ANDREAS VRAHIMIS

Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s

critique of Heidegger
On 24 July 1929, Martin Heidegger presented his inaugural lecture on
the occasion when he assumed Edmund Husserl’s chair at the Univer-
sity of Freiburg. The lecture, titled ‘What is Metaphysics?’, included the
notoriously ungrammatical declaration that ‘the Nothing itself nihilates’
(‘Das Nichts selbst nichtet’).1 Following Heidegger’s succession to Hus-
serl’s chair, a number of philosophers who would later come to be
associated with analytical philosophy, including Rudolf Carnap and
Ludwig Wittgenstein, produced commentaries, often verging on the
polemical, on Heidegger’s pronouncement. Carnap had been one of the
leading members of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and
scientists who, drawing on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
had put forth a vision of an anti-metaphysical philosophy that, drawing
from modern logic, would function as an underlabourer to the advances
of modern science.
The relation of Carnap’s critique of Heidegger’s sentences to their
political antitheses has often been mentioned in recent scholarship, fol-
lowing decades in which scholars had ignored the Vienna Circle’s con-
nection to inter-war Viennese cultural politics. Various explanations have
been offered for this apolitical view of the Vienna Circle. Most Logical
Positivists, in Vienna and Berlin, emigrated in response to Hitler’s rise to
power. Many ended up in the United States where, some have argued,
Cold War politics subsequently forced them to downplay their past
socialist allegiances.2 Furthermore, the Frankfurt School, who had also
emigrated to the United States, and who had contributed to the creation
of the New Left, had a troubled relationship with the Vienna Circle.3
Ignorance of the Vienna Circle’s cultural politics had for a long time
served to obscure their connection with some of their political allies in
modernist art, design, and architecture.4 In particular, the Vienna Cir-
cle’s collaboration with the Dessau Bauhaus school had generally been
ignored, though ‘the logical positivists were more prominent as visitors
to the Dessau Bauhaus than members of any other single group outside
art and architecture’.5 There is a surprising proximity between the
Vienna Circle’s philosophical output and their commitment to a mod-
ernistic cultural politics. As Galison,6 and later Dahms,7 argue, the rela-
tionship between the Vienna Circle and modernist architecture was not
62 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

simply one of coincidental parallelism, but a self-conscious effort on

behalf of both to articulate a view of the world in which both would play
essential roles. Where the Circle had attempted to extrude metaphysics,
aesthetics, and ethics from philosophical discourse, with the aim of
constructing a ‘“scientific”, antiphilosophical philosophy’,8 the Bauhaus
modernists had sought to disentangle decoration from art and architec-
ture, creating a ‘new antiaesthetic aesthetic’9 that focused on function-
ality and was grounded on scientific principles. And one may add,
following Janik and Toulmin, that these intersecting modernistic move-
ments grew from the wider political and cultural background of the
interdisciplinary web of Vienna’s fin-de-siècle ‘Moderne’, including
Karl Kraus’s satirical writings, the Jung Wien group’s avant-garde litera-
ture (including Hugo von Hofmansthal and Robert Musil), Adolf Loos’s
and Otto Wagner’s innovations in design and architecture, Arnold
Schoenberg’s atonal music,10 the development of psychoanalysis,
Austro-Marxism, and so on.11
It is even more surprising that there is a connection to draw between
the Vienna Circle’s modernistic cultural politics (including Wittgen-
stein’s more ambivalent relation to modernism)12 and their critique of
Heidegger. As Galison points out, the alliance between the Vienna Circle
and modernist architecture is one against common enemies: ‘the reli-
gious right, nationalist, anthroposophist, völkisch, and Nazi oppo-
nents’.13 It is thus no accident that Carnap’s criticisms of Heidegger were
uttered in the same breath as statements of sympathy for modernistic
views of architecture. This is because, as I will show, the Circle’s cultural
sympathies were expressed primarily in negative terms, in the form of
contrariness to the opposition. And in the same way that their ‘overcom-
ing’ of metaphysics requires that one abstain from metaphysical pro-
nouncements in its expression, so does their alliance with architecture
require that it be what, with Wittgenstein, one might call a stylistic
consideration: not a universalisable philosophical thesis on aesthetics,
but a cultural political preference that is freed from the kind of authority
carried by philosophical theses.
The downplaying of the modernistic aspect of the Vienna Circle’s
work has meant that there has been little interest for it within the arts
and humanities. At least this is the case outside philosophy depart-
ments, who have nonetheless in the English-speaking world recently
begun to revisit the history of analytic philosophy. Conversely, outside
philosophy departments, in the second half of the twentieth century a
line of thinkers which in many ways begins with Heidegger has had an
immense influence. In what follows, I examine the Vienna Circle’s per-
ceived alliance with certain aspects of their cultural milieu in their
criticisms of Heidegger. Discussions of the early analytic critique of
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 63

Heidegger have largely focused on its technical aspect, highlighting

those issues in the philosophy of language which drove Carnap and
Wittgenstein’s discussions of nonsense. Yet, as I show, there is a further
story to be told regarding the cultural and political motivation behind
this response to Heidegger, a story which involves Austria’s cooperative
housing movement, the Dessau Bauhaus, and Adolf Loos’s critique of
decoration.

