The Spirit of Enlightenment within the Vienna Circle (1907-1938)

From Reception to Reconstruction: The Actualization of the French Enlightenment by Logical Empiricism as an Embodied Attitude for a Critical and Emancipatory Gesture

Abstract:

At the origin of this philosophical inquiry lies a sense of wonder: the observation, within logical empiricist writings, of a family resemblance, resonances, and affinities between the Vienna Circle’s program and Enlightenment thought. Yet, this family resemblance turns out to be evanescent as soon as the meanings of their respective ideas are strictly compared; an evanescence accentuated by the scarcity of explicit references to Enlightenment philosophers, obscuring a central intellectual root of the Vienna Circle.

In order to reconstruct the meaning and function of the “spirit of Enlightenment” (Geist der Aufklärung) at the heart of the “scientific world-conception” (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung) of the Vienna Circle, this study conducts a philosophical and historical analysis of reception. Using a pluralistic methodology, this study draws on a lexical analysis of the logical empiricist corpus to identify the traces scattered throughout the movement’s three decades and among its eighteen central figures. By methodically examining these traces, this research reconstructs the substance and scope of the Enlightenment within the Vienna Circle’s program, as well as the channels through which 18th-century thought was received. It then explores the effective deployment of the spirit of Enlightenment as a committed attitude put into practice toward the sociocultural challenges of their time, resonating with our own.

This research demonstrates that the question of the Enlightenment constitutes the beating heart of the Vienna Circle’s program, at the intersection of epistemology and social commitment. This heritage, received either directly or through the Viennese late Enlightenment (Spätaufklärung), permeates the entire movement, from its roots before World War I to its golden age, and finally to its international expansion as Europe descended into fascism. The spirit of the Enlightenment also united the protagonists of its two wings around a common ideal: that of precise, fact-based thinking, an ideal whose ramifications link science and society.

 We demonstrate that the “Enlightenment” object of the Vienna Circle is not so much a set of theses as a fundamental scientific attitude; a perspective that actualizes the Enlightenment gesture in the face of the irrationalisms of their time, prelude and vectors of obscurantism. Philosophy thus appears as an attitude embodied in a critical and emancipatory gesture, a tool for acting and thinking within the polis.

Keywords: Vienna Circle, Logical Empiricism, French Enlightenment, Otto Neurath, Scientific World-Conception, Spätaufklärung (Late Enlightenment), Encyclopedism, Scientific Attitude, Emancipation, Logical positivism.