Accueil
https://archive.org/details/empiricismsociol0000neur/page/n7/mode/2up
"I was brought up in a scholarly home in Vienna. Even as a child I was already looking at shelves and cupboards full of books, and the impression they made has accompanied me throughout my life. In the entrance hall of our fiat stood extraordinarily big glass bookcases crammed with books and pamphlets ; book shelves up to the ceiling covered all the walls of our drawing room and my father's study. Later on books appeared also on my own and my brother's shelves.
I believe I made my first mathematical estimates counting the number of books in the library. I counted the number of shelves and the average number of books in each shelf - mostly arranged two rows deep - and arrived at a total of about 13 000. They were all at my disposal ; I was allowed to rummage in the library to my heart's content. My parents assumed that a well-treated child would be less interested in unsuitable books if none were forbidden rather than if some were put on a kind of 'index'. Whether this principle is generally advisable I shall not try to decide. In any case I think it was an advantage that, while still a small child, I came into direct contact with books which later on were to become of importance to me in some way or another.
Before I could read properly I started looking into books with pictures and maps. This predilection was reinforced by the arrangement of the library. The big books, many of which contained pictures and maps, mainly filled the deep bottom shelves and thus were immediately at hand. I could take them from the shelves onto the floor and then lie down and look at the pictures - a bodily situation particularly liked by children. I liked pictures where the colors were clear and not vague. There were books which presented craftsmen at work together with their tools, but I soon discovered that the tools in the key charts did not harmonize completely with those used in the workshops, and I disliked that very much. I was even more distressed when a picture showed details I could not distinguish sufficiently or details which did not help to explain anything. I discovered that pictures made for children were very often full of mistakes.
Is it not odd that I never asked anybody about these things ? My father was prepared to speak with me, even when I was a small boy, about any subject I liked, from chemistry to philosophy, from human behavior to architecture. I knew perfectly well how to tell in which way a book was very instructive or disturbing or difficult. But I cannot remember that I ever mentioned a picture as particularly informative or dull or irritating. Pictures had been discussed only from an aesthetic or historical point of view, not as a means of communication. I think I did not even tell my father when I discovered a mistake in a perspective drawing although he had arranged for me to attend university lectures on projection when I was only fifteen. I think it was only a lack of tradition which prevented us from speaking of visual details; I cannot imagine any taboo-like inhibition playing a part in that silence.
Please do not think that I lived among books only. I had my full share of outdoor life too. Our family spent several months in the countryside every year, sometimes in the mountains, and so I became acquainted with trees, flowers, butterflies and caterpillars, with cows and horses, with handicraft of many kinds, with rivulets and wells, I could build little water mills in the streams, and once I built Caesar's bridge across the Rhine, based on drawings in a history book. This little structure was so strong that I could stand on it (but I had built it at a dry spot).
The museums in Vienna played their part in my visual upbringing. Very soon I discovered that museums are usually collections either of beautiful things or curiosities or of historically or scientifically important material, but that they do very little to provide answers to the questions their visitors might have about their collections. I had to look into books to find even the most primitive facts about the treasures I saw.
I think the strongest impact on me was made by the Art History Museum which was opened, together with its twin, the Natural History Museum, when I was a small boy. Occasionally I tried to draw some interesting tools or weapons in my notebook, a hobby which accompanied me through life. (Looking back I realize that I have always been interested subconsciously in the problem of producing either a simplified scheme or, on the contrary, a highly realistic picture complete with all details. Even as an adult, I can sit down with colored pencils, slice a hemlock stem with my penknife and try to depict the fine hairs, the leaves in their purple, yellow, and bluish greens, and other details.)
I was sensitive to the appalling contrast between the pompous entrance hall of the museum and the rather quiet and modest main rooms of the Egyptian department which one immediately entered from the big hall. The Egyptian wall paintings attracted me particularly. I could understand each depicted detail; I could see men and women in their daily activities ; everything simple and perceivable, telling its story. This informative character made me feel at ease. I could not see the same simple details in the adjoining rooms devoted to Greek and Roman antiquities.
I cannot remember when I first realized with a shock that all the clear cut Egyptian wall paintings which I liked so much had belonged in some way or other to an underground world; that all this picture pageantry existed only for the dead.