Neurath’s critique of Lebensphilosophie

Despite being among the leading figures of the Vienna Circle, Otto
Neurath is perhaps one of its more philosophically neglected members.
Together with Rudolf Carnap and others, Neurath is often seen as com-
prising the Circle’s ‘left wing’. He was a Marxist, though quite an un-
orthodox one, and had been involved in an official capacity with the
economic planning of the Bavarian Soviet Republic between 1918 and
1919. Following the fall of this short-lived revolutionary project, he was
accused of high treason and imprisoned.
While awaiting trial for his activities, Neurath wrote Anti-Spengler, an
attack against Oswald Spengler’s 1918 The Decline of the West (Der Unter-
gang des Abendlandes), which had gained popular prominence after the
war. Spengler, along with others such as Jünger, had been part of a new
faction of ‘conservative revolutionaries’ responding to Germany’s defeat
in the Great War with a kind of reactionary approach that would later
encourage the rise of Nazism.14 It is notable that Spengler’s idea of
history also influenced modernist architecture, most significantly
through Mies van der Rohe who had thought it justified the exclusion
of history from architecture.15 Spengler’s brand of Lebensphilosophie
attacked his contemporary academic establishment, and was vehe-
mently criticised by it. Yet, despite these criticisms, aspects of Leb-
ensphilosophie had a considerable influence on the Vienna Circle
(including Carnap and Wittgenstein).
Part of Neurath’s attack is directed against an idea he considers
central to Spengler’s work, that ‘truths exist only relatively to a definite
kind of men’.16 Spengler develops this into a kind of cultural relativism
in which he connects ‘men of the same arch-symbol [. . .] into one truth
community’.17 This, Neurath thought, ‘seeks to undermine all means of
criticism’18 by needlessly reducing them to irresolvable contradictions in
world-view. Neurath attributes this to ‘over-refinements and distor-
tions’19 on Spengler’s behalf of certain ideas put forth by Wilhelm
Dilthey, and most importantly Dilthey’s idea of a clash between conflict-
ing Weltanschauungen.
64 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

Neurath compares the notion of conflicting world-views to that of

competing hypotheses in science, which he claims both Poincaré and
Duhem concede in relation to the realm of physics. Neurath illustrates
the account of hypotheses proposed by the latter by imagining two
competing sets of hypotheses which, on the one hand, serve to explain
the facts and, on the other hand, are without logical contradictions. It
then becomes a matter of whether to choose one set of hypotheses over
the other. We are in the same position when faced with contradictions
between Diltheyan world-views whenever there are no criteria accord-
ing to which one may make a decision. To come to this, though, Neurath
points out, one must have eliminated any possible factual or logical
considerations which might have contributed to the creation of the con-
tradiction. According to Neurath, by being too eager to see contradic-
tions in world-views, Dilthey did not give enough attention to such
considerations.

Dilthey’s writings easily lead one, prior to analysis of logical links and
factual knowledge, to refer differences between thinkers too quickly to
questions exclusively or predominantly concerning differences in their
world-views. This further strengthens the tendency to break off explana-
tions prematurely as hopeless, on the grounds that one world-feeling
stands opposed to another world-feeling, instead of carefully examining
whether everything has been done that can be settled independent of
world-feeling.
The contrasts of world-view that remain when we consider all logical
mistakes and factual errors as eliminated would stand beyond true or
false.20

Thus, according to Neurath, the kinds of conflicting metaphysical

world-views which Dilthey associates with various types of thinker (‘the
naturalist type, the objective idealist and the idealist of freedom’),21 in
those cases when their conflict is not resolvable through recourse either
to ‘factual knowledge’ or to ‘logical links’,22 are neither true nor false.
The goal of placing such clashes in world-views beyond the domain
of truth and falsity is consistent with Neurath’s overall mission, which,
as stated in his introduction to Anti-Spengler, has something to do with
politics. According to Neurath, contrary to what ‘pseudo-rationalists’23
like Spengler seem to propose, ‘politics are action, always built on inad-
equate survey’.24 For Neurath, the proper response to the severing of ties
with tradition and faith, i.e. the factors which had restricted political
action in the past, is not the ‘pseudo-rationalist’ reduction of political
action to insight. Thus, with Neurath, the modernist project is tied to the
falsification of prophets who pose, in the realm of politics, as non-
prophets. The acknowledgement here seems to be that ‘only a prophet
can stand against a prophet, and history unmasks the false one’25 – that
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 65

there is no place for ‘pseudo-rationalism’ in political action. Whoever

ventures beyond this acknowledgement, as Spengler does, is either
subject to the kinds of checks, factual and logical, that scientific dis-
course is subject to, or is expressing feelings which are neither true nor
false. Neurath alleges that, in Spengler’s own words,26 what Spengler
produced was an ‘impure solution’27 of poetry and science; the latter is
subject to criticism, while the former is not.
In Neurath’s text we find an early indication of what would be
the Vienna Circle’s politically minded exclusion of ethical and aesthetic
discourse from philosophy. Thus Neurath’s Anti-Spengler introduces
ideas which slowly came to be transformed into the positivist
‘elimination’ of metaphysics. Neurath distinguishes between world-
feeling and world-view in a manner which leads to Carnap’s later
distinction between Lebensgefühl and theory, which we shall go on to
discuss.

