ‘prudent and trustw orthy guides conducting us to higher
levels of civilization’ and not ‘false councellors, luring us on to
atomic destruction’— to quote the words of W.B. Stanford 4 one of
the leading writers on the Ulyssean theme.
The question whether the unrestricted pursuit of knowledge is
more for good or for evil rests ultimately on value premisses the
acceptance or rejection of which is not a m atter of truth or false­
hood. But it also seems obvious that the optimistic belief in pro­
gress through scientific enlightenment and technological innovation
has very little rational foundation and should therefore rather be
abandoned altogether. Nor have we the slightest reason to place
our hopes in a return to a stage when the Authority of the Word
will again reign supreme in m atters relating to knowledge and
truth. Such retrograde moves, though abortive, have not been
unknown in our century. T he possibility cannot be ruled out that
they will be followed by others, more subtle and therefore more
successful ones than those we witnessed in H itler’s Germany and
Stalin’s Russia. A culture may thrive under the Authority of the
W ord as long as there is a living belief in its divine inspiration or
otherwise sacred nature. Such was the case in the M iddle Ages. But
when the Word is seen to express only the whims and wishes of
worldly power, clinging to its authority has no rational justification
and is a regress into barbarism and the irrational.
W hat befits us to do, instead, is to take a critical attitude to our
own capabilities and doings. To this end we would be well advised
to reconsider the wisdom embodied in the great works of reflection
on the hum an condition of such teachers of mankind as H om er and
D ante and Goethe.

4 W .B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme, 2nd. ed., Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1963,
p. 182.
 DANTE BETWEEN ULYSSES AND FAUST 199

So let us cast a brief glance at w hat guidance they may be able to

offer us.

The centrifugal Ulysses of Dante was condemned because he trans­

gressed the limits set by divine authority on the freedom of hum an
cognitive enterprise. There can be no doubt but that Faust, in
D ante’s opinion, would have been equally illfated, deserving to be
the devil’s booty, as indeed he was made to be in the first major
work of literature dealing with the subject, C hristopher M arlowe’s
dram a ‘Doctor Faustus’. Goethe’s Faust is also a doubtful charac­
ter and a reader may well wonder whether he deserved to be
rescued and go to heaven after his anything but spotless earthly
career had come to an end. At least one can reasonably doubt
whether his unending striving and refusal to rest content with his
achievement by themselves justified his redemption.
Be this as it may, G oethe’s Faust is saved— and the same may be
said of the centripetal hero of the Homeric epic. Not only D ante’s
ascent from Inferno through Purgatorio to Paradiso but also the n arra­
tives of the knight errants of Hom er and Goethe are dram as of
m an’s road to salvation. The Ulysses of the Odyssey came home to
her who had been patiently awaiting his return all those years,
never losing trust in the traveller’s final return to a life of m utually
shared love and happiness. Dante is kept safe on his wanderings
through the abyss by the divine light of which he first saw a
reflection in the love of his youth and which was eventually to take
him, the restless exile from his home on earth, to eternal beatitude
in heaven. And Faust in rescued from the clutches of the devil and
lifted to heaven by the chorus of angels in which she whom he once
loved but then deserted sings of das Ewig-Weibliche which lifts us
above the inconstancies of fate to union with the higher.

It is striking that in all three cases the power which saves the
w anderer from disaster is incarnate in a female figure: Penelope,
Beatrice, Gretchen. We need not overemphasize, however, the
femininity of this common element of the three tales. T he three
figures are first and foremost symbols. The same holds true of their
male counterparts. Yet w hat they symbolize as couples, Penelope
200 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

and Ulysses, Beatrice and Dante, Gretchen and Faust, can n atu ­
rally be related to those qualities which are traditionally held to be
symbolic of womanhood and m anhood— not only in W estern cul­
ture. O n the one side protective care, self-effacing love, and an
intuitive sense of the boundaries which one can overstep only on
peril of destruction. O n the other side lust for dom inating power
and self-centered glory, untem pered enterprize and an indomitable
will to transcend set boundaries. The two are the Yin and the Yang
of ancient Chinese wisdom.
O f our three heroes, Faust no doubt is the one who deviated most
widely from the paths set to men by convention and rule. Unlike
the other two, he is not striving for a goal. His enterprize has no
telos external to itself. In F aust’s perpetual push forward Spengler
saw a symbol of the spirit which has anim ated W estern Culture. He
therefore called this culture of our Abendland ‘Faustian’. How
appropriate this name is, has become fully obvious only in our
century when science-based technological developments in com­
bination with the mechanized industrial mode of production has
nourished a myth of perpetual economic growth and expansionism.
The managerial type of rationality of which modern natural science
is in origin the outflow has acquired a domination under which
other forms of hum an spirituality— artistic, moral, religious— are
either thw arted or relegated to the underground of irrational belief
and uncontrolled emotion. In no other culture, surely, has Yang
come to dominate as completely over Yin as in our own in its late
days.
The cultures of which the other two heroes, H om er’s Ulysses and
D ante of the Commedia, are representatives, viz. the culture of
Ancient Greece and that of the C hristian M iddle Ages, struck a
happier balance between the two opposing forces. Greek mythology
and philosophy emphasizes throughout the necessity for man to
stay with the metron befitting his capabilities and not lapse into
hubris which is then corrected by nemesis, the goddess-guardian of
equilibrium in the kosmos. Christian religion and philosophy is
inherently ambiguous on m an’s freedom in relation to the created
natural order of things. But it paves a road to salvation for those
who curb their selfish will and put their faith in G od’s superior
wisdom and care for their well-being.
There is no way back for us moderns either to Ancient belief in a
self-preserving cosmic harmony or to D ante’s dream of the restora­
tion of a universal Christian commonwealth. We must try to attain
our own self-reflective understanding of our situation. And I have
wanted to say that it belongs to this achievement that we take
 DANTE BETWEEN ULYSSES AND FAUST 201

warning of the fate which the poet foresaw for the non-Homeric
Ulysses who steered his vessel beyond the pillars of Hercules and
thereby entered the road to self-annihilation.
 X II

TH E MYTH OF PROGRESS

A Contribution to the Debate on Modernity

To Jurgen H aberm as
Critic and champion of ‘the modern project’

The debate in recent years about ‘cultural values’ has centered

heavily round the idea of M odernity. In order to get a grasp of the
debate, we m ust first try to make the idea itself at least moderately
precise. By the Classically M odern I shall mean a climate of
opinion which came to prevail in Europe in the 18th and early 19th
centuries. It is associated in origin with the movement known as
the Enlightenment— but also with its afterm ath, Romanticism. Its
im pact consisted in a progressive em ancipation or liberation of
hum an powers from the bondage of authority and tradition, and in
corresponding changes in the mores of men and in social and politi­
cal forms of life. Two of its catchwords were freedom and reason.
Like most profound changes in ideas, the modernity of the En­
lightenment was heralded in the works of the great thinkers of the
epoch. Three stand out from the rest. They are Rousseau, K ant,
and Hegel. O f them K ant seems to me the purest representative of
the spirit here called classical m odernity.1 W ith his senior Rous­
seau and his junior Hegel we already see clouds arise which have
come to cast shadows of doubt over a later time which some think is
in fact the end of the entire epoch of modernity.
K an t’s work culminates in his three great Critiques: those of

1 K ant’s famous little paper ‘Was ist Aufklarung?’ is accessible, together with
com m ents on its question by Erhard, H am ann, Herder, Lessing, M endelssohn,
Riem, Schiller, and W ieland, in Reclam , U niversal-Bibliothek, Nr. 9714. See also
the essay by Jurgen H aberm as on Foucault ‘M it dem Pfeil ins Herz der Gegenwart. Zu
Foucaults Vorlesung iiber Kant's “ Was ist A u fk la r u n g ? in J . Haberm as, Die neue
Unubersichtlichkeit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1985. Foucault’s piece on K an t’s question
appeared in Magazine Litteraire} Nr. 287, 1984.
 THE M YTH OF PROGRESS 203

pure and practical reason and that which K ant calls ‘judgem ent’
(Urteilskraft). Simplifying m atters a little, one can say that they
deal with knowledge, morality, and art respectively. O r, alterna­
tively, with T ruth, Goodness, and Beauty. Their joint message
am ounts to a separation ol the/three notions or spheres from one
another and an acknowledgement of their autonomy in relation to
dem ands on them ‘from outside’, so to speak. Thus knowledge is
em ancipated from w hat may be called the Authority of the W ord,
meaning the authority of ancient authors and of the Holy Scripture.
M orality, i.e. m an as an autonomous agent or subject, is emanci­
pated from forced obedience to the heteronomous imperatives of
spiritual or worldly power. Art, finally, is liberated from the con­
straints of serving the purposes of either entertaining the public or
glorifying the powerful. The Enlightenment, in K an t’s often quoted
words, m eant ‘der Ausgang des M enschen aus seiner selbstver-
schuldeten Unm iindigkeit’2 or, as he says in a shorter dictum of his:
‘The Enlightenment is to follow the maxim always to think for
oneself’.3

The m aturation of the climate of opinion which I have called

modernity in its classical form is a process going back in time far
beyond the Enlightenment. Its beginnings are traditionally placed
in the Renaissance. As far as the em ancipation of knowledge is
concerned, the origins of modernity may in fact be traced back to
the groping beginnings of an exact science of nature in the late
M iddle Ages. This was a turbulent era of break-up of an old order
and the tentative search for a new one. It is sometimes instructive
to view our own troubles in that ‘distant m irror’.4
The em ancipation of m an as moral agent (subject) was an even
slower and more painful process than the em ancipation of know­
ledge from the tutelage of received authority. In roots, too, reach
back to the troubled centuries of the waning M iddle Ages. Heresies
sprang up throughout W estern Christendom and resulted, at the
time of the Reformation, in the final breach in the unity of the
W estern Church. W ith this rupture began the turn to worldliness
that we call the ‘secularization’ of originally C hristian beliefs and

‘Enlightenment is the exit of man from his self-imposed guardianship.’

3 ‘Die Maxime, jederzeit selbst zu denken, ist die Aufklarung.’
4 ‘Distant mirror’. After Barbara Tuchman’s masterpiece A Distant Mirror, the
Calamitous 14 Century (1978).
 204 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

values. One of its early stages of development was the peculiar

individual-centered form of economic enterprize known as capital­
ism. Later the process led to a gradual erosion of religious creeds
and weakening of the influence of religion on education and ways of
life.
Also in the arts one can trace a long history o f ‘em ancipation’. It
has been said5 that the M iddle Ages knew art only in its applied
forms, serving purposes mostly of an overworldly, transcendental
inspiration, ad majorem gloriam Dei. W ith the Renaissance begins
a shift from the over-worldly to the inner-worldly, with purposes set
in the frames of societies in a process of secularization. But it was
only with the Romantic movement of the late Enlightenment that
the idea was born of the artist as the creator of works of expressive
self-realization to be appreciated solely on the basis of disinterested
aesthetic evaluation. This was from the beginning a somewhat
problem atic conception of autonomy. W ithout it, however, the
avant-garde and experimentalist spirit characteristic of eminently
‘m odern’ art would not have come to prevail.

The great G erm an sociologist M ax W eber coined the term ‘dis­

enchantm ent’ (Entzauberung) for the em ancipation of European
culture and forms of life from the spell of Christian beliefs and
traditions and the term ‘rationalization’ for the progressively sec­
ularized forms of m anagem ent of social and political affairs. It also
seems to have been W eber who first characterized modernity in the
terms of the autonomy of the three K antian spheres of knowledge,
morality, and art. This characterization is thus of a later date;
when modernity had already lost its youthful appeal and assumed
the face of thoughtful self-reflexion.
However, let us first dwell upon the beginnings. The face of
young modernity looked hopefully towards the future. Before the
eyes of awakening humanity opened bright prospects of a cosmopol­
itan world of free and equal men. The image of man of classical
modernity was Shelley’s ‘Prometheus U nbound’:
‘The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless

5 By J. Huizinga. His classic work on ‘the waning o f the middle ages’, first
published in English in 1924, contains a very perceptive analysis o f the aesthetic
sentim ent in the middle ages.
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 205

Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king

Over himself; just, gentle, wise— ’
The most characteristic feature of this optimistic mood is belief
in progress. Not ju st tem porary progress or progress contingent
upon the lasting good will of men, but progress unbounded and
everlasting, progress as something ‘n atu ral’ and necessary. This is
a new conception in the history of ideas. I shall call it the M odern
Myth of Progress. As the locus classicus of this idea one often
designates a passage in an essay6 by the French scientist Fontenelle
from 1688. ‘M en\ Fontenelle says there, 'will never degenerate, and
there will be no end to the growth and development o f human wisdom.’ W hat
may be called the canonic script of this new creed, however, is
about one hundred years younger. This is C ondorcet’s Esquisse d’un
tableau historique des progres de I’esprit humain, written at the time of the
French Revolution.7
For Condorcet progress is not confined to knowledge alone. It
also means the moral perfection of man. O n the political level it will
further the equality of the citizens and eventually also the equality
of all nations. The way to progress has no end in time, other than
‘la duree du globe ou la nature nous a jetes’.8
Condorcet did not for a moment doubt that ‘toute decouverte
dans les sciences est un bienfait pour l’hum anite’.9 But at the same
time, interestingly, he had an acute feeling of our responsibility for
future generations.10 We m ust not waste natu re’s resources through
thoughtless multiplication of our own number, he warns. Condorcet
was convinced, however, that this obligation to the not yet bom will
be fulfilled thanks to an enlightened grasp of our own true good.
Condorcet finished the Esquisse in hiding from the bloodhounds
of the terreur. He died one day after he was caught by them;
whether of exhaustion or because he was killed is uncertain. It is a
sad irony of history that the man who so emphatically proclaimed
and firmly believed in progress for em ancipated hum ankind should
himself be sacrificed on the altar of that Moloch who has since, in
the name of reason, freedom and equality dem anded an uncount­
able num ber of lives, from the terreur consequent upon the G reat
French to the Gulag following the G reat Russian Revolution.