The charm of the hieroglyphics has never ceased to fascinate me. I disliked the fact that they changed into the characters of current writing, only legible to the initiated. Why should not everybody get a chance to learn a lot by means of pictures? Now I know that these things belonged to the priests and to the dead, not to us, the men in the street, who want to take part in everything that happens on earth.
Within my personal life there was a visual tendency from death and dream to life and action, always within the realm of visually well defined elements. And just the visually well defined elements and their combinations accompanied me throughout my life, up to the time when it became a planned activity within the ISOTYPE scheme." (pp.4-6)
-Otto Neurath, Notes autobiographiques in Marie Neurath & Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, Reidel Dordrecht, 1973, 473 pages.
"
(p.7)
" [Chapitre 6 "Contre Spengler"]
"The wish to found action on perfect insight means to nip it in the bud. Politics are action, always built on inadequate survey. But a world-view, too, is action; embracing the manifold universe is an anticipation of unpredictable efforts. In the end all our thinking depends on such inadequacies. We must advance, even without certainty ! The only question is whether we are aware of it or not.
Our pseudo-rationalists dare not face this fact. Frivolity! they cry, when it is found that even with the most developed insight more than one way remains open for important decisions and that casting lots can thus become meaningful. They will not admit, precisely when some great task is to be undertaken, that insight becomes awareness of its own limits. Insofar as kind and size of given conditions are hidden, lack of knowledge alone leaves open a multiplicity of possibilities; but even the fullest clarity reveals many goals of which only one can determine our actions. And so the pseudo-rationalists press reason until it shows only one. They put unambiguous sham insight, painfully reached or grasped in a facile manner, in place of augury and entrail-watching, which truly did more justice to human inadequacy and spiritual anguish. These last were based on God ; without such a higher power and with full consciousness of imperfect insight, to act with force and coherence is a difficult task.
Whoever attempts this task is disinclined to overestimate insight in any way, as if it were to give wings to our action. As a man he comes to terms with the fact that comprehensive goals are deliberately defended on insufficient grounds, and indeed they must be so. He abhors self-deception about this. Can whole peoples adopt this attitude, like that lost wayfarer of whom Descartes speaks ? Surrounded by dense forest without signposts and having vainly consulted reason, he chooses one direction which he follows unswervingly, because that is the only conceivable salvation. Or will peoples forever resemble the other lost wayfarer, who first advances in one direction, then returns to push forward in another, thereby losing time and strength ? Once severed from faith and tradition which restricted possibilities from the start and gave extrapersonal arguments to those who still wavered, must people fall victim to the eternal antitheses that insight alone cannot banish? To every well-founded theory today there are equally well-founded counter-theories. The necessary unity in action is undermined if insight by itself is to bring the final decision. Thus striving for clear and conscious mastery of life can lead to decline instead of to a new level of existence." (pp.158-159)
"The burden of the ultimate decision may of course devolve upon individuals, on the leaders. They must decide between equally sensible possibilities, before they appear before the crowd. The approval of those who join their efforts, relying at first on feelings and insight, must in the end be based on confidence in the man who proclaims a goal and, with his companions, wants to build one reality. Confidence cannot be intellectualized. Of this, pseudo-rationalists are unaware: leaders and prophets have to appear with the guise of knowledge; forebodings, suppositions and demands have to appear as the results of conclusive proofs. Is it any wonder if those from prophetic schools stammer in an ambiguous tongue and raise heaps of pseudo-reasons, instead of revealing anything ? Only a prophet can stand against a prophet, and history unmasks the false one; but whoever tries to convince by means of proofs, submits to the rules and the judgment of science.
