In an earlier post I discussed 'genidentity' in relation to the Erlangen Conference. Today, I want to look at the introductory portion of Gimbel & Suleibhan's article, published by 3Quark, where they suggest that Analytic Philosophy was a Religion of Man. This may be true, but if it is true, the Religion in question was of a White Man- preferably not too Jewy or working class.
A representative figure worth mentioning in this context, is Christian von Ehrenfels, a founder of the 'Gestalt' school of psychology, whose 'Cosmogony' (1916) captured the despairing mood of the German speaking savant. Sexual reform- polygamy for the blonde beast- was vital to stave off the 'yellow peril', not to mention the homos seducing young Aryan lads into their despicable lifestyle. This was like the late Victorian racialist eugenics of Galton, Pearson and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Ehrenfels, like Ludendorff, seems to have wanted to create a Religion of his own. No doubt, it was a Religion of some particular very elite type of Man, but a poor, ugly, and almost wholly retarded, darkie like me can't endorse the notion that any actual 'philosophy', as opposed to hilarious fallacy, underlay that shite.
French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte argued that there ought to be an atheist’s religion, the Religion of Man, with holidays, rituals, symbols, saints, and social gatherings for those who maintain a scientific worldview without belief in an all-being.
Comte was a silly sausage. The Romans had turned Emperors into Gods. Sadly, that doesn't seem to have kept them safe from their own Praetorian, Teutonic, guards.
Anyway, a Cao Dai cult in Vietnam in which Victor Hugo was raised to the status of a Buddha, did come into existence in 1926. It wasn't evil. But other 'Secular, Scientifically Socialist, Religions' like the cult of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot, definitely were.
If such a religion existed,
Scientology exists
2023 would be a celebratory year:
So far it has been utterly shit
the centenary of its version of the Council of Nicea, the conference at Erlangen.
This is utterly silly. Christianity is a worldwide force for good. Erlangen was silly, inconsequential, and wholly futile in its own milieu.
The First Council of Nicea, in 325 C.E., brought together bishops from across the Christian world.
No it didn't. Christianity was already present in places like India and Ethiopia and other territories far out of the control of the Romans. Why are these two White peeps pretending that Christ is the monopoly of people of their own colour?
At the time, there was no single institutional structure and no coherent theology within Christianity.
Currently, there are many different Christian Churches each with its own doctrines and prelates and pontiffs. So what? Peaceful competition between Religions may be a good thing though, no doubt, it is silly to go to war over metaphysical issues.
Bishops and theologians held a wide range of positions and endorsed quite different practices, which resulted in a splintering within the Christian community. One question about which there was disagreement: is Jesus God or the son of God? If Jesus isn’t God, then aren’t Christians violating the first commandment not to put other gods before God? If Jesus is God, then how can one be the son of the other? The ensuing debate led to the doctrine of the Trinity coming out of Nicea.
Currently, we are content to say that Faith rests on a Mystery. You may have to affirm a certain Credo to be admitted to a Church or to hold priestly office in it but nobody is required to understand metaphysical dogma.
The First Council of Nicea was instigated by the Emperor Constantine, who was understandably fond of strong institutions wielding power. He brought the various players together to hash out their differences and create a unified Church, which then became the dominant power not only in religious life, but in geopolitical matters as well.
Till the rise of Islam- which didn't bother to hold ecumenical Councils and which attracted support from Monophysite Christians and from Jews thus giving them upper hand in the Middle East.
A similar impulse guided German advocates of what they termed “the scientific philosophy” in the early decades of the 20th century.