6 ‘Digression sur les anciens et les modemes\

1 Here quoted from Les Classiques du Peuple, Editions Sociales, Paris 1971.
8 Op. cit., p. 77.
9 Op. cit., p. 27. The quotation is from Condorcet’s ‘Discours de reception a
I’A cademie jranqaise’.
10 Op. cit., p. 269ff.
206 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

Condorcet’s philosophy of progress had a distinguished fellowship

throughout the 19th century. In France its protagonists were Comte
and Taine and (the young) Renan, in England Mill and Buckle and
Spencer, to mention only the most influential names of their time.
In those two countries the current of thought which is most closely
wedded to the idea of progress and characteristic of the spirit of
modernity is known as positivism. The nam e is an invention of
Com te’s.
The case of G erm any is a little different. Positivism never
flourished in 19th century Germany. And here m odernity and
belief in progress found many of its early critics.
The great Germ an philosopher of progress is Hegel. His views
are alien to the spirit in which knowledge of the kind the English
call ‘science’ has advanced since the time of the Enlightenment.
Hegel’s philosophy is highly speculative. O ne could superficially
characterize it as a doctrine of the self-realization of freedom
through stages of development of the hum an spirit (Geist): the
subjective, the objective, and the absolute. As is well known,
Hegel’s spiritualism was ‘inverted’ by M arx and Engels to a profes­
sedly m aterialist philosophy about successive phases in the dialec­
tic interplay of productive forces and productive relations. This
development was supposed, by an inner logic, to take men and
their societies from the realm of necessity to that of freedom. The
philosophy of progress of (ultimately) Hegelian inspiration has con­
tinued a strong influence both on theory and on practice until late in
our century. Now its potencies seem pretty much exhausted— at least
for the time being.

Never before has Europe played such a domineering role in relation

to the rest of the world as during the thirteen decades separating
the two greatest revolutionary upheavals in its history. The ‘proud
tower’— to use B arbara T uchm an’s happy p hrase11— was erected
in an optimistic belief in progress for all hum ankind through the
diffusion and civilizing influence of European cultural, commercial,
and religious values over the continents of Africa, America, Asia

11 T he phrase is borrowed from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.

 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 207

and Australia. This crusading enterprize ended in the conflagration

of the First World W ar. But the bird which arose from the ashes
continued its flight to the future in an essentially unchanged mood.
The world was supposed to have been made ‘safe for dem ocracy’.
The reactionary H absburg Empire had fallen to pieces. And the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had not only swept away the most
obsolete remains of pre-Enlightenm ent Europe; it was also hailed—
as once the revolution in France— by a generation of bewitched
intellectuals in the West as a new and still brighter hope for the
future of man under the banners of Reason and Freedom. The spirit
of classical modernity was rejuvenated in the ‘modernistic’ move­
ments which swept the world in the afterm ath of the First W orld
W ar. O ne could also refer to them with the name Neo-M odernity.
The 1920’s were a truly remarkable decade. It saw the rebirth of
positivist philosophy. This time it happened on G erm an soil (Kul-
turboden), moreover. The neopositivist movement later spread west­
wards and eventually conquered and reigned supreme, under the
name ‘analytic philosophy’, in the Anglo-American sphere of cul­
tural influence nearly up to the present day. Hegelianism and its
M arxist off-shoots again migrated East and became, under the
name ‘Marxism-Leninism’, the official ‘philosophy of progress’ in the
new type of society which emerged from the October Revolution.
Vienna, the birth-place of neopositivism, was also the cradle of
psychoanalysis. In ‘m odernist’ post-war Europe its fertilizing in­
fluence reached far beyond the confines of therapeutic medicine
and psychological theorizing into art and literature. It also put in
motion a ‘liberalization’ of moral attitudes which has continued
through a num ber of successive generations.
The 20’s were, moreover, the decade of the Bauhaus, of Charlie
C haplin’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s great movies, of Erwin Piscator’s
and M ax R einhardt’s theatre, of Brecht’s version of The Beggar’s
Opera, of modernist poetry, and new experiments in music and the
plastic arts.12 An interesting testimony to the spirit of neomodernity
and the implicit alliance of the various m odernist tendencies of
post-First-W orld-W ar-Europe is the preface to one of the major
works in the philosophy of the time. This is Rudolf C arn ap ’s Der
logische Aufbau der Welt.13 It appeared in 1928. Here C arnap wrote:

12 W hat are known as ‘m odernist’ m ovem ents in poetry, painting, and

architecture had in fact made their appearance already in the decade preceding
the outbreak or the war. T his fact is, I think, essential for understanding their
post-war vogue.
13 Here quoted from the English translation: R udolf Carnap, The Logical Struc­
ture of the World, translated by R olf A. George, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1967.
208 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

‘We feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on

which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual atti­
tude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of
life; we feel this orientation in artistic movements, especially in
architecture, and in movements which strive for meaningful forms
of personal and collective life, of education, and of external orga­
nization in general. We feel all around us the oame basic orienta­
tion, the same style of thinking and doing.— It is an orientation
which acknowledges the bonds that tie men together, but at the
same time strives for free development of the individual. O u r work
is carried by the faith that this attitude will win the future.’

N aturally, the First W orld W ar and the soon frustrated hopes

which the revolutionary upheavals in its wake had kindled could
not fail also to cast doubts on belief in progress through increased
‘rationalization’ of life and society. There had been early critics
throughout the 19th century— men such as K ierkegaard, Dos­
toyevsky, Nietzsche and the great historian Jacob Burckhardt.
Spengler’s Decline o f the West impressed intellectual moods both
after the First and after the Second World W ar. In the 1920’s there
was also an anti-m odernist and neo-conservative intellectual trend.
Some of its representatives even lost their way into the irrationalist
camp of political reactionism.
In sketches for a preface to another work in philosophy of the
same time which, however, remained unpublished, the author,
Ludwig W ittgenstein, characterized the spirit in which his book
was written as follows:14
‘This is not— the spirit of the main current of European and Amer­
ican civilization. The spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest
in the industry, architecture and music of our time, in its fascism
and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author.’ And:
‘O ur civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress’. Progress
is its form— It is occupied by building an ever more complicated
structure.— I am not interested in constructing a building, so much
as in having a perspicuous view of the foundation of possible

14 T he sketches are printed in Ludwig W ittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen, ed.

by G .H . von W right, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am M ain 1977 and published in
English translation in Ludwig W ittgenstein, Culture and Value, translated by Peter
W inch, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980, p. 6.
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 209

buildings. So I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists

and my way of thinking is different from theirs’.
Although there is no docum entary evidence for it, it seems ob­
vious that W ittgenstein’s words were m eant to answer those of
C arnap which I quoted. At the time when they were written, 1930,
they represented an undercurrent which, however, has in the
meantime risen more and more to the surface.

It is significant that both philosophers, C arnap and W ittgenstein,

mentioned architecture in the passages quoted. The second,
moreover, had himself been active as architect.
The modernist movement in architecture—also called ‘functional­
ism’— is an embodiment of the same avant-garde spirit as is m od­
ernism in music, painting, and poetry. But the case of architecture
is, from the point of view of a ‘diagnostic of the times’, of special
interest. It problematizes, one could say, the very idea of m oderni­
ty. This has to do with the fact that architecture— unlike, say,
music or painting— does not belong exclusively in the sphere of art.
It also belongs in the sphere of technics, and therewith in th at of
science. It has, moreover, a moral, i.e. social, dimension from
which it cannot, like the ‘pure’ arts, detach itself.
This multidimensionality inherent in architecture is reflected in
the very name ‘functionalism’— which, by the way, seems never to
have become firmly established in Anglo-Saxon terminology. To be
functional is to serve a purpose. It is an instrum ental(ist) notion. So
the question at once arises: W hat purpose? or Whose purpose? A
house or a built up area which is functional for the life of families is
not, in general, functional for adm inistrative, commercial or in­
dustrial purposes. A single building can, of course, be functional for
one or the other of these purposes. But when planning is concerned
there may be conflict. Adopting H aberm as’s handy terminology,
this can be described as a conflict between the Life-World (Lebens-
welt) of people and the System.15 The concentration of public
buildings, banks, and offices in town centres may be functional for
bureaucracy and for big enterprizes. But not so from the point of
view of the townspeople themselves. The rise in ground prices and

13 See also the essay by Haberm as, ‘Modeme und postmodeme Architektur\ in the
collection o f his essays Die neue Unubersichtlichkeit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am M ain
1985.
210 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

rents kills off the small stores and workshops and drives the dwell­
ers to the periphery. As a consequence, those who work in town
may have to suffer hours of congested transportation every day
from the place where they sleep to the place of their jobs. This,
surely, is anything but ‘functional’. It gives us reason to ask
whether life in the brave new world, for which building, landscap­
ing, and town-planning creates the outer fram^, really bears wit­
ness to the ‘progress’ which the theoreticians of modernist
architecture, a Le Corbusier or a Gropius, professed and believed in.
Behind this question there is another: W hat is progress? W hat
does the word mean? Those who talk about it, I am afraid, usually
take an answer for granted. In fact, it is not at all clear w hat the
answer is. Since we cannot here bypass the question, we m ust stop
for a moment to reflect on it.

O f the three spheres: knowledge, morality, and art, the last two
have in common that they are connected with values. The first
again is concerned with facts. J u st as it was an achievement of the
Enlightenment to have defended the autonomy of the three spheres
against the encroachment on them of external authority, it was
another achievement of this era to have emphasized a separation of
facts from values, of Is from Ought. Thus a conceptual contrast was
marked which had not been noted before in the same sharp form.
The man chiefly responsible for it was David Hum e— the philos­
opher of whom K ant said that he had awakened him from ‘the
dogmatic slum ber’. It has in recent times become common to refer
to this separation— particularly in the form of Is vs. O ught— with
the name ‘H um e’s Guillotine’. O ne wonders, incidentally, whether
the inventor16 of the name was aware of the irony implicit in the
allusion to the executioner’s tool. It, too, dates from the time of the
Enlightenment; it has become the sombre symbol of the ‘dialectics’
which led to the terreur and to the crowning of a harlot Queen of
Reason.
Now progress is distinctly a value notion. In this it differs from
related concepts such as change and growth— and also from de­
velopment. These latter are (or may be treated as) purely factual.
T hat one state of affairs represents progress in comparison with

16 Professor Max Black in the essay ‘The Gap between “Is ” and “O u g h t first
published in The Philosophical Review 73, 1964, reprinted in Black’s collection of
essays Margins o f Precision, Cornell University Press, Ithaca N.Y. 1970.
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 211

another implies that the first, in addition to being later in time than
the second, is also, even if not wholly good, so at least better than
the second. T h at something is good or better than something else
is, however, not anything which can be established by scientific
argum ent or otherwise on the basis of facts about the things in
question.
Here a qualification is in place. It can be an established fact that
something is better than something else as a means to some end.
This means that the first is more efficient, more useful, for its
purpose. It has, as we say, greater instrum ental value. Judgem ents
of instrum ental value are factual and therefore no ‘genuine’ value
judgem ents. Pronouncing the end or the purpose good is a
(genuine) value judgem ent. So are all judgem ents which say of
something that it is in itself good or bad, better or worse than
something else.
Value is attributed to or conferred on something by a valuating
subject. In this sense value is subjective. Only factual judgem ents
are objectively true or false. This view of value can be said to inhere
in H um e’s distinction. It is a characteristically modern view, I
should say. It is not the view of value of Plato or St. Augustine or
Aquinas. And not all philosophers agree with it even today.
From w hat has been said it follows that the sole criterion that
progress has occurred in the conditions under which men live is the
way in which those concerned value their own situation. The
modern M yth of Progress is a conjecture that men and their
societies will thrive better if they are free to follow K an t’s maxim to
trust reason rather than authority. No facts about diminishing
illiteracy, improved sanitary conditions or increased per capita
income can, by themselves, prove this conjecture true. If it is
inherent in the idea of modernity that there are no objective stan­
dards of goodness (value), then, in an enlightened view, belief in
progress is ju st another article of faith. It may turn out to have as
little rational justification as any which a pope or an em peror or
some other pre-modern authority once tried to im plant in men.