Dion of Prusa cried woe over his epoch and compared Athens with the funeral pyre of Patroclus which was merely waiting for the flames to light it ; H. G. Wells, now in the style of past experience, now in grotesque exaggeration, painted pictures of our future ; but Oswald Spengler, instructively diagnosing, conjures the traditional force of insight, instead of confronting men as a poet and visionary. Through method and proof he wants to compel our approval, wanting systematically to 'predetermine' history, to 'calculate' the future of the Occident and to settle from the outset what we might still successfully tackle in the way of art and science, technology and politics, in times to come. Urgent necessity may compel us to choose an insufficiently founded image of the future as the basis for our actions. Perhaps our pedagogy, our constitution, our law must express whether we are reckoning on 'decline' or on another forward step in our development. But let there be no mistake: a decision is no proof. One who as prophet, or as his pupil, steadily supports a prophecy may show the accuracy of his prophecy by influencing reality: the prophecy becomes the cause of its own realisation. But this has nothing to do with 'calculations' or 'proofs'. Spengler, in his attempt to calculate and prove everything, contradicts not only the nature of prophecy but even some of his own views concerning the problem! "Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Everything else is an impure solution." Is his work poetry ? No. Then what ? In Spengler's own verdict: an impure solution." (p.160)
"It is not the individual wrong results, the wrong facts, the wrong proofs, that make Spengler's book so dangerous, but above all his method of conducting proofs, and his reflections on proof as such. Against this one must defend oneself. Anyone who wants to shape a happier future with hope and striving should know that none of Spengler's 'proofs' is enough to prevent him; and whoever wishes to come to terms with the idea of 'decline' should know that he does so on the basis of a resolution, and not a proof !
Few books make such great demands on the devoted confidence of the reader. Who can check all fields that Spengler touches on, especially since there are no references to sources ? Yet there are many crude errors that can be corrected merely from reference works, errors that carry imposing chains of proofs. This sort of thing is not justified by the magnitude of the task. Old and established knowledge, well familiar to experts, is presented as world-shaking novelties of Spenglerian make but this everyone may judge according to taste ! On what height does Spengler imagine he is when he dares utter statements like this: "I ask myself, when I pick up the book of a modern thinker, what - except for professorial or windy political party speeches on the level of an average journalist, as is found in Guyau, Bergson, Spencer, Diihring, Eucken - does he even suspect of real world politics, of the great problems of metropolitan cities, of capitalism, the future of the state, of the relation of technology to civilisation, of the Russian question, of the sciences ?" Even the less informed reader can see through such immoderate pretensions ; but not everyone sees so quickly the constant deprecatory remarks about historical and other research, nor the technique by which Spengler plays off one thinker against another while making exaggerated statements even more outrageous." (pp.161-162)
-Otto Neurath (auth.), Marie Neurath & Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, Reidel Dordrecht, 1973, 473 pages.
"I was brought up in a scholarly home in Vienna. Even as a child I was already looking at shelves and cupboards full of books, and the impression they made has accompanied me throughout my life. In the entrance hall of our fiat stood extraordinarily big glass bookcases crammed with books and pamphlets ; book shelves up to the ceiling covered all the walls of our drawing room and my father's study. Later on books appeared also on my own and my brother's shelves.
I believe I made my first mathematical estimates counting the number of books in the library. I counted the number of shelves and the average number of books in each shelf - mostly arranged two rows deep - and arrived at a total of about 13 000. They were all at my disposal ; I was allowed to rummage in the library to my heart's content. My parents assumed that a well-treated child would be less interested in unsuitable books if none were forbidden rather than if some were put on a kind of 'index'. Whether this principle is generally advisable I shall not try to decide. In any case I think it was an advantage that, while still a small child, I came into direct contact with books which later on were to become of importance to me in some way or another.
Before I could read properly I started looking into books with pictures and maps. This predilection was reinforced by the arrangement of the library. The big books, many of which contained pictures and maps, mainly filled the deep bottom shelves and thus were immediately at hand. I could take them from the shelves onto the floor and then lie down and look at the pictures - a bodily situation particularly liked by children. I liked pictures where the colors were clear and not vague. There were books which presented craftsmen at work together with their tools, but I soon discovered that the tools in the key charts did not harmonize completely with those used in the workshops, and I disliked that very much. I was even more distressed when a picture showed details I could not distinguish sufficiently or details which did not help to explain anything. I discovered that pictures made for children were very often full of mistakes.
Is it not odd that I never asked anybody about these things ? My father was prepared to speak with me, even when I was a small boy, about any subject I liked, from chemistry to philosophy, from human behavior to architecture. I knew perfectly well how to tell in which way a book was very instructive or disturbing or difficult. But I cannot remember that I ever mentioned a picture as particularly informative or dull or irritating. Pictures had been discussed only from an aesthetic or historical point of view, not as a means of communication. I think I did not even tell my father when I discovered a mistake in a perspective drawing although he had arranged for me to attend university lectures on projection when I was only fifteen. I think it was only a lack of tradition which prevented us from speaking of visual details; I cannot imagine any taboo-like inhibition playing a part in that silence.