But Kant and Hegel and so forth were already scientific. However it was discoveries in geology and those of Darwin which enabled a mechanistic Scientific philosophy to triumph over Religion. The problem was that the mechanistic universe featured things like an Aether which pervaded the Universe. That sounded a bit Theological. If there is no God, why should there be an Aether? Worse yet was the scandal mentioned by Doestoevsky- viz. maybe we don't live in an Euclidean Universe. Out universe maybe 'four dimensional'- whatever that means. In other words, getting rid of God hadn't got rid of mysteries and paradoxes. In 1919, an astronomical observation (that of the Eddington expedition) showed Einstein was right. Taken together with Germany's defeat in the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, there was a feeling of despair. All the old certainties had been snatched away. If even pure and serene rays of light get bent by gravitation what happens to the Enlightenment project? Darwin was bad enough, we may have to accept that our ancestors were apes, but if there are no irrefragable 'synthetic a priori' judgments and no categorical imperative then the Enlightened European Savant may be no better than the Mongol or the Negro. If there is no privileged frame of reference and no 'genidentity' such that our intellectual genealogy is superior to that of the Hindoo or Voodoo oungan then the decline of the West is inevitable.
Chief among them was philosopher Hans Reichenbach.
For whom probability and causality were deeply entangled. We are content with 'Granger Causality'- i.e. useful type of correlations.
Reichenbach earned his Ph.D. for a dissertation on the foundations of probability… eventually. Fascinated by statistical mechanics, he realized—before quantum mechanics—that non-deterministic mathematical methods in natural science raised serious epistemological questions.
But those questions didn't matter. Having a Structural Causal Model with better predictive properties was useful even if people felt the Model was seriously weird. But then, everything is weird if you think about it long enough. Anyway, maybe the Universe is a hologram.
How could we gain knowledge about how the world operates from situations in which we cannot really know exactly how the world operates?
We can discover useful correlations which enable us to design better 'crucial experiments' or invent cool new tech.
He wrote about the nature of knowledge and the foundations of statistics and the ways in which these are employed scientifically. He submitted it to the faculty at the University of Erlangen, but the philosophers said that it was not philosophy, but physics. The physicists said that it was not physics at all, but philosophy. Eventually, he was able to cobble together a committee from both disciplines, and the dissertation was approved, but it took political wrangling among disagreeing parties with different backgrounds. It was an experience that would serve him later in life.
Max Noether, the father of Emmy, was one of his supervisors. It must be said that Reichenbach and Lewin and a number of other Left-leaning, Romantic, German students had an intellectual and cultural depth severely missing among most young scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, America was eagerly embracing 'mathematical philosophy' despite their traditional pragmatism and preference for utilitarian applications. I think Kurt Lewin did make a very useful contribution to American psychology- including its commercial applications to organization theory and marketing- in this respect.
Almost immediately after he received his degree, World War I began. Because of his technical background, Reichenbach was sent to the Eastern front to work in the radio corps. When the punishing Russian winter gave him a lung ailment, he was discharged, finding work in the research and development shop of a radio company. The stability of a paycheck was nice, but his mind was restless. He learned about the new general theory of relativity and realized that it contained profound philosophical ramifications.
This tropism towards deep ontological questions was what England's Haldane had found admirable. He helped set up both the Imperial College and the LSE.
As luck would have it, Albert Einstein himself was offering a seminar on the topic—the first ever—at the University of Berlin, where Reichenbach had spent time as an undergraduate. While he was there, he studied physics and philosophy, but he was also a campus rabble-rouser, starting socialist political organizations and building infrastructure for students, many of them Jewish, who weren’t welcomed into the school’s fraternal organizations.
Sadly, the German Left, like the Hungarian Left, acted precipitately and thus strengthened the Right Wing backlash.
There were only eight students in Einstein’s seminar, so Reichenbach became friendly with Einstein, who shared his interest in the philosophical aspects of science. They happened to live on the same streetcar line and would ride home together, discussing the ways in which relativity challenged the worldview of Immanuel Kant, who dominated academic philosophy in Germany at the time.
Why did Kant throw such a giant shadow so many years after his death? Surely it was obvious that there were no synthetic a priori judgments? I suppose the answer is that Kant was read against the grain and thus taken to represent Enlightenment rather than a sort of more metaphysical 'synderesis' based Pietism.