The contrary of progress is regress. Regress means deterioration

and decay. T h at which follows later is less good than th at which
went before. Ju st as there exists a climate of opinion which pro­
fesses belief in progress, there is also one which believes in regress.
The first is optimistic, forward-looking, and welcomes change. This
212 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

is what we call a ‘progressive5 attitude. The second tends to be

pessimistic, nostalgic, and conservative. In extreme forms it is what
we call ‘reactionary’ or ‘retrograde’.
It is noteworthy that the two great civilizations of which our
W estern Culture is an ‘am algam ated continuation’— the Greco-
Roman and the Judaic— at no stage in their history entertained the
idea of linear, unbounded progress; it is even more noteworthy that
both can be said to have shared an implicit faith in the deteriora­
tion of the world. From Greek mythology we know the tale of a
Golden Age in the infancy of mankind. After it followed, in succes­
sion, a silver, a copper, and an iron age. They were characterized
by increasing scarcity and material hardship. Also morality de­
teriorated. Deceit and discord sprang up among men, and there
were more and more wars.
Typically, the tellers of the story, from Hesiod on, placed them ­
selves in the iron age, the least good of all. However, there is also
restoration in sight. The world will return to another Golden Age.
It, too, is doomed to degenerate but also to be restored— in a
perpetual succession of world cycles.
The model for the Greek idea of decay and rebirth in history is, of
course, the life cycle. Individual plants, animals, and men are born,
grow up to m aturity, then age and die. But they also have offspring.
Why could this rhythm not hold also for a people or a culture or
even for the hum an race as a whole?
There are other familiar processes of a cyclic character in nature.
Some are related by analogy, others also by causal tie, to the life
cycle. Examples are the four seasons of the year, the phases of the
moon, the regularly repeated span between rising to work in the
morning and going to rest with the sunset.
Impressive and suggestive as these analogies are, it is not easy to
see how they apply to history. The tale of the Golden Age and its
gradual deterioration stands in need of a supplem ent, viz. a tale of
how this age is restored through a gradual amelioration of things.
This tale, to the best of my knowledge, is never told by the Ancients.
We hear of how the depraved man was swept away by angered
gods— a Greek counterpart to the Deluge of the Bible. This was
supposed to have happened in the copper age. The age of the few
survivors was the iron one. In its beginning there was temporary
progress. The ascent of primitive man to civilization is eloquently
described by Lucretius in his great poem De rerum natura. Lucretius dftl
not believe in myths. But in his tale, too, progress gained is doomed i '
decay; indeed the world itself will one day perish. Thus the Greek id'
of history has a predominandy pessimistic flavour. ^
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 213

This pessimism is nowhere more impressive than in Plato’s

Politeia (‘Republic’). After having described the Ideal State, based
on reason and ruled by philosopher-kings, Plato in the eighth and
ninth books of the dialogue describes the successive stages of the
state’s deterioration. His description is a masterpiece of socio-
psychological insight. Next in perfection after the (so far) nowhere
realized ideal comes the aristocratic rule of the olden times. It is
called timocracy from the word time which means awe or respect or
honour. It is not instituted by reason but is upheld by the implicit
acceptance by the citizens of an inherited order the superior wis­
dom of which is not questioned. Its rulers are the elder and more
experienced. This order is then gradually replaced by an oligarchy
of a few rich and powerful men or families. They are often envious
of or hostile to each other and tend to pursue their own interests
rather than care for the common good. Society is now divided into
the rich and the poor. W hen the rich can no longer rule the masses,
a society of a more egalitarian type emerges. It is called democracy.
In it the self-interest of the individuals dominates over the solidar­
ity of the citizens. Lawlessness and disorder increase. Finally, a char­
ismatic leader or strong man takes over, exploiting for his purposes the
miseries of the poor and the fear of anarchy of the rich. He is the
tyrant. Tyranny or dictatorship is based neither on reason nor on
respect for legitimate authority nor on the consensus among free and
equal citizens, but on brute force. The social order has reached its
lowest stage and become as bad as can be. When things cannot
deteriorate further there is hope that out of chaos will crystallize a
better order, maybe even an ideal state. But how the restoration is going
to take place, on this the philosopher—like mythology—is silent.
A practical consequence of this gloomy political philosophy
would seem to be an extreme conservatism. If every big change in
the body politic must be a change for the worse, the best recipe for
the rulers is to guard maximal stability. Only an immobile political
order can be a good one.
Plato the realist is as far as can be from the political spirit of
W estern modernity. But Plato the utopist had an idea of a state
built on reason which has nourished this same spirit from its
beginning up to the present day.

10

The Ju d aic myth of regress differs interestingly from the Greek one.
It is not cyclic. It foresees a one-way process of gradual depravation
214 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

of the sinful man. Its two poles are the Fall of Adam and, in the
Christian version, the Second Coming of the Redeemer. These two
poles have a transcendental, supranatural or over-worldly, setting.
Herein lies the greatest difference between the Grefek and the
Judeo-C hristian ‘philosophies of history’. The pole corresponding
to the Golden Age is set in Paradise which, the Creation story
notwithstanding, is not ‘of this world’. The Second Coming marks
the end of the world and the transm utation of life to either eternal
torments for the doomed in Hell or final union with God for the
saved in Paradise Regained.
The finite span of time between the poles is essentially a story of
decline. St. Augustine— the C hristian Plato— describes it in his
monum ental work De Civitate Dei (‘The G od-State’). History is a
passage through six stages. Like the Greek mythologists, Augustine
finds himself in the last and worst period. This, in fact, began with
the First Coming. Since then m ankind has been awaiting the
Harm ageddon or universal conflagration which signalizes the
Saviour’s Second Coming.
Expectations of the near end of the world were almost constant
throughout the M iddle Ages. They increased in intensity towards
the close of the period, when immense vicissitudes befell W estern
Christendom in the forms of the G reat Plague, the invasion of the
Turks, the H undred Years W ar, and the heresies and final schism
in the Church. In this world man can strive for final salvation in the
next world. He can work for his soul by extolling the goodness and
wisdom of God or by ‘im itating’ the ways of life of Christ. But he
cannot hope for a gradual amelioration of the living conditions of
men through changed forms of government or of the social order.
Belief in worldly progress is an illusion.

11

In the world thus awaiting its end there was, however, advance­
ment in knowledge and technology. New forces began to mould
societies. W ith these developments new hopes were lit. Eventually
men began to dream of progress of their own making also in this
world of ours. This happened in the turbulent era of the Renais­
sance and Reformation. Knowledge which originally was thought
needful mainly for the salvation of our souls, more and more took
the form of a useful instrum ent for doing better in this world. The
changed attitudes drew inspiration and support from elements in
both Ju d aic and Greek mythology. God had, after all, created man
 THE M YTH OF PROGRESS 215

in his image and given him domination over the rest of nature.
Prometheus had infused self-reliance in m an and taught him the
arts and skills whereby he could enhance his m aterial well-being
and advance in civilization. Prometheus was punished for his hubris.
But the god who punished him was not the loving Father of all
Christians but an envious and distrustful invention of pagan imag­
ination.
Yet this Christian God, too, had to recede somewhat in the
background of m en’s thinking before the change in climate of
opinion became possible which marked the birth of w hat I have
called classical modernity with its belief in the advent of an era of
linear and unending progress for the em ancipated man.

12

In order to appreciate the novelty and persuasive force of this

modern idea of progress, we m ust view it against the background of
what is perhaps the most significant single feature in the cultural
physiognomy of the 19th century. This is the idea of development
or evolution. It is by no means confined to biology. Nor is it of
biological inspiration, like the Greek idea of growth and decay. Its
roots should rather be sought in an awakening sense of historicity.
By this I mean a (‘secularized’) interest in the origin of things and
a view of history, not as a haphazard flow of disjointed events, but
as development, i.e. as a directed and ordered succession o f ‘geneti­
cally’ related stages. A view of the present as a child of the past.
Long before Darwin, Goethe wrote his Metamorphose der Pflanzen
and Lam arque his Philosophie zoologique. T he work of Rasmus Rask
and Jacob Grimm on the evolution of spoken sound is also pre-
Darwinian. It laid the foundation of the mighty tradition of 19th
century historical linguistics, Sprachgeschichte. A paradigm for D ar­
win himself was Lyell’s work on the history of the Earth. But, of
course, the crowning achievements of this trend in the biography of
ideas were D arw in’s The Origin o f Species and The Descent o f Man.
Darwin and Darwinism had repercussions in all areas of culture
and science, com parable in paradigm atic strength to the im pact of
Newton and Newtonianism a century and more earlier.
The evolutionism and historicism of the time is, naturally,
reflected also in philosophy. The three main figures here are Hegel,
Comte, and Spencer. They are also good illustrations of character­
istic differences between the three main national divides in 19th
century European culture: the German, the French, and the English.
216 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

Hegel’s ‘phenomenology’ of the development of the spirit (Geist) is

a speculative and rather ‘Teutonic’ tale of m an’s ascent on the
ladder of freedom. C om te’s three stages: from the religious through
the metaphysical to the positive may be said to reflect the ‘Gallic’
spirit of order and reason. Spencer is less speculative than Hegel
and less rationalist than Comte. He rather represents the common
sense of British empiricism.
Spencer is also the first to have attem pted w hat may be called a
scientific analysis of the meaning of evolution and development.
According to Spencer, a whole or totality is the more developed the
more differentiated it is into parts with specialized functions.
Secondly, it is more developed the more integrated its parts are for
the functions proper to the whole. Problematic aspects aside,
Spencer’s characterization of evolution through differentiation and
integration— Spencer later added a third feature which he called
determ ination— is probably as good as one can wish for.
But what has all this to do with progress? Progress, we said, is a
value concept. Why, in which respect, is the in Spencer’s sense
more developed whole better than the less developed? Could not
the process we call evolution equally well be one of decline and
regress?
Spencer himself was aware of a problem here. But he did not
doubt that evolution was progress, was for the good. (Darwin, too,
implicitly shared this view.17) ‘The transformation of the
homogenous into heterogenous is that in which progress essentially
consists’, Spencer w rote.18 The law of organic progress, moreover,
is for him the law of all progress. Here ‘all progress’ also includes
moral improvement, the progressive ascent to the good and the
‘evanescence of evil’.19 Progress, moreover, is not accidental. It is a
kind of Law of Nature. Spencer repeatedly calls it a ‘benevolent
necessity’. This means that evil and immorality will have to dis­
appear and man become perfect. Perfect also as a member of
society. Because, Spencer says, ‘surely must the hum an faculties be
moulded into complete fitness for the social state’.20
T hat moral progress is a (natural) necessity is, of course, sheer
illusion. But there is a sense in which the question whether develop­

17 The Origin o f Species, reprint of sixth edition, Oxford University Press, London
1951. See especially Chapter Four ‘Natural Selection; or the Survival o f the Fittest’. Ib.,
p. 85: ‘—natural selection can act only through and for the good of each being”.
18 Spencer, Essays, D. Appleton & Co, New York 1891, p. 10.
19 The quoted words are the title of a chapter in Spencer’s work Social Statics.
20 Spencer, Social Statics, Williams and Nor^ate, London 1902, p. 31. The
quotation continues ‘so surely must evil and immorality disappear; so surely must
man become perfect.’
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 217

ment means improvement has an affirmative answer. T he more

developed a species, the better adapted to the environm ent are, on
average, its individual members. T h at is: the more capable are they
to satisfy their needs for nutrition, protection, and procreation.
W hat holds for the relation between species, holds m utatis m utan­
dis also for groups and individuals inside the species. Being more
evolved thus means being fitter, stronger in w hat is called ‘the
struggle for survival’. Development has survival value, i.e. value for
the purpose of survival. This is an instrum ental sense of betterness
(goodness).
Is survival then not a good thing in itself? From the point of view
of the survivor it is. This, I think, is ‘true by definition’. But is the
species, or the group, or the individual, or the organization which
survives in competition better, more valuable, than the one which
perishes? It is not clear that the answer to this question m ust be
affirmative. Nor that it must be negative. The only thing that is
clear is that it cannot be decided on the basis of scientific or
otherwise ‘naturalistic’ criteria of development.
We have arrived at the very core of the question W hat is prog­
ress? And we have also laid bare one of the main sources of
confusion and obscurity in efforts to answer it. This source is a
tendency to transform questions of the value of ends into questions
of the value of means (to those ends). One could call this a tendency
to factualize or to instrum entalize or to reify value. It has been
greatly encouraged by Darwinism and other evolutionist doctrines,
but also by developments in science generally. For this one cannot
blame science. But one can deplore the tendency. Because it makes
us blind to the genuine issues of value and thereby also of progress.

13

It is something like an irony of the history of ideas that the century

which, in the form of Darwinian evolutionary theory, seemingly
afforded scientific underpinning of belief in progress did the same
also for belief in regress. This second kind of quasi-scientific sup­
port came from an achievement of the century which in im portance
bears comparison with D arw in’s. This is the Law of Conservation
of Energy and its ‘com plement’, if I may call it so, the Second Law
of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of (Growing) Entropy.
According to these principles, roughly speaking, all forms of energy
are finally transm uted into equivalent am ounts of heat (thermic
energy). Furtherm ore, differences in tem perature tend to cancel out
218 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

until a stage is reached when the molecular motion, which is the

generator of tem perature, ceases. The entire ‘clockwork’ of the
universe comes to a standstill at the ‘tem perature’ (really the
no-tem perature) of absolute zero. The state is known as the Heat-
Death. It is an undifferentiated ‘egalitarian chaos’ with no order or
structure. The process term inating in this state is the antithesis of
development in the Spencerian sense. The H eat-D eath is thought
to be the ultim ate state to which the entire universe tends. Evolu­
tion is only a tem porary move in a contrary direction in limited
regions of space and time.
Few, if any, scientific theories have had a more powerful in­
fluence on the intellectual imagination than the Second Law of
Therm odynam ics.21 (D arw in’s theory is not so much an appeal to
imagination as an encouragement to scientistic superstitions about
progress.) M any critics of contem porary civilization, who viewed
with misgivings ongoing tendencies to egalitarianism, cultural
nivellation, standardization, and internationalism , saw in them an
analogy in history to the workings of th at great ‘equaler’, the
Second Law of Therm odynamics, in the universe as a whole. Thus,
for example, Nietzsche, and Spengler, and the Adams Brothers:
Brooke and Henry. W ith Nietzsche the speculations led to a version
of the ancient doctrine of world-cycles. According to this version
the universe will, within immense spans of time, return again and
again to identically the same state.
It almost goes without saying that these analogies between ther­
mic processes and history, however suggestive they may seem and
however ingeniously worked out, are pure fiction. Thermodynamics is
ju st as worthless as a scientific underpinning of belief in regress and
decay as the Theory of Evolution is for belief in progress.
It deserves mention here, however, that the notion of entropy has
come to figure prominently in recent scientific developments of our
century. I am referring to research, associated chiefly with the
name of Ilya Prigogine, on energy flow in w hat are called ‘dissipa­
tive systems far from equilibrium ’. Living organisms exemplify
such structures. This research, too, has inspired applications by
analogy to hum an affairs. Prigogine himself has become something
of a scientific guru for many social critics. I think we have good
grounds for viewing the phenomenon in question with guarded
scepticism. But it is also obvious that considerations about entropy

21 On this see the interesting book by the physicist Stephen G. Brush, The
Temperature o f History. Phases o f Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Burt
Franklin & Co, New York 1978.
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 219

increase have sound and valuable applications to research on ener­

gy consumption, recycling, and waste in agricultural and industrial
systems. Such research may turn out to be of practical significance
for coping with problems which now weigh heavily on what I
would call the ‘environm entalist conscience’ of modern man.