Please do not think that I lived among books only. I had my full share of outdoor life too. Our family spent several months in the countryside every year, sometimes in the mountains, and so I became acquainted with trees, flowers, butterflies and caterpillars, with cows and horses, with handicraft of many kinds, with rivulets and wells, I could build little water mills in the streams, and once I built Caesar's bridge across the Rhine, based on drawings in a history book. This little structure was so strong that I could stand on it (but I had built it at a dry spot).
The museums in Vienna played their part in my visual upbringing. Very soon I discovered that museums are usually collections either of beautiful things or curiosities or of historically or scientifically important material, but that they do very little to provide answers to the questions their visitors might have about their collections. I had to look into books to find even the most primitive facts about the treasures I saw.
I think the strongest impact on me was made by the Art History Museum which was opened, together with its twin, the Natural History Museum, when I was a small boy. Occasionally I tried to draw some interesting tools or weapons in my notebook, a hobby which accompanied me through life. (Looking back I realize that I have always been interested subconsciously in the problem of producing either a simplified scheme or, on the contrary, a highly realistic picture complete with all details. Even as an adult, I can sit down with colored pencils, slice a hemlock stem with my penknife and try to depict the fine hairs, the leaves in their purple, yellow, and bluish greens, and other details.)
I was sensitive to the appalling contrast between the pompous entrance hall of the museum and the rather quiet and modest main rooms of the Egyptian department which one immediately entered from the big hall. The Egyptian wall paintings attracted me particularly. I could understand each depicted detail; I could see men and women in their daily activities ; everything simple and perceivable, telling its story. This informative character made me feel at ease. I could not see the same simple details in the adjoining rooms devoted to Greek and Roman antiquities.
I cannot remember when I first realized with a shock that all the clear cut Egyptian wall paintings which I liked so much had belonged in some way or other to an underground world; that all this picture pageantry existed only for the dead.
The charm of the hieroglyphics has never ceased to fascinate me. I disliked the fact that they changed into the characters of current writing, only legible to the initiated. Why should not everybody get a chance to learn a lot by means of pictures? Now I know that these things belonged to the priests and to the dead, not to us, the men in the street, who want to take part in everything that happens on earth.
Within my personal life there was a visual tendency from death and dream to life and action, always within the realm of visually well defined elements. And just the visually well defined elements and their combinations accompanied me throughout my life, up to the time when it became a planned activity within the ISOTYPE scheme." (pp.4-6)
-Otto Neurath, Notes autobiographiques in Marie Neurath & Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, Reidel Dordrecht, 1973, 473 pages.
"
(p.7)
" [Chapitre 6 "Contre Spengler"]
"The wish to found action on perfect insight means to nip it in the bud. Politics are action, always built on inadequate survey. But a world-view, too, is action; embracing the manifold universe is an anticipation of unpredictable efforts. In the end all our thinking depends on such inadequacies. We must advance, even without certainty ! The only question is whether we are aware of it or not.
Our pseudo-rationalists dare not face this fact. Frivolity! they cry, when it is found that even with the most developed insight more than one way remains open for important decisions and that casting lots can thus become meaningful. They will not admit, precisely when some great task is to be undertaken, that insight becomes awareness of its own limits. Insofar as kind and size of given conditions are hidden, lack of knowledge alone leaves open a multiplicity of possibilities; but even the fullest clarity reveals many goals of which only one can determine our actions. And so the pseudo-rationalists press reason until it shows only one. They put unambiguous sham insight, painfully reached or grasped in a facile manner, in place of augury and entrail-watching, which truly did more justice to human inadequacy and spiritual anguish. These last were based on God ; without such a higher power and with full consciousness of imperfect insight, to act with force and coherence is a difficult task.