After the seminar, Reichenbach committed himself to the Academy and, with Einstein’s recommendation, got a position teaching physics and philosophy at the Technical University in Stuttgart, an engineering school.
He became a 'beamten'- i.e. a Civil Servant and thus the inheritor of 'beamtenliberalismus' or the 'camera liberalism' of the officials. Sadly, this class would prove no bulwark against Hitler.
While in Stuttgart, he wrote his first book, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, a draft of which he sent to Einstein for comments. (Einstein’s copious marginal notes still exist on that original copy in the archives at the University of Pittsburgh). Einstein was quite pleased with Reichenbach’s arguments, and the book was published.
Einstein understood both academic politics as well as how public reception or popular prejudices could adversely affect a research program. Pretending his theory was Kantian made it respectable and bourgeois.
The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge found its way into the hands of another lone wolf scholar who also bought into the scientific philosophy, this one working alone in the mountains outside of Freiburg. Rudolf Carnap had written a dissertation on the different concepts of space employed in philosophy, physics, and geometry. Submitting it to the University in Jena, his hometown, he got the same treatment as Reichenbach. The philosophers thought it was physics, and the physicists thought it was philosophy. The same sort of negotiating was required to create a committee in which no faculty member actually understood the content. As with Reichenbach, Carnap was eventually awarded the degree.
What point are the authors making here? Is it that both were 'outsiders' and that it was only in pragmatic America that they were able to flourish? I think it is Tarski who is the key figure here though Carnap developed notions of extension and intension more rigorously. It is noteworthy that Godel and Tarski reach the same conclusion as Turing who used Brouwer's choice sequences. Gentzen is another name missing from this analysis. But Gentzen was a Nazi. Carnap was a pacifist. I suppose, the author is highlighting the 'nice guys' who contributed to their 'Religion of Man'. But there was a horrible Right Wing version of it. Back then, the feeling was that 'Race Science' was probably on the right track. Also, women don't actually have any brains.
Reichenbach’s book made Carnap feel a little better. At least there was someone else who shared not only his professional experience, but also his intellectual alienation. The works of Einstein, Bertrand Russell,
Who wrote 'a Free Man's Worship' and had been imprisoned during the Great War for his pacifist views. Russell became a global celebrity as a champion of Free Love and Pacificism and not being nasty to niggers.
and a few others were opening up new vistas for a scientific worldview. That worldview offered incredibly rich possibilities, along with some big questions that needed answering. The two men corresponded about technical questions and commiserated about the way in which advocates of this new scientific philosophy were being kept out of professorial positions. Carnap was married with two kids, and the possibility of an uncertain work future worried him.
The industrious German pedant had created an algorithmic way of turning any type of inquiry into something which appeared rigorous enough to deserve a place in the Academy. The trouble was, the thing was seldom useful. Often it was hilariously wrong-headed. Thus, it was important for pedants to pretend that some great political benefit attached to their work. Religion, like Paideia, is a Service industry. If it can't pay for itself, the State must subsidize it for some bogus ideological reason.
Reichenbach told Carnap about several others he knew who shared their orientation toward the world, including Mortiz Schlick, who wrote another book on the philosophy of relativity and who had recently gotten a plum job at the University of Vienna.
Schlick argued against synthetic a priori knowledge and said there should be an empirical test. So far, so good. The problem is the thing could just as easily be called an intuition. Brouwer has an intuition of a 'two-ity'. He constructs choice sequences. Later Turing can use them to some good purpose. Then Brouwer himself shows his great fixed point theorem might be wrong. This scandalizes the Americans. Errett Bishop is so incensed by this failure to appreciate a true genius that he calls his subject 'Schizophrenic'. By the end of the Sixties, there appears to be some sort of hippy-dippy Cultural Revolution threatening the sanity of Mathematics Departments. Once things like non-standard analysis emerge, people suddenly find that C.S Pierce might have anticipated all this. Then Lawvere gives the Hegelian dialectic a category theoretical interpretation. What would follow? Grothendieck has his 'Yoga' and Godel his version of Anselm's proof. Perhaps America had been wrong to whore after Gottingen's Gods. Plain old Yankee Pragmatism and an evangelism of 'know-how' was good enough.