14

I have tried to clear away the mist of pseudo-science hovering over

beliefs in progress as well as in regress. Let us now take a look at the
rational grounds which might have justified the early beliefs that
the road of em ancipated man to the future was going to be a road of
progress.
I shall review this question briefly from the standpoint of the
three spheres which the Enlightenm ent thought of as autonomous
and wanted to liberate from the tutelage of heteronomous author­
ity. These were the spheres of knowledge, of morality, and of art.
In the realm of knowledge, amelioration means in the first place
growth, the accumulation of more and more recorded truth. In the
natural sciences it also means increased unification of knowledge
by means of explanatory theories. Newton’s theory of gravitation
and D arw in’s of natural selection are good examples. It may be
that the advancement of science is not a linear and steadily accu­
mulative process. Shifts in paradigms, sometimes called ‘scientific
revolutions’, stand for discontinuity and changes of direction. But
such jum ps and bends do not void gains already attained. They
rather follow the schema of what Hegel called Aufhebung and Aufbe-
wahrung. This means that the facts remain ‘on record’ even if they
are interpreted in a new way or if their position within the theo­
retical frame is shifted.
Is the accumulation of knowledge progress? Is it a good thing to
get to know more? Many philosophers have thought that knowl­
edge is a value in itself. Then presumably a greater am ount of
knowledge is more valuable than a lesser am ount. I shall not deny
that it sometimes is so. W hether it is always so seems to me less
certain.
W hat is certain, however, is that (the growth of) knowledge in
general and scientific knowledge in particular may have in­
strum ental value for purposes which lie outside the accumulative
process itself. ‘Knowledge is power’, as Francis Bacon said. He
m eant power to produce the desired and prevent the undesired
by m anipulating the causal mechanisms which govern natural
220 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

processes. O r, as the French positivists after Comte put it: 4Savoir

pourprevoirpour pouvoir’. Both formulas reflect the technological aims
of knowledge, if by ‘technology’ we mean science-based technical
innovations in the service of man.
The instrum ental value, i.e. usefulness, of science has steadily
increased since the days of Bacon. Not least in the second half of
our century has this value been enormously enhanced. So much so
that it is threatening all our other notions of value with a corre­
sponding ‘reification’. A striking example is the commercialization
of art and of creative achievement generally.
Is this increase in instrum ental value of science, i.e. the enhance­
ment of m an’s power over nature, progress— a good thing in itself?
Condorcet, as we have seen, held that all advance in science is ipso
facto beneficial. But we must surely take a more guarded attitude.
W hether scientific knowledge is beneficial or not depends on the
purposes for which it is used. And that science can be put to serve
destructive and evil purposes should by now be clear to everyone.
One thing which power over nature can achieve is to increase the
material well-being of men. O f this industrial and technological
developments give impressive evidence. There can be no question
but that enhanced material well-being, standard of living, in many,
perhaps most, cases is progress in a genuine sense of the word. This
means that it is valued, by those who benefit from it, as an improve­
ment of their lives. But it is not necessary that this valuation will
persist when growth has reached above a certain level or when its
repercussions on the environm ent or on the social order have to be
taken into account.
So much for the sphere of knowledge. W hat then about that of
morality?
M oral progress, as envisaged by the heralds of modernity, con­
sists in the perfection of man. W hat was m eant was not so much
progress in the life of the individual as progress from generation to
generation. J u st as the accumulation of knowledge does not mean
that individual men know more and more, but that the impersonal,
total ‘body of knowledge’ increases as Science progresses, similarly
M an, the hum an race, not necessarily individual men, becomes
with time better and better, more civilized, more ‘hum ane’. This
idea of perfection or progress hardly makes sense outside a social or
political context. T h at the perfected man is more civilized than his
less perfect ancestors should mean that he is more tolerant, less
selfish and greedy, more inclined to see a loving brother in his
neighbour than an alien enemy. Then also the social order is
correspondingly perfected. It tends towards a ju st society of free
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 221

and equal citizens. Progress thus conceived is concom itant with

something which can, in a broad sense, be called a dem ocratization
of institutions and of the system of government. Ideally, a demo­
cratic society is an order in the creation and m aintaining of which
every member of the society is also a participant.
It is much more difficult to get a foothold for the idea of progress
in the sphere of art than in the spheres of knowledge and morality.
It is even questionable whether progress has any application at all
to art. The nearest analogy to progress which I can see in the
emancipation of artistic activity from the tutelage of religious belief
or moralistic edification is an enhancement of the artist’s possibili­
ties to express the moods of his time, its hopes and fears, its visions
of beauty but also its disgusts.
Schiller envisaged an ‘aesthetic education of m an’ in the spirit of
modernity. "Alle Menschen werden Bruder\ sings the chorus in Beeth­
oven’s Ninth. This is the Enlightenm ent’s great hymn to progress.
But perhaps the special role of art within modernity was, in the
longer run, not so much to extol its hopes as to debunk its illusions,
to reveal its agonies, and thus to pave the way for a climate of
opinion which comes after the modern.

15

The modern idea of progress thus exhibits two main divides, partly
of different historical origin. One is the idea of progress through the
accumulation of knowledge and advancement of science and tech­
nology. The other associates progress with the perfection of man
and the civic order.
Science is the foundation of m an’s technological mastery of na­
ture. In the frame of an industrialized mode of production this
mastery has come to further economic growth and higher standards
of living. The alliance of science, technology, and industry, can be
called a techno-system. It tends to become global and transnation­
al. Therewith it also becomes increasingly independent of the socio­
political system(s) organized on the basis of cultural and ethnic
kinship into national states. The increased tension between the
national and the transnational, i.e. between the political system
and the technosystem, is one of the characteristic traits of the
physiognomy of late 20th century civilization.
Economic growth is a measurable quantity. It can be assessed in
the figures of GNP, per capita income, volume of production of
goods, and in various other ways. Economic growth has become a
222 THE TREE OF KNOW LEDGE

main motive force for the expansion of the technosystem. As a

consequence, the progress which was thought to follow from the
advancement of science (accumulation of knowledge), tends to
become identified with economic growth as such. I shall refer to
this identification as the Q uantification of Progress. Progress thus
measured is no longer a value concept. It is a ‘factualized’, value
neutral notion, an instance of w hat philosophers call the reification
of value.
The second grand idea of progress, the perfection of man, was
thought to imply a dem ocratization of the socio-political order. The
process, having started in England centuries earlier, received a
decisive impetus from the American and the French revolutions. It
was, after a period of stagnation, further accelerated by the events
of 1848 and also by the unification of the states of Italy and
Germany. It became global, world-wide, in the afterm ath of the
first and second world wars. In w hat we call the W estern W orld it
took the form of parliam entary government, granting of universal
suffrage, civil rights, freedom of the press, etc. In other parts of the
world, first Russia and later China, the process assumed different
forms. The people’s democracies of the East were very unlike the
liberal democracies of the West. So much so that the one side tended
to regard the use of the term ‘dem ocracy’ by the other side as a
misnomer or as mockery. These differences notw ithstanding the
question is essentially of one and the same big process of mod­
ernization (rationalization) of societies, the breaking up of old
social orders and the shaping of new ones, stam ped not least by
belief in the blessings for the peoples of industrialization and tech­
nological advance.
J u st as there is a tendency to identify progress through the
accumulation of knowledge with economic growth, there is a cor­
responding tendency to identify progress through social reform
with the external forms of rational adm inistration (bureaucracy)
and law-giving in the name of the people. I shall speak of this as a
Formalization of Democracy. This is another reification of the
value notion of progress. Like the idea of economic growth in
relation to the technosystem, the idea of the dem ocratization of
society has been a main motive force of the action of the political
system on the road of modernity in the past 200 years.
W hether a society thus ‘dem ocratized’ is the more just, the more
hum ane order which the philosophers of the Enlightenm ent saw
emerging in a disenchanted and rationalized world seems in­
creasingly problematic. There may even inhere a kind of contradic­
tion between two of the main aspects of democracy, the egalitarian
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 223

and the emancipatory one, between equality and freedom. A max­

imally egalitarian society can perhaps not exist w ithout individual
freedom being heavily curtailed, and a maximally liberal society
not without engendering inequalities among its members.

16

The sole measure of progress as a value, we said, is the way people

thrive in the circumstances under which they live. These
circumstances— the external frame of our life-world— are moulded
by developments within the two systems, the technosystem and the
political system. As we have seen, these systems have their charac­
teristic measures of progress: increased wealth in the one case,
formalized democracy in the other. These measures are factual and
not evaluative.
It is contingent whether the two types of measure of progress, the
evaluative one of the people themselves and the reified ones of the
two systems, give concordant results. Do economic growth and
formalized democracy enhance the quality of life? Since the answer
may be Yes or No, depending upon details of the situation, one can
speak of a latent tension between the life-world and the system-
world.22
It is, moreover, also contingent to which extent the measures of
progress of the two systems themselves mutually agree. Are eco­
nomic efficiency and extended democracy compatible, or not? Does,
for example, participation in the m anagem ent of enterprizes by all
those employed in them further or ham per productivity? This,
incidentally, has become a grave problem in the only society which
has made a serious effort to implement a system of self-managing
economic communities, Yugoslavia. Thus one can also speak of a
latent tension between the two systems. Both have a tendency to
autonomy and domination. We live in an era when the technosys­
tem tends to get the upper hand in relation to the political system.
The decisions of the latter are often nothing but a confirmation of a
fait accompli created by the former.
The quantification of progress in economic terms had its remote
origin in the em ancipation of knowledge (science) from the external
22 The idea of a contrast and tension between ‘life-world’ and ‘system-world’ is
a main theme in the mature work of Jurgen Habermas. Habermas’s writings have
been a source of inspiration for my own efforts to attain to a critical understanding
of the world in which we live. It is possible, however, that I give to the terms
‘life-world’ and ‘system’ a somewhat different connotation from the sense in which
they occur with Habermas.
224 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

authority of Church and State. Analogously, the reification of

progress in formalized democracy had its historic roots in the
em ancipation of man as a moral subject. W hat happens now is that
the two systems are recoiling destructively on their own origin.
The technosystem is threatening the autonomous pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake. Scientific truth is not contested, as of
yore, by another claim to truth raised by religious or other author­
ity. But research and academic training are to an increasing degree
oriented toward the ends of economic growth, competitive power,
and technological innovation. In the educational programs of states
the notion of schooling (for a profession) takes the place of that of
studying (for one’s education). In a corresponding m anner, the
autonomy of the subject is threatened by the necessity to conform
to the pressures of opinion and to regulations in the creation of
which he has not participated and the sense of which he often
cannot understand. The individual is alienated from the im person­
al social machinery run by selfrighteous bureaucrats. His life-world
is hedged in so that his ‘real freedom’ is reduced to narcissistic
indulgence in external symbols of status and well-being which
consumer goods and material possessions offer.
Thus the em ancipation and autonomy of man both as knowing
subject and as self-determined agent threatens to get lost because of
the deforming influence on the life-world— its ‘colonialization’ to
use H aberm as’s term 23— by the two systems. The threat m aterial­
ized would mean the bankruptcy of the lofty ideals of Classical
M odernity and the final debunking of its great M yth of Progress as
a delusion. Belief in the ‘m yth’ still prevails and is proclaimed by a
thousand voices of advertizers and propagandists. But the progress
of which these latter day Sirens sing is not the perfection of which
the Enlightenm ent dream t but its reified identification with eco­
nomic growth and extended formalization of social conduct.

17

The second great shock to modern society came with the rise of
fascist barbarism in Europe and the consequent 1939-45 war. The
reaction which followed after the second w ar was very different
from the reaction after the first. The end of the war did not kindle
great hopes for peaceful developments in the future. It had barely

23 ‘die Kolonialisierung der Lebenswelt durch Imperative verselbststandigter

wirtschaftlicher und administrativer Handlungssysteme’. In ‘Modeme und postmod-
eme Architektur\ op. cit., p. 28.
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 225

ended when it was succeeded by the ‘Cold w ar5. Nor did its end
release a superabundance of creative energies. This second fact is
very striking when we compare the 1920’s with the late 40’s and the
50’s. The first was perhaps the most creative decade of the century
in science as well as art. This was eminently true of the defeated
Germany (Berlin), the disintegrated H absburg empire (Vienna),
and— for a brief period— also the revolution shaken Russia. O n the
other hand, a singular barrenness in the arts and, as far as theoret­
ical developments are concerned, also in the sciences,24 is charac­
teristic of the second post-war period. Nothing com parable to
modernism in architecture or poetry, or to neopositivism in phi­
losophy made its appearance after the chaos of the war years. W hat
we have so far witnessed in the second half of the century have been
stupendous technological advances; the use of nuclear power, the
computerization of work of all kinds, genetic m anipulation— only
to mention the most revolutionizing novelties. In the arts we have
seen wild experimentation coupled with nostalgic, pastiche-like
mixing of styles, not least in architecture.
H and in hand with these developments there has taken place an
integration of practically the entire globe in a network of industrial
technology, international trade, and banking. In the W est we have
enjoyed an unprecedented increase in material standards of living.
In the ‘under-developed’ parts of the world there is famine and
growing relative poverty— but also a desperate struggle for an
enlarged share in the cake o f ‘progress through m odernization’. In
all quarters, advanced as well as backward, developments testify to
an ongoing quantification and formalization of the idea of progress
with a corresponding deforming influence of industrialization and
quasi-democracy on traditional patterns of life. This deformation is
particularly striking in those parts of the world which are euphe­
mistically called ‘developing countries’.