Cooperative housing and modernist architecture

Neurath was a social scientist, and a large part of his work, consistent
with the Circle’s doctrines, was less concerned with philosophy than it
was with social scientific research. Neurath was also politically active.
Beyond his association with the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic,
Neurath was, as we shall see, involved practically with a number of
socialist causes. Moreover, a number of the philosophical views Neurath
had developed were grounded on his political views, which found
expression in his political activism.28
Among Neurath’s activities, the most relevant to our discussion is his
involvement with Vienna’s cooperative housing movement. In 1920,
Neurath became the general secretary of the newly founded Research
Institute for Social Economy (Forschungsinstitut für Gemeinwirtschaft),
which had supported the cooperative housing movement.29 This move-
ment had come about partly in response to the disastrous economic
consequences of the First World War, which had left a large number of
Austrian workers either homeless or living in poor housing conditions.
The Hapsburg Empire’s reluctant approach to industrialisation had also
contributed to the housing shortage, and the empire’s fall had paved the
way for constructive modernisation to solve the problem.30 With the
newly founded Austrian state governed by the Social Democratic party,
hope for reform would gradually lead to effective political activism in
promoting this cause.
As general secretary of the Research Institute, Neurath actively con-
tributed towards the causes of the cooperative housing movement by
founding the Austrian Co-operative Housing and Garden Allotment
66 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

Association in 1921.31 The association lobbied for city-funded estate

housing, which it eventually secured by organising demonstrations
outside the city hall. Thereby Neurath, as secretary of the association,
became involved in the planning and building of these municipally
funded housing projects, the so-called Gemeindebauten. Neurath’s views
on housing were derived from his socialist ideology, which dictated his
preference for

simple terraced houses with connecting gardens and a communal house

in the middle to serve as centre and meeting point. He envisaged the
end of private kitchens and planned ‘mini-kitchens’ or kitchens-
cum-living-rooms as a transitional stage. He also proposed communal
raising for children, youth care and communal cultural and educa-
tional facilities.32

Neurath was responsible for involving in the planning and building of

these projects a number of modernist architects, who seem to have
shared his view of housing. Adolf Loos’s involvement is noteworthy
here since, as we shall see, not only were Loos’s theoretical views
against decoration in architecture central to the overall modernistic
tendencies in Vienna, but they were specifically referred to by Witt-
genstein.33 The Gemeindebauten became a kind of landmark of architec-
tural modernism, launching what was perhaps the first modernistic
project on such a grand scale – what Margaret Gillett called ‘Modern-
ism for the Masses’.34
Neurath’s ties with various key figures in modernist architecture
were strengthened through his subsequent directorship of Vienna’s
Social and Economic Museum. Under his direction the museum would,
among other projects, begin work on the ‘Vienna Method of Pictorial
Statistics’, later known as Isotype (International System of Typographic
Picture Education), a kind of universal pictorial language. The language
was first used to communicate, to its illiterate proletarian beneficiaries,
the cooperative housing associations’ achievements through pictorial
representations of statistics. Neurath’s work on Isotype is responsible
for the design of the male and female silhouettes prominently used at
public lavatories, as well as many road signs. His work on Isotype had
also brought him into close proximity with various graphic artists asso-
ciated with the modernist movement.
Thus Neurath came to develop ties with the Dessau branch of the
Bauhaus school, which had initially invited him to its reopening and
from which he subsequently received a number of invitations for lec-
tures.35 The growing ties between Neurath and the Dessau Bauhaus
would eventually lead to the organisation, at the invitation of Hannes
Mayer (then director of the Dessau Bauhaus),36 of a series of lectures
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 67

presented to the Bauhaus by members of the Vienna Circle. This took

place between 27 May 1929 and 9 June 1930, with presentations by
Neurath himself (who presented his new method in pictorial statistics),
Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Walter Dubislav. It seems that a sig-
nificant impetus behind the organisation of these presentations was
Neurath’s feeling, as attested to by Feigl, ‘that the Circle’s philosophy
was an expression of the neue Sachlichkeit which was part of the ideology
of the Bauhaus’.37 The feeling was, as we shall see, shared by the partici-
pants in varying degrees.

Carnap at the Dessau Bauhaus

Rudolf Carnap presented a series of four lectures at the Dessau Bauhaus,
from 15 to 19 October 1919. His lectures were titled, in order of presen-
tation, ‘Science and Life’ (‘Wissenschaft und Leben’), ‘Task and Content
of Science’ (‘Aufgabe und Gehalt der Wissenschaft’), ‘The Logical Con-
struction of the World’ (‘Der logische Aufbau der Welt’), ‘The Four-
dimensional World of Modern Physics’ (‘Die vierdimensionale Welt
der modernen Physik’), and finally, ‘The Misuse of Language’ (‘Der
Mißbrauch der Sprache’).38
The event that we shall focus on here took place during Carnap’s last
presentation, devoted to the issue of the abuse of language by metaphys-
ics. The lecture was an early presentation of views which would end up
published two years later in his seminal article ‘The Elimination of
Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’.
In this article, Carnap distinguishes between what he calls ‘cognitive
(designative, referential) meaning on the one hand, and non-cognitive
(expressive) meaning components, e.g. emotive and motivative, on the
other’.39 According to Carnap, although metaphysics cannot make mean-
ingful cognitive assertions, it is unavoidably expressive, which is an
‘obvious psychological fact’.40 In other words, although Carnap denies
the cognitive meaningfulness of some emotive and motivative expres-
sions which remains ‘an eternal secret’ to the ‘weak, finite intellect of
man’,41 he does not deny that such states are unavoidably human.
According to Carnap, despite the meaninglessness which makes it
necessary to overcome it, metaphysics is nonetheless to be understood
as an expression of a certain life-feeling, an attitude towards life (Lebens-
gefühl, a concept which his teacher Hermann Nohl had inherited from
Dilthey).42

[. . .] metaphysics does indeed have a content; only it is not theoretical

content. The (pseudo)statements of metaphysics do not serve for the
description of states of affairs, neither existing ones (in that case they
would be true statements) nor non-existing ones (in that case they
68 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

would be at least false statements). They serve for the expression of

the general attitude of a person towards life (‘Lebenseinstellung,
Lebensgefühl’).43