The same university had been the ultimate professional destination of Ernst Mach, the patron saint of the scientific worldview, and Schlick was brought in to make the new scientific worldview a part of the institution.
Sadly, he was murdered by a crazy ex-student who said the Professor's philosophy had undermined his ethics and morality. The Viennese thought the fellow was protesting against the Jews (though Schlick wasn't Jewish) and soon released him from prison. It is strange that Religions or Man or Man-Gods, tend to get off the ground by finding Jews, or people who look a bit Jewy, to kill.
Carnap suggested getting all of these people together for an opportunity to meet and feel a sense of cohesion. Reichenbach quickly realized that the gathering would be even more important than a chance to feel less alone. The burgeoning scientific philosophy they all thought about was more than just a few technical formulations of big questions. It was even more than a worldview; with the appearance of fascism in Europe between the wars, which was based on questionable metaphysical presuppositions, the scientific philosophy was a political movement.
The plain fact is Fascism and Nazism only emerged because a counter-weight was needed to the rising Bolshevik threat. German savants realized that Bismarck's strategic alliance with the Socialists as well as the continuing reverberations of the Kulturkampf (which he lost) had directly contributed to the success of the crazy pedants who had taken over the Kremlin. Incidentally, Stalin too was a philosopher of language- a very successful one in political terms because he gave all sorts of 'subaltern' linguistic groups a reason to champion their own literature and separate Nationality while remaining faithful to a supposedly 'Internationalist' and 'Enlightenment' political program. This may not be obvious to American savants but it is obvious to Tamils. Indeed, the name of our Chief Minister is Stalin.
Stalin enabled Communism to take a 'linguistic turn' which was useful to him and his murderous crew. The West's 'linguistic turn' was stupid and useless.
Carnap’s conference became a constitutional congress: an opportunity to craft a new way of seeing the world, of being in the world, based on logic and observation.
No. The thing didn't matter in the slightest. Lenin and Stalin mattered. Henry Ford and 'Taylorism' mattered. Germans had ceased to count though it would take a second war followed by Partition and Occupation for them to acknowledge this.
From his college days, Reichenbach knew how to organize. He contacted Dr. Rolf Hoffmann, a wealthy entrepreneur from Erlangen who loved philosophy and would be sympathetic to their movement.
Germany had established diplomatic relations with the Bolshevik regime. It was possible that the country would move to the Left so as to ally with the Kremlin and Ataturk's Turkey so as to get rid of 'war guilt' and reparation payments. The other big worry was worker occupation of factories as had happened in Italy. It was important that young engineers and chemists and so forth not fall victim to the Marxian notion that Capitalism was foredoomed to disappear.
Hoffmann had just converted a mansion in the beautiful Burgberg garden district into a home for philosophy, with each room named after a classic thinker. Hoffmann agreed to host the gathering. With the economy floundering, Reichenbach raised funds from the Kant Society to help pay for food for the attendees: food for thought, one might say.
Indeed. But was any worthwhile thought actually fed? Did a 'Religion of Man' actually get off the ground? If the Council of Nicea anathematized Arianism, what did Erlangen anathematize? Carnap's 'constitutional project' aimed at 'defining and uniting all scientific concepts in a single conceptual system on the basis of a few fundamental concepts'. What was that conceptual system? Even a hundred years later, we don't know. I'm not saying the thing can't be done in an arbitrary ipse dixit manner. But 'naturality' is lacking. Any ranting Socioproctologist can come up with such a constitution. Religions, however, are founded upon awe and wonderment at a mystery. The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
The problem with 'logical empiricism' was that so long as women and Asiatics and people of African heritage were considered to lack logical thinking, its Religion of Man was bound to be either useless or positively repugnant.
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