18

As I see it, the climate of opinion, the Zeitgeist, of our time is

predominantly one of concern for the malaise caused by the en­
croachment of the two most typically ‘m odern’ systems, viz. the

24 This impression would be contested by many. But I think that the contrary
opinion is misled by the enormous increase in the practical importance and
therewith also social prestige of science in recent decades. This is largely a
consequence of rapid and spectacular technological developments and the impact
they have had on life.
224 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

authority of Church and State. Analogously, the reification of

progress in formalized democracy had its historic roots in the
em ancipation of man as a moral subject. W hat happens now is that
the two systems are recoiling destructively on their own origin.
The technosystem is threatening the autonomous pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake. Scientific truth is not contested, as of
yore, by another claim to truth raised by religious or other author­
ity. But research and academic training are to an increasing degree
oriented toward the ends of economic growth, competitive power,
and technological innovation. In the educational programs of states
the notion of schooling (for a profession) takes the place of that of
studying (for one’s education). In a corresponding m anner, the
autonomy of the subject is threatened by the necessity to conform
to the pressures of opinion and to regulations in the creation of
which he has not participated and the sense of which he often
cannot understand. The individual is alienated from the im person­
al social machinery run by selfrighteous bureaucrats. His life-world
is hedged in so that his ‘real freedom’ is reduced to narcissistic
indulgence in external symbols of status and well-being which
consumer goods and material possessions offer.
Thus the em ancipation and autonomy of man both as knowing
subject and as self-determined agent threatens to get lost because of
the deforming influence on the life-world— its ‘colonialization’ to
use H aberm as’s term 23— by the two systems. The threat m aterial­
ized would mean the bankruptcy of the lofty ideals of Classical
M odernity and the final debunking of its great M yth of Progress as
a delusion. Belief in the ‘m yth’ still prevails and is proclaimed by a
thousand voices of advertizers and propagandists. But the progress
of which these latter day Sirens sing is not the perfection of which
the Enlightenm ent dream t but its reified identification with eco­
nomic growth and extended formalization of social conduct.

17

The second great shock to modern society came with the rise of
fascist barbarism in Europe and the consequent 1939-45 war. The
reaction which followed after the second war was very different
from the reaction after the first. The end of the war did not kindle
great hopes for peaceful developments in the future. It had barely

23 ‘die Kolonialisierung der Lebenswelt durch Imperative verselbststandigter

wirtschaftlicher und administrativer Handlungssysteme’. In ‘Modeme undpostmod-
eme Architektur\ op. cit., p. 28.
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 225

ended when it was succeeded by the ‘Cold w ar’. Nor did its end
release a superabundance of creative energies. This second fact is
very striking when we compare the 1920’s with the late 40’s and the
50’s. T he first was perhaps the most creative decade of the century
in science as well as art. This was eminently true of the defeated
Germany (Berlin), the disintegrated H absburg empire (Vienna),
and— for a brief period— also the revolution shaken Russia. O n the
other hand, a singular barrenness in the arts and, as far as theoret­
ical developments are concerned, also in the sciences,24 is charac­
teristic of the second post-war period. Nothing com parable to
modernism in architecture or poetry, or to neopositivism in phi­
losophy made its appearance after the chaos of the war years. W hat
we have so far witnessed in the second half of the century have been
stupendous technological advances; the use of nuclear power, the
computerization of work of all kinds, genetic m anipulation— only
to mention the most revolutionizing novelties. In the arts we have
seen wild experimentation coupled with nostalgic, pastiche-like
mixing of styles, not least in architecture.
H and in hand with these developments there has taken place an
integration of practically the entire globe in a network of industrial
technology, international trade, and banking. In the W est we have
enjoyed an unprecedented increase in material standards of living.
In the ‘under-developed’ parts of the world there is famine and
growing relative poverty— but also a desperate struggle for an
enlarged share in the cake o f ‘progress through m odernization’. In
all quarters, advanced as well as backward, developments testify to
an ongoing quantification and formalization of the idea of progress
with a corresponding deforming influence of industrialization and
quasi-democracy on traditional patterns of life. This deformation is
particularly striking in those parts of the world which are euphe­
mistically called ‘developing countries’.

18

As I see it, the climate of opinion, the Zeitgeist, of our time is

predominantly one of concern for the malaise caused by the en­
croachment of the two most typically ‘m odern’ systems, viz. the

24 This impression would be contested by many. But I think that the contrary
opinion is misled by the enormous increase in the practical importance and
therewith also social prestige of science in recent decades. This is largely a
consequence of rapid and spectacular technological developments and the impact
they have had on life.
226 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

industrial mode of production and the bureaucratic-paternalistic

forms of democracy, on the living conditions of men. At the level of
critical reflection this concern manifests itself as a problem atization
of the em ancipatory ideas of classical modernity and as lost faith in
the ‘progress’ which was thought to follow upon their im plem enta­
tion. I propose to call this Zeitgeist Late M odernity.
Is this not the climate th at is also called Post-M odernity? W hen
characterized in the way I did, the name does not seem apt for it.
The Zeitgeist as described is one of crisis and criticism. It is the
crisis of an idea which was born in the days of the Enlightenment,
which hovered over W estern Civilization for a century and a half,
and which is now turning self-critically against its own assumptions
and promises.
It is not surprising that in the wake of such self-criticism phe­
nomena crop up which signalize a conscious break with modernity
and the proclamation of something new. These are the things we
list under the heading ‘post-m odern’; a very mixed bunch. We
know them from architecture, literature, philosophy— and also
from experimental forms of new life-styles. It is perhaps no coinci­
dence that architecture which was in the vanguard of w hat I called
neo-modernity or modernism was in fact the field in which the
name ‘post-m odern’ in its now current sense first established
itself.
If Late M odernity is predom inantly a sombre mood, the under­
current in it which calls itself post-modern is predom inantly
hopeful. It sees m odernity as something essentially overcome,
transcended, and in post-modernity a beginning and a promise of a
renewal in culture and forms of life.
A skeptic may prefer to see in the post-modern phenom ena
symptoms of the malaise of modernity rather than a cure for it. I
am myself inclined to see them in this way. T hen they appear as
reflexions in the cultural superstructure of the influence on life of
developments in the technosystem and the socio-political order.
Even if this is the right way to view them, it does not exclude that
they may also forebode readjustm ents in the relationship between
‘life-world’ and ‘system’. W hether this will mean a ‘transcendence’
of modernity to something which comes after it, or should rather be
looked upon as a continuation of w hat has been called ‘the modern
project’25 may be a m atter of taste to decide. The time-perspective
for a more definitive judgem ent is still lacking.

23 J. Habermas, "Die Modeme— ein unvollendetes Projekf, in Kleine politische Schriften

I-IV , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981.
 THE MYTH OF PROGRESS 227

One thing, however, seems to me certain. This is the death of

certain great tales (‘grandes recits’) to use the term of Jean-
Frangois Lyotard, the French philosopher who has made the
perhaps best articulated effort to locate post-modernism on the
cultural m ap.26 The great tales of pre-modern times we find in the
mythologies and religions of past cultures and in the efforts of
philosophers to capture in ‘systems’ of rational thought the essence
of being and the destiny of man. M odernity may be said to have
substituted for these all-embracing creations of the hum an mind
others, no less absolutist secularized tales of ‘the education of
m ankind’ for the promised land of freedom and reason which it was
supposed to enter when the old idols had been crushed. O ne of
these great tales was the one which I have called the M odern M yth
of Progress. It will not survive the crisis of M odernity in its late
stage.

19

I shall conclude with a plea for what I would call a ‘de-mytholo-

gized rationalism’. To abandon belief in progress as a historical
necessity is not to abandon work for progress as a task. This task, as I
see it, is essentially a critical one. Because even though the original
myth is dead, it survives in the derivative forms which identify pro­
gress either with economic growth or with formalized democracy.
These fossilized remains of an original optimistic belief continue to
exercise a strong influence as motive forces for technological and
societal developments. They motivate the actions and decisions of
technocrats on the one side and politocrats on the other, partly in
agreement and partly in opposition to one another.
To debunk these false mythologies is, I think, the greatest service
intellectuals of our time can do to the cause of progress. To debunk
them is to expose the lack of rational justification for the distorting
effects on life stemming from the systems. It is also to urge those
who exercise power to consider the value of the ends for the
attainm ent of which their acting and doing are the means. It is
therefore a plea for a form of rationality which has tended to atrophy
under an excessive growth of the instrumental uses of reason. In
W eberian terms one could call it a plea for Wertrationalitdt in a

26 Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard, La condition postmodeme, Editions des Minuit, Paris

1979.
228 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

culture which has become obsessed and twisted by a hypertrophy of

its capacity for Zweckrationalitat.
The three catchwords of the great upheaval which marked
the beginning of the modern era were liberte, egalite, fratemite. The
dialectics of forces through which one has tried to implement the
first two ideals has gradually undermined and eroded the belief in
progress vested in their im plementation. We need not reject the
ideals, but we have learnt to view with skepticism their full m utual
compatibility. O f the three slogans, the one which still holds forth
an unconsumed hope is fratemite, the idea of the universal brother­
hood of men. In a world which is in a process of unification thanks
to technological and industrial developments and the rationaliza­
tion (democratization) of the socio-political orders, the dem and on
solidarity among men has acquired new dimensions. It can no
longer be restricted to a narrow circle of immediate kinship of blood
or professional interests. It must transcend all boundaries of na­
tion, race or religion so as to become a consciousness of global
responsibility— ‘global’ also in that it extends to those who after us
will tram ple this earth. At bottom this is nothing but a fulfilment of
the Christian command that we should love our neighbour as we
love ourselves.
Will this command be fulfilled, the hopes held forth in the third
slogan of M odernity materialize? It is futile to brood over the
question. To answer Yes or No would be to cede to the illusions of
myths of progress and of regress respectively. O f them we must
beware. The only answer we can give to the question whether there
is hope for the future of man runs: Let us work for its fulfilment!
 X III

SCIEN CE, REASON AND V ALUE

It is a commonplace that the civilization we call W estern is the heir

of two great legacies. One is Judaic, the other Hellenic. As symbols
for them one also uses the names of two cities: Jerusalem and
Athens.
The Judaic legacy, continued in Christianity, is a religious and
moralistic tradition. From the ancient Greeks we inherited the
belief in the intelligibility of the natural order of things and the
spirit of rational inquiry which is the ethos of science.
Less of a commonplace is, I think, the ways in which the inherent
tension between these two legacies is reflected in the turbulent
technological developments, the crisis of spiritual values, and the
threats even to m an’s physical survival which have become charac­
teristic of the twentieth century in its final decades.
The two traditions were in origin alien and even hostile to each
other. Their fusion into the stem of W estern civilization is a story of
contest and m utual suspicion. To mediaeval Christendom Greek
philosophy was still only an ancilla theologiae. The renaissance of
ancient ideals effected, in the first place, a tremendous surge in the
arts and eventually also triggered w hat is known as the ‘scientific
revolution’. For a century or more it looked as if the hum anism of
our classic inheritance had been firmly integrated with the moral-
ism of a Christian society. This was the time, roughly, when the
H um boldt University, the Ecole normale, and Benjamin Jo w ett’s
Oxford in their different ways set the educational ideals for the
intellectual elite of Europe. This harm ony of forces, stemming
ultimately from Jerusalem and Athens, no longer prevails. T heir
dialectic opposition is once again shaking the foundations and
threatening to shatter the unity of W estern civilization.
230 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

It is a characteristic of Judaism and of its two main offshoots,

Christianity and Islam, that they claim authority for a revealed
word, recorded in a Holy Book or scripture. W hat the Torah is for
the Jew , the Bible is for the Christian and the K oran for the
Moslem; a supreme authority in m atters of true belief and right
conduct. The word of God is mediated to m an through a charis­
matic leader or ‘prophet’— a Moses or a C hrist or a M ohamm ed.
The authority of the W ord is absolute and cannot be doubted.
But in m atters of application and detail it stands in need of inter­
pretation. And interpreters may disagree among themselves.
Hence, the tension between orthodoxy and heresy, the threats to
the unity from schism and sectarianism, which have been the
source of so much discord and merciless fighting among the follow­
ers both of Christ and of M ohammed.
As long as the Word is held sacred its meaning must be thought
univocal. A split in the unity is therefore not, in the first place, a
plea for toleration. Rather, it nourishes the m ental attitude we call
fundamentalism. This is a weakness inherent in every religion
which claims possession of a revealed truth. This weakness is still a
burden on our cultural tradition.
The existence of rival claims to the one right interpretation of the
prim al W ord cannot, however, in the longer run fail to undermine
its authority— and therewith also to promote, first toleration and
then laxity in m atters of religion. This is w hat has happened with
Christianity in the process called secularization. If toleration
means a ‘hum anization’ of religious attitudes, secularization of the
forms of life may in the end mean the gradual erosion, the withering
away of religion itself.