Thus, what is to be overcome in metaphysics is not the Lebensgefühl

which metaphysicians express, nor is it clear that this either may or
should be overcome. Rather, metaphysical theories are to be overcome
precisely because they attempt the theoretical expression of something
inexpressible in theory. Carnap is here attacking the poverty of
theory, and particularly of metaphysics, as a medium for the necessary
expression of an attitude towards life. According to him, what is
expressed in metaphysics is much more potently expressed in a realm
within which truth and falsity (i.e. the central concern of theoretical
endeavours) are precisely not that which is at stake. Rather, Lebensge-
fühl is suited to a medium in which the expression itself is the telos
sought after.
As an example of the above, Carnap compares metaphysicians to
lyrical poets. Both select ‘language as the medium of expression and
declarative sentences as the form of expression’.44 Poets, it turns out,
are rather more successful in this. Metaphysicians attempt to support
their attitude towards life through argument and polemics with other
metaphysicians, proceeding thus because they labour under the delu-
sion that there is something designative that is either true or false in
their use of language. Lyric poets, on the other hand, are successful in
their use of language precisely because their poetry involves no asser-
tion of facts – there is no argument between poets regarding the truth
or falsity of such and such sentence in this or that poem.
Carnap finds that the ultimate expression of Lebensgefühl is given in
music: since music is not referential, there is a total absence of even the
semblance of cognitive linguistic content.

The harmonious feeling or attitude, which the metaphysician tries to

express in a monistic system, is more clearly expressed in the music of
Mozart. And when a metaphysician gives verbal expression to his
dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic system, is it not perhaps
because he lacks the ability of a Beethoven to express this attitude in an
adequate medium?45

In other words, it is to a great extent the inadequacy of language for pure

expression, one that does not at the same time introduce an element
(even if only a semblance) of referential meaning, that plagues meta-
physics. Carnap sees metaphysicians as ‘musicians without musical
ability’,46 fusing and thus confusing a fundamental human attitude
towards expression with the theoretical drive to knowledge. For Carnap,
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 69

genuine theoretical knowledge is impossible in metaphysics, while

Lebensgefühl is inadequately expressed by the declarative sentences
thereby produced, since such expression is hindered by the theoretical
medium in which metaphysics is undertaken.
The 1929 lecture treads more or less similar ground to the paper
published subsequently; it accuses metaphysics of being derived from
elementary errors in the use of language. It also advances the view that
metaphysicians are ultimately more like poets than like scientists,
attempting to express some fundamental attitude towards life rather
than to produce theories.
It is notable that Carnap here seems to have presented his account of
overcoming metaphysics as a kind of protreptic towards artists, who,
one could say, are seen as having been cheated of access to that realm
through metaphysicians’ meaningless theorisation. Thus, though when
Carnap reduces metaphysical talk to failed poetry, art, or music he has
often been thought to be denigrating the importance of the arts, he
clearly intended no such denigration.47 In his diary, he kept the follow-
ing notes on his lecture:

What is the point of metaphysics? (and of its more primitive antecedents:

theology and mythology).

We have said: it has no theoretical meaning, no representational function;

but it must have some sort of meaning, or so many exceptional people
would not have concerned themselves with it.

The point is: (expressive function): Expression of a life-feeling [Ausdruck eines

Lebensgefühls], an overall total stance towards humanity and the world (in
contradistinction to momentary feelings and moods).

But: the wrong form of expression.

The right means of expression for life-feelings (as well as momentary feel-
ings) are:

1) subconscious: The contours of the face (physiognomy; facial expressions;

mimicry); the physical stance of the body and its movements; the contours
of one’s handwriting (physiognomic and expressive elements here, too);
practical behavior toward fellow human beings.

2) conscious articulations: art (especially poetry and music) (as shaping of

particular objects, ‘works of art’); the conscious design of the things of
[everyday] life.48

In other words, beyond criticising metaphysics as a failed attempt at

expressing Lebensgefühl, Carnap points to particular aspects of art and
70 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

design as somehow being the right means of expression for such atti-
tudes. It is the task of artists, following the paradigm set by the new
stance towards architecture that the Bauhaus instantiated, to undertake
the conscious articulation of that which metaphysics purported to argue
over, once the latter discussion is shown to be based on a nonsensical
employment of language.

The nothing nothings

Carnap’s 1931 article is known for its polemical theses against
Heidegger. In ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis
of Language’, Carnap quotes a number of sentences from Heidegger’s
1929 inaugural lecture ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, employing them as exam-
ples of metaphysical nonsense. Carnap focuses in particular on
Heidegger’s notorious use of the expression ‘Das Nichts nichtet’, which
he attempts to translate from its ordinary usage into ‘logical syntax’.
According to Carnap, metaphysicians such as Heidegger are misled by
the fact that what Carnap calls ‘historico-grammatical syntax’ permits
the transition from a sentence form such as ‘the rain rains’ to the simi-
larly structured ‘the nothing nothings’. The technique of logical analysis
of language, predicated on Gottlob Frege’s invention of modern logic,
shows philosophers how such elementary errors may occur.
The earliest recorded instance in which Carnap had employed
Heidegger’s ‘Das Nichts nichtet’ as an example of metaphysical non-
sense was his 1929 lecture series at the Dessau Bauhaus. Earlier the same
year, Carnap had attended Heidegger’s disputation with Ernst Cassirer
at Davos, an event which was portrayed by the contemporary press as a
kind of political clash of values between Cassirer’s enlightenment
humanism and Heidegger’s existentialist anti-rationalism. Heidegger
was depicted as emerging from the confrontation victorious. Thus the
presentation of ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ at Freiburg was a personal
triumph for Heidegger, and an event which received an array of reac-
tions, including those by Carnap and Wittgenstein.
It was only three months after Heidegger’s inaugural lecture that
Carnap lectured at the Bauhaus. According to the memoirs of Eva Tchi-
chold, Carnap had employed Heidegger’s notorious statement as an
example during the discussion that followed his final lecture, as Hans
Dahms relates:

Carnap first quoted Heidegger’s recent dictum from his Freiburg inaug-
ural lecture of July that year, ‘the Nothing nothings’ (‘das Nichts nichtet’),
and then asked the audience who they thought might have said this. And
Eva Tchichold answered, ‘Kurt Schwitters’, which was greeted with howls
of laughter by the assembled audience. Carnap then named the author and
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 71

diagnosed the passage as a case of multiple syntactic nonsense. Whether

his argument works is still controversial. But in political terms he had a
pretty good nose, and thus gave a demonstration of the practical useful-
ness of his ‘logical analysis of language’: a short time later Heidegger
revealed himself a dyed-in-the-wool national socialist.49

It would be anachronistic to attribute to Carnap foreknowledge of

Heidegger’s membership of the Nazi party, which would occur four
years later, in 1933, and would come as a surprise to even his closest
associates. Whether Heidegger’s later political convictions could already
be made out in 1929 is highly disputable, and subject to conflicting
testimonies. For example, there is some speculation (from people
present at the event) over whether Heidegger, due to some anti-semitic
bias, had indeed shaken his Jewish interlocutor’s hand at the end of their
dispute at Davos, though it is now known that Heidegger had been
friends with Cassirer for years prior to the event,50 the puzzling fact that
eye-witnesses seem to have clashing recollections of the event testifies to
the controversy involved in the matter. Following Davos and his inaug-
ural speech, in his 1929–30 Freiburg lectures titled The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger began to turn to Spengler (and other
Lebensphilosophie prophets of the downfall of Western culture)51 when
producing an early version of his criticism of Western technological
modernity.
Whether knowingly or not, Carnap seems in 1929 to have become
convinced that Heidegger was on the opposing side of the political
spectrum, and thus deserved the kind of polemic he directed against
him. Furthermore, he seems to have thought that it would be appropri-
ate to rehearse his attack on Heidegger in front of the audience at the
Dessau Bauhaus.
The reasoning behind Carnap’s association of, on the one hand,
a defence against the perceived renovation of metaphysics, and on
the other, an enlisting of forces outside philosophy in the struggle
against metaphysics, is to be found in the preface to his 1927
Aufbau:52

We cannot hide from ourselves the fact that trends from philosophical-
metaphysical and from religious spheres, which protect themselves
against this kind of orientation [i.e. scientific philosophy], again exert a
strong influence at the present time. Where do we derive the confidence,
in spite of this, that our call for clarity, for a science that is free from
metaphysics, will prevail? – From the knowledge, or to put it more cau-
tiously, from the belief that these opposing powers belong to the past. We
sense an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philosophical
work is based and the spiritual attitude that currently manifests itself in
72 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

entirely different spheres. We sense this attitude in trends in art, especially

in architecture,53 and in the movements that concern themselves with an
intelligent reshaping of human life: of personal life and the life of the
community, of education,54 of external organisation at large. We sense here
everywhere the same attitude, the same style of thinking and working. It
is the orientation that is directed everywhere towards clarity yet recog-
nizes at the same time the never entirely comprehensible interweaving of
life [. . .] The belief that this orientation belongs to the future inspires our
work.55

So the critique of metaphysics is not some isolated matter of pure phil-

osophy, but is clearly part of a larger picture in which, Carnap thinks,
philosophy is especially allied with modernist architecture, as well as
various political, social, and educational causes.56 In Carnap’s account,
what predominates is the resistance to an opposition; that is, resistance
to a kind of negativity, a guarding of the boundaries against common
enemies (decoration and religion, aesthetics and metaphysics, clerical-
ism and right-wing politics). The kind of negativity involved is the
realisation of ‘the never entirely comprehensible interweaving of life’,
which cannot be grasped by the pseudo-statements of metaphysics. The
opposition, which is shared within the neue Sachlichkeit (particularly in
modernist architecture), is one against those who pretend to have com-
prehended this interweaving.

Heidegger’s reply to Carnap

Heidegger’s response to Carnap goes a long way towards confirming the
primacy of their opposition in terms of political orientation rather than
any particular philosophical differences. The reply, which is very brief, is
found in a draft version of the lecture series presented in the summer of
1935 titled Introduction to Metaphysics, and which was first published in
1953. The reply was omitted from the post-Second World War publication.
In it Heidegger accuses Carnap, along with ‘a tendency of thought
that has been assembled in the journal Erkenntnis’,57 of destroying the
question of the meaning of being by reducing it to questions about the
propositional copula ‘is’. According to Heidegger, this tendency began
with Aristotle, passed through Descartes’s reduction of truth to cer-
tainty,58 and became prominent following the decline of German Ideal-
ism. It seems as if Heidegger is here preaching to the choir, insofar as
his reply seems to presume some agreement with his views on the
meaning of being, and some interest in the Heideggerian version of
the history of Western metaphysics. There is, in other words, very little
in terms of convincing argument.
Heidegger does, nonetheless, employ some more sophistic means of
persuasion. It is worth remembering here that the lecture course had been
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 73

presented during the height of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism.