Whoever attempts this task is disinclined to overestimate insight in any way, as if it were to give wings to our action. As a man he comes to terms with the fact that comprehensive goals are deliberately defended on insufficient grounds, and indeed they must be so. He abhors self-deception about this. Can whole peoples adopt this attitude, like that lost wayfarer of whom Descartes speaks ? Surrounded by dense forest without signposts and having vainly consulted reason, he chooses one direction which he follows unswervingly, because that is the only conceivable salvation. Or will peoples forever resemble the other lost wayfarer, who first advances in one direction, then returns to push forward in another, thereby losing time and strength ? Once severed from faith and tradition which restricted possibilities from the start and gave extrapersonal arguments to those who still wavered, must people fall victim to the eternal antitheses that insight alone cannot banish? To every well-founded theory today there are equally well-founded counter-theories. The necessary unity in action is undermined if insight by itself is to bring the final decision. Thus striving for clear and conscious mastery of life can lead to decline instead of to a new level of existence." (pp.158-159)
"The burden of the ultimate decision may of course devolve upon individuals, on the leaders. They must decide between equally sensible possibilities, before they appear before the crowd. The approval of those who join their efforts, relying at first on feelings and insight, must in the end be based on confidence in the man who proclaims a goal and, with his companions, wants to build one reality. Confidence cannot be intellectualized. Of this, pseudo-rationalists are unaware: leaders and prophets have to appear with the guise of knowledge; forebodings, suppositions and demands have to appear as the results of conclusive proofs. Is it any wonder if those from prophetic schools stammer in an ambiguous tongue and raise heaps of pseudo-reasons, instead of revealing anything ? Only a prophet can stand against a prophet, and history unmasks the false one; but whoever tries to convince by means of proofs, submits to the rules and the judgment of science.
Dion of Prusa cried woe over his epoch and compared Athens with the funeral pyre of Patroclus which was merely waiting for the flames to light it ; H. G. Wells, now in the style of past experience, now in grotesque exaggeration, painted pictures of our future ; but Oswald Spengler, instructively diagnosing, conjures the traditional force of insight, instead of confronting men as a poet and visionary. Through method and proof he wants to compel our approval, wanting systematically to 'predetermine' history, to 'calculate' the future of the Occident and to settle from the outset what we might still successfully tackle in the way of art and science, technology and politics, in times to come. Urgent necessity may compel us to choose an insufficiently founded image of the future as the basis for our actions. Perhaps our pedagogy, our constitution, our law must express whether we are reckoning on 'decline' or on another forward step in our development. But let there be no mistake: a decision is no proof. One who as prophet, or as his pupil, steadily supports a prophecy may show the accuracy of his prophecy by influencing reality: the prophecy becomes the cause of its own realisation. But this has nothing to do with 'calculations' or 'proofs'. Spengler, in his attempt to calculate and prove everything, contradicts not only the nature of prophecy but even some of his own views concerning the problem! "Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Everything else is an impure solution." Is his work poetry ? No. Then what ? In Spengler's own verdict: an impure solution." (p.160)
"It is not the individual wrong results, the wrong facts, the wrong proofs, that make Spengler's book so dangerous, but above all his method of conducting proofs, and his reflections on proof as such. Against this one must defend oneself. Anyone who wants to shape a happier future with hope and striving should know that none of Spengler's 'proofs' is enough to prevent him; and whoever wishes to come to terms with the idea of 'decline' should know that he does so on the basis of a resolution, and not a proof !
Few books make such great demands on the devoted confidence of the reader. Who can check all fields that Spengler touches on, especially since there are no references to sources ? Yet there are many crude errors that can be corrected merely from reference works, errors that carry imposing chains of proofs. This sort of thing is not justified by the magnitude of the task. Old and established knowledge, well familiar to experts, is presented as world-shaking novelties of Spenglerian make but this everyone may judge according to taste ! On what height does Spengler imagine he is when he dares utter statements like this: "I ask myself, when I pick up the book of a modern thinker, what - except for professorial or windy political party speeches on the level of an average journalist, as is found in Guyau, Bergson, Spencer, Diihring, Eucken - does he even suspect of real world politics, of the great problems of metropolitan cities, of capitalism, the future of the state, of the relation of technology to civilisation, of the Russian question, of the sciences ?" Even the less informed reader can see through such immoderate pretensions ; but not everyone sees so quickly the constant deprecatory remarks about historical and other research, nor the technique by which Spengler plays off one thinker against another while making exaggerated statements even more outrageous." (pp.161-162)
-Otto Neurath (auth.), Marie Neurath & Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Empiricism and Sociology, Reidel Dordrecht, 1973, 473 pages.