‘In the beginning was the W ord.— And the W ord was with G od.’ It
is a little ironic that these words which epitomize the religious
frame of mind which we have inherited from our Ju d aic cultural
ancestors were written in Greek. Because nothing could be more
foreign than they are to the Hellenic spirit.
T he Greeks had no sacred book of their own, and their gods were
the all-too-human creations of an intelligent and playful im agina­
tion. The Olympos was no indisputable authority in m atters of
truth or of right and wrong.
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 231

Yet the Greeks, too, may be said to have acknowledged an

other-than-hum an authority in these m atters. This was the order
which seemed to prevail in the world as a whole. The Greek word
physis has the same double meaning as has our derivation from its
Latin equivalent natura. It means both the physical world or nature
around us and the principles at work in it. In this second sense,
physis was also a logos, an intelligible message. Not, however, in the
form of a W ord proclaimed by God or his Prophet, but in the form
of a M eaning to be unravelled by the inquiring mind.
It is characteristic that much later in history, partly under the
im pact of Christian ideas, but partly in opposition to them, getting
to understand this meaning too was likened to reading a book. This
was the ‘Book of N ature’. Studying it was thought equivalent to
scientific enterprise.
Accepting the m etaphor, we can note th at the way the Greeks
tried to read the book of nature was very different from the way it
has been read by W estern scientists since the days of Galileo. T he
Greek contribution to the bulk of w hat we would call ‘scientific
knowledge’ is in fact surprisingly small— probably smaller than the
contributions of some other early civilizations. O ne can account for
this by saying that science with the Greeks remained ‘embryonic’,
but little developed. This is the view one takes, for example, when
one labels the speculations of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers
a first step on the road to modern physics and chemistry.
But rather than to view Greek science as ‘backw ard’, one should
acknowledge that it was ‘science’ in a different sense from ours. It
was oriented towards different goals. Greek science was value-
oriented in a way modern science is not. It tried in the rational
order of nature to discern a norm for a reasonable order of society,
to look for standards of a good life and for limits which m an could
not with im punity transgress. This reading of the rational as the
reasonable is alien to us.
It should be noted in passing that the Greeks were not unique in
their view of the order which prevails in nature. We find something
similar in ancient Chinese culture. Here, too, there is a recognition
of principles governing natural events as standards for a wise
arrangem ent also of hum an affairs. These are the opposite forces of
Yin and Yang the equilibrium of which measures an optimal order
of things.
The Ju d aic attitude to truth encourages trust in external author­
ity and the superior wisdom of the Word. The Hellenic attitude
again may be said to encourage inquisitiveness and a will ‘to search
for oneself’— to paraphrase one of the remaining fragments of
232 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

Heraclitus. The negative aspect of the former attitude is intolerance

and a tendency to dogmatic fundamentalism. The danger inherent
in the latter is that the conflicting views of enterprising ‘searchers5
lead to relativistic scepticism and therewith indifference in m atters
of belief and rightness of conduct. Whereas the first attitude makes
God the measure of all things, the second tends to let M an usurp
this position. If God is one, truth is still univocai. But since men are
many, truth runs the risk of being fragmented into a m ultitude of
individual opinions.
W hat is known as the Socratic tradition in Greek philosophy,
from Socrates through Plato to Aristotle, was a tremendous intel­
lectual effort to curb the relativism of the //omom^Mm-principle of
the Sophists. Analogously, within the C hristian tradition has ex­
isted an urge to subject the revealed logos to rational scrutiny and
reconciliation with the hum an intellect. Scholasticism of the high
M iddle Ages gives impressive testimony to this. But, it is clear that
a civilization which builds on legacies from ancestral sources as
different as Jerusalem and Athens, has had to struggle for their
harmonization and, at times, to experience frightful agonies of
unresolved contradictions.

In a novel1— nowadays seldom read— the m aster architect of the

British Empire of Victorian times, Benjamin Disraeli, contrasted
our Judaic and Hellenic legacies with a new one, then in making.
Its symbolic capital he named M anchester. These are his words:
Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the
pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art. . . . What Art was to
the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In
the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of
the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a
mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood,
Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.
The statesm an of artistic im agination goes on to say that ‘It is the
philosophers alone who can conceive the grandeur of M anchester,

1 Coningsby. I am indebted to a paper by Freeman Dyson called Athens and

Manchester for the theme of thought invented by Disraeli. My own development of
the theme is rather different from its variation by Dyson.
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 233

and the immensity of its future5. So, I feel myself entitled to take up
his words for consideration here.
The contrast Athens— M anchester as posed by Disraeli is not
altogether felicitous. We owe to Athens at least as much in the
sphere of thought as in that of art. Moreover, it is not of science that
M anchester of the 19th century is the well-known symbol. The
Lancashire city stands out symbolically for the dawn of a new era
in the history of mankind, following upon w hat is known as the
industrial revolution.
The industrial mode of production is at least as old as urban
forms of life. Industry was not born in M anchester. W hat took
place there can perhaps be best described as the cementing of that
peculiar alliance between science and craft we call technology. It
revolutionized in the first instance the work of the hand— thereby
making possible the mass-production and worldwide distribution
of material goods which has since been characteristic of industry.
Later, in our century, it has made a com parable im pact on work
done by the brain— and therewith on control and steering of hu­
man activities. This second big change has been described as a
transition from the industrial to a post-industrial type of society. In
its most recent phase this is also spoken of as the information
society. The best name for these new forms of life seems to me to be
‘the technological society5, and for their breakthrough, not the
industrial, but the scientific-technological revolution. Because
these societal transformations have their ultimate source in scien­
tific knowledge of how to tame nature’s forces and utilize its re­
sources for hum an ends and purposes.
In the light of the alliance between science, technology, and
industry the name ‘M anchester5 acquires a deeper symbolic m ean­
ing. M anchester is not only the place were ‘factories and ware­
houses5 first began to dominate the urban landscape; it is also the
city of John Dalton and Jam es Joule and the city where Ernest
Rutherford reached the peak of his scientific achievement. Dalton
put ancient atomic theory on a modern scientific footing. Joule laid
the foundations of thermodynamics, the most distinctively new
conquest of 19th century physics. And Rutherford opened the path
to the interior of that world which Dalton had still thought of as
atomos in the original sense of the word. W hat these scientific
exploits have meant to the life of men and their societies during the
last two centuries is obvious, but perhaps not always rightly esti­
mated in its historic immensity.
Greek science, we said, had an axiological or value orientation. A
technological orientation has been characteristic of W estern science
234 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

from its beginning. M etaphorically speaking, the one type of sci­

ence aims at obeying, the other at m astering the object of inquiry
common to both, which is Nature.
One can find it strange that technological aims are almost com­
pletely absent from the pursuit by the Ancients of episteme or
rationally justifiable claims to knowledge. O ne can also speculate
about the reasons for this. They are not to be attributed to intellec­
tual ‘backwardness’. They certainly have something to do with the
fact that the economy of the Greco-Roman world was based on
slave-labour. This led to a depreciation of m anual work as some­
thing unworthy of a kaloskagathos or cultured gentleman. Aristotle
speaks with disdain of the akribia or painstaking exactitude in
details which artisans display in their work. But it is worth re­
membering that the artisans in the outgoing M iddle Ages were in
fact pioneers of w hat eventually became scientific technology.
T h at W estern science is technologically oriented does not mean
that mastery of nature has been and is the only motive force of
scientific enterprize. In order to conquer nature one m ust first
know its governing principles. Search for such knowledge I shall,
faute de mieux, call the epistemic orientation of science. In the order
of things it has priority over the technological orientation. This is
what Francis Bacon m eant when he said th at natura non vincitur nisi
parendo. But the obedience which he then had in mind was not the
imitation of natural patterns for the good life, but the respect for
facts, the humility and the patience which is required of the inquisi­
tive spirit.

The epistemic orientation of science is a manifestation of m an’s will

to find out, for himself and independently of being told, how things
are. Its basic psychological drive is, I assume, curiosity. Aristotle
expressed the same or a similar idea when he said that philosophy
sprang from m an’s wondering about the world.
It is easy to understand that the legitimation of this orientation
should be a problem for a culture in which knowledge in m atters of
the greatest im portance had to be sanctioned by the divine author­
ity of the Word. Right at the beginning of the sacred Book there is
an ominous statem ent of this dilemma. To eat of the Tree of
Knowledge was forbidden to man in Paradise. ‘— thou shalt not eat
of it’, said the Lord (Gen. 3:17), ‘for in the day th at thou eatest thou
shalt surely die’.
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 235

The fruit of the forbidden tree, we are told, gave knowledge of

good and evil. Knowledge of facts, it may be argued, is different.
But what Greek science ultimately had been in search of was
precisely insight into w hat is good for man. Already by virtue of its
value-orientation it therefore stood in latent opposition to the
teaching of the Book. But the deeper conflict concerned the episte-
mic orientation itself: on the one side unquestionable acceptance of
authority, on the other side reliance on m an’s rational capability to
find the way to truth.
Christian philosophers from Augustine to Aquinas condemned
the mental disposition they call curiositas. At the same time they
stood on the shoulders of Greek predecessors: Plato in the case of
Augustine, Aristotle in the case of Aquinas. But this adoption of
Greek philosophy by mediaeval W estern culture did not mean
acceptance of a rival authority to the Word. This is best illustrated
by the case of Aristotle. His views in m atters relating to the con­
stitution of the physical world and the laws governing natural
events became a ‘residuary W ord’ which, duly commented on and
interpreted, had to be accepted by those who were eager to learn,
but was not to be tested on the evidence of the senses or refuted by
rational argum entation.
The em ancipation of science from the tutelage of the authority of
the W ord— be it the Bible or Aristotle or some other ancient
author— was a long and painful process. It had many m artyrs,
Galileo being far from the only one. But his case stands out from
the rest because of its overwhelming moral strength against powers
whose authority in m atters of knowledge was then hopelessly in
decline, weakened both by internal schism in the Church and by
the force of new ideas which mark the dawning of the era known as
M odernity.
One could try to capture the outcome of the fight for ‘the freedom
of science’ by saying that it ended in a kind of compromise or truce.
Science had to relinquish pretensions to be a source of value,
leaving to religion authority in m atters of good and evil and ‘super­
natural’ truth. Religion, again, was to cease to claim authority in
questions of ‘natural’ truth, accessible to experiment and observa­
tion and logical reasoning on their basis. Philosophically speaking,
this ‘division of competence’ m eant a conceptual cleavage between
fact and value, between Is and O ught, which did not exist either in
Greek or in mediaeval Christian thought. O ne of its implications is
the thesis that science is ‘value-free’. The distinction is nowadays
sometimes referred to as ‘H um e’s guillotine’. It continues to be a
m atter of debate— and so does the idea of the value-freedom of
236 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

science. But no twists and turns in the minds of philosophers can

minimize the historical significance of a progressive tendency to
exorcize value-judgements from the proper domain of scientific
inquiry. This applies, incidentally, also to the humanities where the
scientific study of valuations as facts holds an im portant but some­
times methodologically confusing position.
O f the two necessary ‘renouncem ents’ which I mentioned, one
was much more difficult than the other. Emerging W estern science
had never raised serious claims to be an independent source of
value. In this, it was from its birth unlike its Greek ancestor—
perhaps because its early infancy was under the patronage of
Christian religion. But long after the final split in W estern C hrist­
endom, churches of various Christian denom inations regarded with
suspicion or open hostility changes in the scientific picture of the
world which were thought to have evaluative implications for the
life of Christian man. The struggle over the two world-systems had
ended with the displacement of the E arth from its fancied position
in the centre of the universe. A few hundred years later, science
dethroned man from his unique position as G od’s created image
and made him another member of the animal kingdom. The ‘ax­
iological waves’ stirred up by Darwin have hardly yet completely
abated. But their flood is no longer a serious threat either to the
freedom of science or to the purity of a Christian faith.
Today, the battle for the legitimacy of the epistemic attitude we
call ‘scientific’ may be regarded as won. In m atters of truth, Reason
has inherited the place of God. It is difficult to imagine a return to a
state in which opinions on questions of factual truth had to conform
to the authority of revelation. Moreover, pursuit of knowledge for
its own sake is acknowledged to be an end in itself which needs no
further justification. M aybe this has with time become, as has been
said,2 ‘a lethal gam e’— giving new urgency to the threat of the Lord
to m an in Paradise. But if this is so, it cannot be because knowledge
is sought for its own sake— but because of some other orientation,
also associated with its pursuit.

It is something of a paradox that the intellectual orientation which

has problematized the scientific enterprize in our days apparently
holds its w arrant of legitimacy from the remotest beginnings of our
2 I found the phrase in a book by Marshal Berman, A ll that is Solid Melts into Air.
The Experience o f Modernity (1982).
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 237

civilization. The same sacred book which declared knowledge for­

bidden fruit for man also gave him dominion ‘over all the earth 5
(Gen. 1:26). ‘Replenish the earth5, it said (ib. 1:28), ‘and subdue it5.
Did m an's dominion also make legitimate his m anipulation of
nature for the sake of ameliorating his living conditions? I think we
can say that it did. Because our Ju d aic legacy goes back to a time
when a great change, then still dimly remembered, had occurred in
the life of man— a change at least as profound as any which
scientific technology and industry in combination have effected in
the last 200 years. This was the change in the state of m an from
hunter and errant gatherer of food to cultivator of the soil and
domesticator of other animals to serve his purposes. This trans­
formation rested on a genetic m anipulation of anim al and plant life
on a much bigger scale than any so far contemplated by latter day
agricultural and sfnimal geneticists.
It is true that this change in m an5s life was not an achievement of
‘science as technology5. But, if m an5s dominion over nature was, as
a historical fact, pleasing to the eyes of Jahve— as the Book gives us
every reason to think— then it would indeed be plausible to regard
the m andate given to m an as a carte blanche also for the controlled
and steered ‘subduing of the earth5 which science has later m ade
possible.
M an's rightful rule over nature has been a recurrent theme of
comments also in Christian theology—from the Fathers of the
Church, through mediaeval Scholasticism to the great figures of the
Reformation. O f particular significance here is the attitude of C al­
vin, founder of that branch of Protestantism the crucial role of
which, as an ideological basis of capitalist economy in combination
with an industrial mode of production, has been amply documented.
M an's domination of nature was instituted for his benefit. By
helping man to unravel ‘the secrets of nature5, science has cemented
this dominion and also greatly extended its influence. Technologi­
cally oriented science has turned out to be of the greatest in­
strum ental value for the achievement of purposes which m an sets
himself. This in itself is no guarantee th at w hat is achieved is also
for his good. Technology can serve purposes which are in them ­
selves either good or evil. It is a knife which cuts both ways. As
Friar Lawrence says in Shakespeare's play:
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain’d from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
238 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

The pioneers of modern science— not only Francis Bacon, but

also the by far greater figures of a Descartes or Galileo— did not
doubt, however, that the technological powers which science would
give to man, would on the whole also be used for his true benefit as
measured by Christian standards. In other words, they could not
foresee that the instrum ental value of science might one day be in
conflict with the moral values im planted by religion. Science and
technology stood for progress— not only in the form of amelioration
of the material conditions under which m an had to toil, but also in
the form of an enhancem ent of the ways of life we call civilized.