Addressing an audience living under the Nazi regime, he notes that:

It is no accident that this kind of ‘philosophy’ wishes to supply the foun-

dations of modern physics, in which all relations to nature are in fact
destroyed. It is also no accident that this kind of ‘philosophy’ stands in
internal and external connection with Russian communism. And it is no
accident, moreover, that this kind of thinking celebrates its triumph in
America.59

Thus Heidegger grotesquely accuses one of his more vehement critics of

being an ally of the enemies of the Third Reich. He ignores completely the
fact that the socialist convictions of the Vienna Circle’s ‘left wing’ run
counter to the Soviet orthodoxy. It is also puzzling that he claims, in the
early thirties, that logical positivism was triumphant in America. Though
Pöggeler implies that this was a reference to Carnap’s emigration to the
United States,60 Friedman points out that Heidegger’s course had taken
place in the summer of 1935 while Carnap emigrated in December.61
Heidegger relates his reaction against Carnap’s critique of meta-
physics to his own criticism of scientistic thought’s severing of
Dasein’s ties to nature. In fact his criticism of positivistic thought seems
to boil down to his assertion that it is the ultimate expression of that
line of thinking in the history of Western metaphysics leading to the
kind of technological modernism which he came to be critical of
around this time. (Resonances of this critique can still be found in his
particular critique of modernism in architecture, as was later devel-
oped in his famous 1951 lecture ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’. One
might, in passing, note here that Heidegger’s initial critique of mere
building, as opposed to dwelling, begins with the example of houses
built in response to ‘today’s housing shortage’,62 which do not ‘in
themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them’.63 And
one might be tempted here to contrast this attitude with Neurath’s
active involvement in cooperative housing, and his responsibility for
the inclusion in these projects of the kind of modernist architecture
against which Heidegger’s critique was employed.)
All the above serves to demonstrate some of the ways in which the
critique of metaphysics coming from the Vienna Circle’s ‘left wing’,
motivated as it was by a basic political orientation towards its cultural
milieu, found its opposing analogue, one might even say its ideal target,
in Heidegger. His alliance with Nazism, his critique of modernity, scient-
ism, and technology, his apparent return to talk of metaphysics, and even
his views of architecture, all seem polar opposites to the Vienna Circle.
Yet, as we proceed to discuss Wittgenstein’s criticism of Heidegger, we
will come to see that it was not the entirety of the Vienna Circle that turned
74 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

against Heidegger. There might yet be at least some degree of philosophi-

cal proximity between Heidegger’s views and those of Carnap and
Wittgenstein.

Of metaphysics and lace tablecloths: Wittgenstein, Loos,

and foundations
Though Wittgenstein was responsible for many of the ideas that under-
lie the Vienna Circle’s critique of metaphysics, it is well known that his
attitude towards the subject was quite distinct from theirs. Unlike
Neurath, he had been influenced by some of Spengler’s ideas,64 and, by
contrast to Carnap, he expressed some sympathy for particular views he
attributed to Heidegger.
Despite such differences in attitude, Wittgenstein too had close ties
with the modernist movement in Viennese architecture, perhaps more
so than any member of the Vienna Circle.65 In 1925 he collaborated with
Adolf Loos’s student Paul Engelman in designing the house of his sister
Margaret. He was familiar with Adolf Loos’s work, to which he refers
approvingly. Furthermore, he seems to have been influenced by Loos’s
critique of decoration in his work on the Stonborough-Wittgenstein
house.
In December 1929, two months after Carnap’s reference to Heidegger
at the Dessau Bauhaus, Wittgenstein dictated to Friedrich Waismann his
first set of sympathetic comments on Heidegger, in which he claimed
that ‘I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread’66
(‘Ich kann mir wohl denken was Heidegger mit Sein und Angst
meint’67).
Wittgenstein’s expression of sympathy for Heidegger, who later came
to be seen as exemplary of all that the Vienna Circle’s brand of analytic
philosophy opposed, was not exactly well received. A small scandal
surrounded the publication of this set of remarks: the editors of the
first Anglophone publication of Wittgenstein’s dictation to Waismann
seem purposefully to have omitted the sentence in which Heidegger is
mentioned.68
Wittgenstein’s expression of sympathy towards Heidegger would at
the time certainly have appeared disagreeable to most Vienna Circle
members. It is possible that Wittgenstein’s sympathy was at least partly
derived from sources external to the Circle. At the joint session of the
Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association held at Nottingham in
June 1929, Wittgenstein had met and ‘struck up a friendship’69 with
Gilbert Ryle, who had in that same month published a sympathetic
review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in Mind, which Wittgenstein is likely
to have known about.70
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 75

We do not know whether Carnap discussed his critique of Heidegger

with Wittgenstein during their meetings between 1927 and the beginning
of 1929.71 Carnap had no more private meetings with Wittgenstein after
his visit to Davos in March 1929, at which time he seems to have begun
forming his view of Heidegger as a metaphysician paradigmatically
misled by his use of language. Yet one might reasonably suppose that
Wittgenstein’s sympathy towards Heidegger may have had something to
do with Wittgenstein’s being informed of Carnap’s polemic turn against
Heidegger.72 That is not to say, of course, that Wittgenstein’s sympathy
towards Heidegger was not genuine, but rather that it might be safe to
suppose that the attack by Carnap prompted Wittgenstein’s defence.
Wittgenstein would subsequently become convinced that Carnap had
been stealing his ideas, a complaint which he communicated in April
1932.73 Though Wittgenstein’s anger came about as a result of reading
‘Physicalistic Language as the Universal Language of Science’, it is not
impossible that his anger towards Carnap might have been influenced
by an earlier reading of Carnap’s ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics
through Logical Analysis of Language’, published in December 1932.
Soon after his final break with Carnap in 1932, Wittgenstein men-
tioned Heidegger in a longer set of comments. This second set of com-
ments is clearly less approving than the explicitly sympathetic ones of
1929. In the undated notes he dictated to Waismann for Moritz Schlick,74
Wittgenstein’s view can be more firmly placed as responding to Carnap,
since he concerns himself with Heidegger’s phrase ‘Das Nichts nichtet’,
which Carnap analyses in his 1931 paper. As Baker suspects,75 it is
probable that Wittgenstein dictated these notes in December 1932, which
makes it reasonable to assume that here Wittgenstein was indeed
responding to Carnap.
Wittgenstein’s remarks on Heidegger take an approach which Witt-
genstein himself compares to the psychoanalytic method. The commen-
tary discusses the role of disquietude in philosophical questioning. His
diagnosis seems to be that it is through conjuring up certain pictures that
philosophers come to face disquietude. He concentrates on the disquiet-
ude that Heidegger faces when he discusses nothingness. The picture
behind Heidegger’s talk of the nothing is, according to Wittgenstein one