The uses of technology in the 17th and 18th centuries were mainly
for what I propose to call (technical) constructions. Examples are
sailing ships, canals, fortifications, pumps for mines, improved
weapons, and instrum ents for use in the crafts as well as in science
itself. To the same category also belong the two technical innova­
tions which more than anything else revolutionized life in the early
and mid-19th century: the steamship and the railroad. The forms of
hum an activity which these innovations most deeply affected were
transportation, travel, and warfare. They were of crucial im por­
tance to the Western enterprize of colonialism. Their effects on the
daily life of families and people were still minor.
The change which the industrial revolution of the late 18th and
early 19th century brought about consisted in the use of technology
for the m anufacture of commodities for a m arket of consumers. In
its origins this change was not a fruit of new advancements in
science. Jam es W att owed little to science and neither did H arrock
whose loom revolutionized the cotton industry. It was only after
physics had conquered the realm of electricity and chemistry had
been placed on a solid scientific basis th at technical innovations
usable for industrial mass-production of goods began to have their
source in scientific discoveries. The dynam o is unthinkable without
Faraday, the electric motor w ithout Christian 0 rste d , the tele­
graph and radio without Maxwell and H ertz, artificial manures
w ithout Liebig, synthetic dye without Hoffman and Perkin. The
work of these men and their peers gave to the industrial revolution,
then already in progress, the scientific dimension the immense
potentialities of which the author of the novel Coningsby had seen
prophetically foreboded in the bustling life of a Lancashire town.
The new industrial developments also had political implications.
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 239

They made the rest of the world dependent upon the technological
superiority of Europe and the U nited States of America. But above
all they effected enormous changes in the consumption patterns of
people in the W estern countries. Their m aterial standard of living
was steadily raised and the rise affected ever larger segments of
their populations.
Science itself could not stay aloof from these developments—
leaving industry to pick up whatever fruits happened to fall from
the Tree of Knowledge. The new relationship between science and
industry had repercussions on both parties. The ensuing changes
could be described as the integration of science into the economy of
industrialized societies. T h at the process should have come about is
most natural. W hat is a little surprising is that it started relatively
late and was in full swing only in the second half of our century. To
this slowness contributed perhaps a deep-rooted sentim ent—
inherited from our Greek forbears— of science as an elitist preoc­
cupation detached from practical concerns. A nother reason may
have been an inherent dem and on the part of science for freedom
and independence for work, the practical implications of which
cannot easily be predicted and often reveal themselves only after a
long lapse of time. The shortening of this time-lag between new
knowledge and technical innovation has become something of a
problem for contemporary science policy.
W ith the slowness of the integrative process may be contrasted
the rapidity of the changes in industrial production, once a tech­
nological breakthrough has occurred. T he efficiency and usefulness
of new commodities soon make earlier products with a similar
purpose outmoded. At the same time the cost of m anufacturing
them tends to diminish, making the goods available to an increas­
ing num ber of buyers/consumers. T he best example is perhaps the
development of the computer. The first commercial computers of
not more than a quarter of a century ago were the size of a room
and yet had a capacity which appears almost ridiculously small in
comparison with that of the personal computers which many of us
now carry in a handbag or even in the pocket.
As a consequence of this flexibility of new technologies, the
research which propels their development has come to hold a
pivotal position in the competition for markets by the producers.
To keep abreast with advances in science and technology is vitally
necessary both for the industrial enterprizes and for the national
states themselves.
At the same time as the cost of production goes down under the
joint pressure of technological advance and economic competition,
240 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

the cost of research increases. Advanced research in some branches

of science tends to become exorbitantly expensive. National re­
sources may not suffice for its upkeep. Jo in t ventures in science
become increasingly necessary between nations. In a ‘parallel’
process industries transcend the national borders, forcing the poli­
tical leadership to smooth out and relax the legal ties which con­
strain the market. The very notion of a sovereign national state is in
the melting pot— and imaginative minds may even speculate about
its gradual withering away. The integration of Europe is ominous
of this possibility. But it is good to remember that it is only a
geographically bounded instance of a global process, which consists
in the integration of science and economy into something which
may be called a techno-system, which determines the future p at­
terns of life on the planet. U nder the unifying network of this
system great changes also in its cultural and political sub­
structures can be expected to occur.

In mediaeval times learned men earned their living by training

others in the professions for which intellectual schooling was
needed. The professions were those of priest and lawyer and medi­
cal doctor. The training took place in collegiate units out of which
emerged with time the unique institution of combined research and
teaching which is the University. Here the im planting and search
for knowledge was initially ruled by w hat I called the authority of
the Word: Holy Scripture and ‘canonized’ ancient writers.
The ‘scientific revolution’ of the late Renaissance and Baroque
periods was an upheaval against this state of affairs. As a conse­
quence, the universities declined and even fell into disrepute. The
Academies took over as fountainheads of the new scientific knowl­
edge. The Academy presided over by Linnaeus and later by Berze­
lius is as good an example of this as any.
Only after the new science had secured its freedom from the
tutelage of the external authority of Church and State was it time
for the universities to revive. The H um boldt University of Berlin
became in many European countries what Paris had been some 600
years earlier: a model to be im itated. It can be said to reflect the
idea that scientific study is a value in itself, a constituent of that
which the Germans with a term difficult to translate call the Bildung
of a person. This view of the value of science and the task of the
university belongs essentially to the 19th century. The integration
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 241

of science in the economy which is in progress has changed the

picture. The ideals of the H um boldt U niversity appear more and
more as a pastoral dream of bygone days.
The University as institution is again in a state of crisis. Science
seeks refuge in special institutes for ‘advanced study’ or is absorbed
into the research laboratories of industries. It is true that basic
research still holds a prom inent place in the universities— and the
educational philosophy in support of this state of affairs can argue
its case with force. But, there is also a growing dem and for universi­
ty services from industries. In a reciprocal move, expensive re­
search projects in physics or medicine or environm ental study turn
to industries for financial support. The traditional divide between
pure and applied science is blurred and tends to lose its meaning.
In fact, several of the most consequential advances in science in our
century originated in the research laboratories of big industrial
enterprizes— Bell and IBM to mention only two of the most spec­
tacular examples.
It goes without saying that the fusion of basic science with
technological development work also influences the direction of
research. W hen the science policy of states to an increasing degree
is geared to the ends of economic growth and sustained competitive
power, research is forced to orient itself in the direction which will
best promote these objectives. Thereby, science as the prime mover
of societal developments runs the risk of becoming an auxiliary
force steered not so much by pure intellectual curiosity about truth
as by the cravings for continued advance on the road towards the
earthly paradise where Bacon and his spiritual kinsmen promised
— a little lightheartedly perhaps— th at its technological orientation
would take us. The changed role of science from an ancilla theologiae
in mediaeval universities to an ancilla industriae in the research
laboratories of modern companies cannot fail to have far-reaching
implications. A new situation is about to arise, and science has
reason to rethink the problem of its own legitimation.

Originally, m an’s dominion over nature was ‘by the grace of G od’.
This made man accountable for how he used his privilege. W hat
man does to nature must not conflict with the standards of good
and evil set by divine authority. But w hat if this authority was
shaken, man ceased to be the vassal of God? Then he could make
himself ‘Lord and Com m ander of the Elements’— as M ephisto
242 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

whispers to Doctor Faustus in Christopher M arlowe’s dram a. This

is, in fact, what has happened under the eroding influence on
religion of secularized institutions and rationally enlightened
opinions.
As long as a culture or hum an community acknowledges a source
of legitimacy for its shared values, the question of acceptance of
those values does not arise. This was, by and large, the case as long
as Christian religion set the standards of valuation in m atters of
proper behaviour. But with the loss of authority in m atters of truth,
the authority of religion also in questions of value became the
object of critical doubts. W estern philosophy after the Renaissance
has been in search of a new ground for morality. As in science, and
inspired by its example, this ground was sought in reason too. But
unlike the search for truth by science, the search for new values has
not been very successful. W ith time it has tended to the view that
value-judgements, as distinct from factual ones, are mere expres­
sions of emotive attitudes reflecting the likes and dislikes, the
ambitions and lust of hum an individuals or groups.
The erosion of the traditional basis of values in religion and the
futility of the efforts to establish a new one in reason, in com bina­
tion with the overpowering enhancem ent of the instrum ental value
of science, has tended to remove altogether from the sphere of
rational thought questions relating to moral and other forms of
w hat philosophers call intrinsic value. A state of value-vacuum or
even value-nihilism has come to prevail. It can be regarded as the
deepest source of the confusions and uncertainties which are char­
acteristic of the present cultural situation.
Symptomatic of this state is also the resurgence of new forms of
fundamentalism. Some of them are of C hristian inspiration. O thers
seek in ancient O riental wisdom a cure for the inquietude of the
Western mind. Some are purely escapist and narcissist. O thers look
forward to a New Age of m utual aid and loving brotherhood of all
men.
Among these fundam entalist creeds I would also classify the
attitude called scientism. It is the belief that science and technology
by themselves can solve the problems for which their advancem ent
is to a great extent responsible and adjust us to the life-style of a
new era in the history of mankind. The rational faculty of man
which made him the measure of all things will eventually also make
him Lord of his own destiny. But, if the rational faculty is shrunk
and limited to the instrum ental value-dimension of science and
technology, I think this belief is a serious illusion.
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 243

Early technology, on the whole, did not generate unintended side-

effects which were harmful or otherwise a cause of concern. Tech­
nical constructions could misfire: a ship sink or a bridge collapse or
a steam engine burst. But such undesired consequences did not
affect either the hum an or the physical environm ent much beyond
the immediate range of the constructions themselves.
The intrinsically beneficial and therefore reasonable ends which
preindustrial technics served, in combination with the relative
absence of harmful side-effects, prevented doubt about the uses of
science for technological purposes arising. This state continued
long after the eroding effects of scientific rationality on the value-
basis of W estern civilization had, in the 19th century, begun to
worry philosophers and moralists.
The situation changed when science, through technology, be­
came allied with the new industrial mode of production. W hat
caused concern was, to begin with, the social im pact of industry on
those people who were involved in the production process them ­
selves. In marxist terminology, the problem was how to adjust the
productive relations in industrialized society to the productive
forces which science and technology had released. In the W estern
countries the adjustm ent process was sometimes painful, but on the
whole successful, and did not assume the dram atic forms envisaged
for it by M arx and Engels. Its fighting corps was the labour
movement and its crowning achievement the modern welfare state.
M an’s adjustm ent to changed social conditions may in the end
turn out to have been easier than the preservation of his continued
dominion of nature. The difficulties here are too well known to
deserve more than a cursory mention.
The increase in num ber of people who share the cake of material
goods provided by industry, and the much greater, uncontrolled,
increase in the num ber of those who are still looking forward to
their share in it has created a load which nature may not be able to
support. H ardly a day passes when we are not reminded of disaster
due to pollution or poisoning of air and water, of famine caused by
spreading erosion, of progressive im poverishment of the genetic
variety in the animal and plant kingdoms. Nonrenewable resources
are threatened with depletion and improved technology may not, in
the end, be able to meet growing dem ands on energy supply
without exposing man to risks which he is no longer willing to take.
We feel relieved by the temporal reduction of nuclear danger
thanks to m utual agreements between those who have the greatest
244 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

capability of letting the tempest loose. But it is good to remember

that the potential threat of those and other lethal weapons will stay
with us for the rest of the history of mankind.
In addition to these so to speak terrestrial warnings to our
technological form of life there are w hat may be called the cosmic
threats to the future of the globe presented by the dim inution of the
ozone layer and by the greenhouse effect. The fact that their causes
are a m atter of dispute and their future course difficult to predict
may nourish neglect to react, in time, to the evil they produce.
It is no exaggeration to view ongoing technological and indus­
trial developments— or better, the unintended consequences of these
developments— as a potential threat to the survival of man as a
species. This is now commonly recognized also within the scientific
community. Voices of alarm are heard from it with increasing
frequency and intensity.
Species originate and pass away. M an, surely, is no exception to
this ‘law of nature’. The thought does not make us uneasy when the
end can be contemplated in the perspective of hundreds of millions
of years. But it becomes terrifying when we realize that it may be
much nearer; that if not we ourselves so our great-grandchildren a
century or two ahead may be the last men.
Cataclysms have occurred before in the history of the earth.
D istant memories of them survive in old mythology. Some may
even have had destructive effects on life com parable to those of an
imagined ‘nuclear w inter’. But there is an im portant difference.
Past catastrophes of global dimensions were not caused by the
species themselves for whose life they may have been fatal— but by
uncontrollable external forces. The uniqueness of the present situa­
tion lies in the fact that the threats to m an’s continued existence
have been conjured up by man himself.
In this one may see something hopeful. If man is a threat to
himself he may also be able to rescue himself by taking appropriate
measures or by changing his way of life. Unless, of course, it turns
out to be too late, for reasons of natural law, to reverse the de­
structive processes called forth by him. O r unless his biological
equipm ent turns out to be such th at he lacks the innate steering
mechanisms needed for correcting his courses on the road where
science and technology has set him. These possibilities too have to
be taken into account.
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 245

10

To make science responsible for the predicam ent in which mankind

finds itself is, in the first instance, only to acknowledge the im por­
tance which science thanks to its technological orientation has had
for the changes, for good and for bad, in the conditions under which
men live. I think the attribution to science of the role of prime
mover of these societal developments is correct; but does it also
carry moral implications for science?
T here has been a tendency among scientists to wash their hands
when faced with the question. Scientific research is one thing, its
technological applications another. The first is an intrinsically
valuable activity; the second is good or evil depending on goals in
the choice of which the scientists need not be, and in most cases
probably are not, directly involved. O r their involvement is re­
stricted to giving expert opinions on the instrum ental value of their
knowledge for purposes extraneous to their work as scientists.
This, however, is not enough to free scientists from moral co­
responsibility for the uses of science. The inventor of a deadly
weapon cannot rid himself of responsibility for its use by claiming
that he had no intention to kill. He may even be willing to shoulder
responsibility for its use— as in the case of war. Those who were
instrum ental in constructing the first atomic bomb thought they
were working for the good, even for the good of hum anity. Only
when the enthusiasm at their success had cooled down, did the
afterthought dawn upon some of them that they may, in the re­
moter perspective, have opened the gateway to evils which would
contam inate their work as scientists and technicians. We remember
Leo Szilard’s words that the bomb killed a beautiful science. The
bomb did not stop physics, nor were the reflective scientist’s words
m eant as a suggestion that this should happen. But they have an
ominous ring for all of science and their deeper meaning commands
lasting attention. If a team of geneticists were to produce, at the
request of their employers in a state of emergency, a helper which
turned out to be Frankenstein’s monster, they would have similar
reasons for thinking that they had killed another beautiful science.
However steadfastly we may stick to the intrinsic worth of scien­
tific knowledge, its pursuit is not an innocent game. It would be
this only if science had no instrum ental value at all. The mere fact
that it has maculates its innocence, and the greater this value
grows, the greater becomes the scientists’ moral involvement in the
uses of science.
I shall not discuss here what could be the practical implications
246 TH E TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

of this. One thing seems clear: No restrictions on the freedom of the

scientific enterprize, whether imposed by m utual agreement among
scientists themselves, or in the form of enacted legal constraints on
their activity, could win the approval of an enlightened conscience.
Things being such, restrictions would hardly be effective either.
The only thing one can dem and in the nam e of morality and reason
is that scientists be aware of their responsibility and of the m agni­
tude of the dangers to which the practising of their art has exposed
us all. However, it m ust be left to the conscience of the individual
scientist to decide w hat further conclusions to draw in view of the
good and evil he is likely to promote by his efforts to find the truth.
In the longer time-perspective a development looms which may
be worth considering. This is a loss of prestige for science due to the
misuse made of it in technology— and a consequent weakening of
the intellectual curiosity which is the psychological motor for the
epistemic orientation of science. In order that this should happen,
profound changes in prevailing climates of opinion would have to
take place. There may in fact be some signs of this. For example, in
the increasing role which new forms of art— often unrecognizable
as such by a more tradition-bound taste— have come to play in the
life of advanced industrial societies, particularly among the young.
W hether these ‘post-m odern’ signs are transient or of a more
lasting influence is difficult to predict and futile to speculate about.
But it is worthwhile remembering that everything in history is
perishable and subject to change and that our W estern-dominated
and -inspired culture may one day find itself replaced by another
which has little respect for and takes little interest in either science
or technology. W hether people then would feel more relaxed, less
insecure and worried about w hat may come than they do in our
world is uncertain. The unresolved problems of their decomposed
past would probably continue to torm ent them.

11

O ur legacy of Judeo-C hristian values prevented us from seeking,

like the Ancient Greeks, patterns for a reasonable arrangem ent of
hum an affairs in the course of events in nature. O u r Hellenic legacy
of rational thought again voided the claims of the Christian
Churches to authority in m atters of truth. Thus, the tension be­
tween the two legacies has had a weakening influence on each of
them. Value seemed exorcized from the sphere of reason, and
rational thought from the sphere of valuations. Excessive sceptic­
 SCIENCE, REASON, AND VALUE 247

ism about values has resulted in value-nihilism, and exaggerated

faith in the power of reason has encouraged scientistic fun­
damentalism. The dialectic antagonism between the two cultural
traditions which have nourished W estern culture has in the end
produced a cleavage which threatens it with chaos and decay.
The rift between fact and value which this antagonism has
produced is something which intellectual honesty requires us to
accept. But the narrowing of the range of reason which seemed
to follow from this split is an illusion which m ust not be allowed to
obscure our clearsightedness.
The striving for survival— the ‘will to life’ as Schopenhauer
called it— is the biological, naturalistic basis of all evaluation. In
the sub-hum an animal kingdom w hat we call evaluative activity
simply is identical with this striving. Only at the hum an level does
it take the form of judgem ents of good and bad articulated in a
language.
An individual, even other than hum an, can seek the opposite of
survival, which is death and destruction, for the sake of some
further end. W hen it is sought for the sake of others of the kin it is
self-sacrifice. This is not something we deem contrary to reason.
We may even view it with adm iration and approval. But striving
for ends which will lead to the self-destruction of the species is
exactly what we call irrational, contrary to reason. Considering its
biological foundation we also call it perverse or contrary to nature.
These are conceptual observations, neither evaluations nor scien­
tific discoveries.
W hat is scientific, however, is insight into the natural conditions
of hum an and animal survival, and therefore also into w hat we may
and must not do to nature, if survival is to be secured. In this sense
science may be said to investigate the margins within which life in
accordance with reason will be possible. To overstep the margins is
purposeless self-destruction, an irrational perversion.
One can therefore say that our Greek forbears were right when
they saw in N ature (‘N ature’s Law ’) the supreme authority from
which hum an doings derive their legitimacy. But their fanciful
reading of the Book of N ature will not do for us. This is so because
their science lacked the technological dimension the exploration of
which has revealed and given us warning of the limits within which
mortal man has to arrange his life.
The creation of an exact science of nature is without doubt the
greatest contribution which W estern civilization has made to his­
tory. It is, moreover, a contribution which unlike that of any
civilization to art, religion, or philosophy, knows no boundaries of
248 THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

language or tradition for its continued amelioration. We have no

reason to think that further developments of science and technology
will be a privilege of European culture or its off-shoots West and
East of the continent. New people are entering the stage and may
one day be leading in creative talent and innovative energies.
M aybe their cultural legacies will be less contradiction-loaded than
ours and therefore, let us hope, make it easier for them to respect
the natural bounds which men must not transgress lest nemesis
revenge their hubris.
 IN D E X O F NAM ES
Abelard 8 Carnap, R. 16, 34, 36, 40, 42, 50, 70,
Adam s, B. 218 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 84, 85, 86,
Adam s, H. 218 90, 99, 106, 114, 207, 209
Aeschylus 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, Chaplin, Ch. 207
142 C homsky, N. 13, 44
von Allesch, J. 54 Cicero 155
Anscom be, G .E .M . 102 C ohen, R.S. 82
Anselm 47 C om te, A 84, 161
Aquinas, St. Thom as 195, 211, 235 Conte, A.G . 105
Aristotle 7 ,8 , 1 0 ,2 0 ,2 1 ,4 7 , 116, 121, Condorcet 205, 220
144, 152, 196, 232, 234, 235 Copernicus 160, 161
Augustine 1 9 5 ,2 1 1 ,2 1 4 ,2 3 5 Le Corbusier 210
Austin, J.L . 23, 39f., 50 Couturat, L. 8, 9
Avenarius, R. 65, 70 Crick, F. 186
Ayer, A.J. 38, 52, 74, 81
van D alen, D. 8
Bacon 8, 114, 127, 128, 129, 151, 157, D alton, D. 233
158, 177, 178, 179, 185, 187, 220, D ante 192-210
234, 238, 241 Darwin 84, 160, 215, 216, 217, 218,
Beethoven 221 219, 236
Bell, J. 183 D ascal, M. 51
Bergmann, G. 13, 40 D avidson, D. 48
Berman, M. 236 D escartes 1, 27, 47, 63, 73, 177, 185,
Bernard, C laude 185 187, 238
di Bernardo, G. 103, 119 D ilthey, W. 47, 73, 163
Bernays, P. 12 D inklage, H. 54
Berzelius, J. 240 Disraeli 232
Black, M. 15, 27, 33, 40, 50, 95, 102, Dostoevsky 3, 86, 89
210 D uns Scotus 22
Bohm, D. 183 Durkheim, E. 160
Boltzmann, L. 57, 87 D yson, F. 232
Bolzano, B. 8
Boole, G. 1 1 , 1 3 , 1 9 Einstein, A. 57, 81, 82, 86, 181, 183,
Borel, H. 12 184
Brecht, B. 207 Eisenstein, S. 207
Brentano, F. 53, 56, 57, 85 Emerson, R.W . 55
Broad, C .D . 104, 114 Engels, F. 120, 206, 243
Broch, H. 92 Erhard, J .B . 202
Brouwer, L.E.J. 12, 14, 18, 21, 123 Eudoxos 11
Brunner, S. 186
Brush, S.G. 218 Faraday 67, 71, 238
Buckle, Th. 206 Feigl, H. 40
Burckhardt, J. 157, 158, 207 Feys, R. 19
Fichte 90
C alvin 237 Ficino 157
Cambridge School o f Analysis 3 9 ,4 1 , Fodor, J . 44, 51
43, 45, 47, 163 Fontenelle 205
C am panella T. 127, 128 Foucault, M. 202
Cantor, G. 12, 17 Frankfurt School 4, 49
250 IN D EX OF NAMES

Frazer, J. 90, 145 H um e 27, 56, 59, 210f., 235

Frege, G. 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, Husserl, E. 56, 58, 198
21, 23, 38, 41, 91, 94, 109, 116 H uxley, A. 128
Freud, S. 92, 161
Frise, A. 53 Ibsen, H. 93

Gadamer, H .G . 47 Jaeger, W. 2
G alavotti, M .C . 51 Jam es, W. 41
G alileo 1, 31, 38, 101, 144, 158, 160, Janik, A. 89f., 91, 102
162, 177, 178, 185, 196, 231, 235, 238 Jerusalem , W. 63
Gellner, E. 40, 51 Johnson, W .E. 114
George, W .A. 207 Joule, J . 233
Gestalt-Psychology 54, 69ff., 78f. Jow ett, B. 229
G odel, K. 17, 18, 19, 23, 40, 42 Judson, H .F. 186
Goethe 138, 140, 141, 147ff., 176, 199,
215 K aila, E. 1, 2, 34, 35, 36, 6 2-82, 85,
Goodm an, N. 36, 51 103
Grabm ann, M. 13 K ant 8 f , 10, 31, 47, 63, 73, 96, 202,
Gresham 168f., (G resham ’s Law) 203, 223, 224, 226
Grillparzer 88 K elsen, H. 104, 105, 109
Grimm, J. 84, 160, 215 K epler 159, 160, 161
Gropius, W. 210 K eynes, J .M . 114
Kierkegaard, S. 86, 208
H aberm as, J. 49, 202, 209, 223, 224, K irschenm ann, A.& P. 82
226 Kleinpeter, H. 56, 58
Haeckel, E. 65, 66 K neale, W .C. 52
Hagerstrom, A. 104, 105, 109 K nuuttila, S. 82
H ahn, H. 85, 86, 102 Koffka, K. 69
H ahn, L. 5 1 , 1 1 5 Kohler, W. 54, 69, 70
Haller, R. 84, 102 Kraus, K. 92, 94
Ham ann 202 Kronecker, L. 12
Harrock 238 K uhn, T .S. 44
H edenius, I. 105
Hegel 9, 10, 31, 84, 86, 119, 202, Lagerborg, R. 65, 81
214f., 219 L alande, A. 9
H eisenberg, W. 183 Lambert, J .H . 8
H em pel, C .G. 40, 73 Leibniz 7, 12, 20, 23, 62, 63, 73, 101,
H enning, H. 82 146
Heraclitus 232 Leinfellner, E. 102
Herder 202 Lenin 57, 66
Herz, H. 238 Leonardo da V inci 151, 158
Hesiod 219 Lessing 202
Hexner, E.P. 55 Lewis, C .I. 9, 19, 40, 116
H ey ting, A. 12, 18 Lewy, C. 51
Hilbert, D. 12, 14, 17, 18, 22, 36 Liebig, J . 238
H ilm y, S. 90ff., 100, 102 Lukes, S. 51
H ilpinen, R. 117 Lindborg, F. 159
Hintikka, J. 115, 117 Linneaus 240
Hirn, Y. 82 Loos, A. 92, 94
H itler 55, 198 Lotze, H . 53
H 0ffding, H. 64 Lowenheim , L. 17
Hoffman 238 Luce, J .V . 195
H ollis, M. 51 Lukasiewicz 1 9 ,2 6 , 116
H om er 198, 199, 200 Luke, D. 141
von H ornbostel 54 Luther 129
H uizinga, J . 204 Lyell, Ch. 64, 215
von H um boldt, W. 160 Lyotard, J.Fr. 227