of an island of being which is being washed by an infinite ocean of the

nothing. Whatever we throw into this ocean will be dissolved in its water
and annihilated. But the ocean itself is endlessly restless like the waves on
the sea. It exists, it is, and we say: ‘It noths’ [es nichtet].76

Wittgenstein considers the simile which he thinks underlies Heidegger’s

talk of nothingness as one whose correctness is not demonstrable. What
is required, instead, is for one to be freed of the disquietude which the
76 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

picture raises, and this may be achieved through clarifying the linguistic
confusion involved. Wittgenstein considers the possibility of being freed
of such disquietude by conceiving of ‘introducing a notation in which
this proposition cannot be formulated’,77 as Carnap does for Heidegger’s
sentences. We are led to this reduction through the disquietude the ‘old
manner of expression’ gives rise to. Thus, reverting to ‘tracing certain
propositions back to more fundamental ones’78 is itself a kind of mental
habit for dealing with disquiet.
Because it is habitual, one might attempt to apply this remedy to
situations where it is not applicable.79 Wittgenstein asks whether this is
a mistake that Heidegger commits:

If someone says ‘The nothing noths’, then we can say to this, in the style of
our way of considering things: Very well, what are we to do with this
proposition? That is to say, what follows from it and from what does it
follow? From what experiences can we establish it? Or from none at all?
What is its role? Is it a proposition of science? And what position does it
occupy in the structure of science? That of a foundation-stone on which
other building-blocks rest? Or has it the position of an argument?80

This concern with the foundationalist picture of philosophy which Witt-

genstein raises is, it might be said, central to Heidegger’s work through-
out the various stages of his career. At the heart of Heidegger’s project
lies a questioning of the proper activity of philosophy, over and above
the study of particular kinds of beings by the special sciences.
Heidegger’s overriding concern lies with the manifold nature of Being,
and the question whether there is something called Being beyond the
manifold ways in which Being is made manifest is one to which
Heidegger’s approach seems to change throughout his career. This is,
indeed, the question which Heidegger raises in the passages surround-
ing the often-quoted claims about nothingness. In 1929, breaking with
his previous project of linking Being to temporality, Heidegger decides
that beyond particular manifestations of Being in ways of being, there is
what he talks of as ‘nothing’. Heidegger’s conclusion that the nothing
nothings comes by way of a series of interrogations into the kind of
questioning undertaken by scientific research, which investigates
‘beings themselves – and beyond that nothing’.81
According to Wittgenstein the foundationalist image of philosophy,
its conception as a way of dealing with whatever is fundamental and
more basic than specific branches of science, has something to do with
the question of disquietude. Wittgenstein’s consideration of the poten-
tial for philosophy to engage in the kind of foundation-laying discussed
above is one which derives its inspiration from Adolf Loos’s famous
polemic against decoration.
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 77

We would like to begin ph(ilosophy) with something which should be the

foundation of everything to follow, of all the sciences, and yet at the same
time it is not supposed to be a ‘foundation’ simply in the sense of the
bottom course of bricks in a house. Here we are confusing two things in
the way that can happen if we describe the foundation of a building
sometimes as the bottom course of bricks and sometimes as solidity. This
dilemma gives rise to the need to begin philosophy with, so to speak, an
inarticulate sound. And a proposition such as ‘The nothing noths’ is in a
certain sense a substitute for this sort of inarticulate sound. The proposi-
tion ‘I have knowingly known something about my knowledge’ is also
such an inarticulate sound. The need to preface our own enquiries with
such propositions or slogans is in a sense really a requirement of style. In
certain periods houses and chests of drawers are bounded with a cornice.
Calling attention to boundedness is something desirable. We finish off
posts of all kinds with knobs even where this is not demanded by func-
tional considerations. A post must not simply stop. At other times there is
a need not to emphasize, but rather artificially to conceal boundedness. An
object must fade into its surroundings. In this style the edge of a tablecloth
was given lace borders, which were originally nothing more than scallops
cut into the cloth, for we did not want it to be sharply bounded. But at
other times we give a border its own colour in order to call attention to it.
And that is just how it is with this argument: it is a desideratum, e.g., to
trace back to a creator the coming into being of the universe even though
this in a certain sense explains nothing and merely calls attention to the
beginning. (This last reflection is of the type of those made by the architect
Loos and is certainly influenced by him.)82

Here Wittgenstein reduces the image of philosophy as founded on some

solid proposition to a mere matter of stylistic considerations. The foun-
dationalist picture of philosophy is, according to Wittgenstein, ulti-
mately a kind of aesthetic preference, a matter of decoration. And, like
Loos, Wittgenstein claims the kind of decoration in question is one that
is in time made redundant, like cornice or lace tablecloths. The disquiet-
ude in question arises whenever a certain kind of boundedness calls
attention to a certain kind of picture (e.g. of an island washed by the sea
of nothingness). The option of calling attention to the boundedness is ‘a
desideratum’ and, like decoration, it serves no particular function – it
explains nothing.
Here, Wittgenstein is even clearer than Carnap had been about the
relation of his thinking about metaphysics and his orientation towards
Loos’s modernistic rejection of decoration. The kind of assumed value of
functionality in Loos’s rejection is almost directly transferred to the
realm of philosophy. With Wittgenstein, we should ask of a proposition,
‘what is it supposed to do?’ The proper function of ‘foundation laying’
would have been not just to serve as a bottom layer of bricks, but also
as solidity. Yet metaphysical ground-laying, according to Wittgenstein,
‘explains nothing’. Wittgenstein thinks that images such as that which is
78 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

painted, by implication, in Heidegger’s talk of nothingness only serve as

kinds of hypomnemata calling attention towards a certain direction.
The direction indicated by talk of foundations in philosophy is, one
might say, towards a meta-philosophical impasse which Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, and Carnap were bound to face. All these thinkers, as well as
many of their contemporaries, seem to acknowledge something along
these lines: that it is problematic to sustain the traditional idea that there
is an object of inquiry which is proper to philosophy, and which is more
general than the various special objects of inquiry to be investigated by
science, related to through religion, approached through poetry, music,
art, and architecture, and so on.
When faced with this question, while having acknowledged that there
is no reverting to traditional metaphysics, one might either insist on
identifying something that is proper to philosophy, or assert that there is
no realm of inquiry proper to philosophy. Heidegger’s interrogation of
the notion of Being is the outcome of a kind of conservatism about
philosophy, as opposed to early analytic philosophy’s revolutionary
approach towards the subject.83 In each case, we have seen that these
lines of abstract questioning are grounded in concrete considerations
regarding each philosopher’s cultural allegiances. Surprisingly, in the
case of the Vienna Circle, these have consistently been related to their
modernistic outlook, and particularly to their connection with modern-
ism in the architecture of their time.

Notes
1 Martin Heidegger, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ in Pathmarks, ed. William A.
MacNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82–97 (p. 90).
Note that MacNeil’s translation uses the more apt English term ‘nihilates’,
rather than other translations which render ‘nichtet’ as either ‘nothings’ or
‘noths’. The latter, which are rather less charitable towards Heidegger, seem
to emphasise that Heidegger is here employing a neologism.
2 See John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy
Era (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001); George A. Reisch,
How the Cold War transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
3 Neurath and Horkheimer had, around 1936, projected a collabora-
tion between the two movements, qua leftist intellectuals. Apparently
Horkheimer is to blame for its failure. In 1937, Horkheimer published ‘The
Latest Attack on Metaphysics’, which attributed to positivistic thought (and
its attack on metaphysics) a responsibility for the rise of Nazism that it
supposedly shared with metaphysicians like Heidegger. When Neurath
submitted a reply to Horkheimer’s attack, for publication in the Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung, Horkheimer, acting as editor, refused to publish it. See
John O’Neil and Thomas Uebel, ‘Horkheimer and Neurath: Restarting
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 79

a Disrupted Debate’, European Journal of Philosophy, 12:1 (2004), 75–

105.
4 The work which introduced the cultural backdrop of Viennese philoso-
phy to the Anglophone world is Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s
Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
Peter Galison’s later ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Archi-
tectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry, 16:4, (1990), 709–52, introduced the
connections between the Vienna Circle and the Dessau Bauhaus in
particular.
5 Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 710.
6 Ibid., 710.
7 Hans J. Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit in the Architecture and Philosophy of
the 1920s’, in Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena, ed. Steve Awodey
and Carsten Klein (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 357–76.
8 Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 711.
9 Ibid.
10 See also Antonia Soulez, Au fil du motif: autour de Wittgenstein et la musique
(Paris: Delatour, 2012).
11 Janik and Toulmin, who focus in Wittgenstein’s Vienna on Wittgenstein’s
influence by the ‘Moderne’, also point to such developments as Mach and
Avenarius’, empiriocriticism in the philosophy of science, Schopenhauer
and Kierkegaard’s Viennese revival, Bolzmann’s contributions to physics,
and Mauthner’s views of language (especially influential on the young
Wittgenstein).
12 Janik and Tulmin see Wittgenstein’s pessimistic worldview as a derivative
of the pre-war ‘Moderne’, and sharply distinguish this from the more
optimistic misinterpretation of the Tractatus by the Vienna Circle. Later,
Allan Janik, in Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2001), 197–211, distinguishes the Vienna Circle’s
‘classical modernist faith in progress’ from Wittgenstein’s ‘critical
modernism’ as two ways of responding to the cultural context of Vienna’s
‘Moderne’.
13 Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 710.
14 Spengler, along with a list of other German thinkers that includes Jünger
and Heidegger (though the latter had himself criticised Lebensphilosophie
and the former two) have been thought of as ‘reactionary modernists’; see
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in
Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Of course, particular forms of modernism (from the Italian futurists to Ezra
Pound) were continuous with fascism, and Roger Griffin goes as far as to
argue that fascism was the political form of modernism; see Roger Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler
(New York: Palgrave, 2007).
15 Van der Rohe, who took over the Dessau Bauhaus’s directorship from
Hannes Meyer, was responsible for breaking the Vienna Circle’s ties with
the Bauhaus; see Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, 371.
80 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

16 Quoted in Otto Neurath, ‘Anti-Spengler’, in Empiricism and Sociology, ed.

Otto Neurath, Marie Neurath, Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973),
159–213 (p. 199).
17 Neurath, ‘Anti-Spengler’, 199.
18 Ibid., 197.
19 Ibid., 202.
20 Ibid., 203.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 160.
24 Ibid., 158.
25 Ibid., 160.
26 ‘Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Everything else is
an impure solution’ (quoted in Neurath, ‘Anti-Spengler’, 160).
27 Ibid., 160.
28 On Neurath’s differences with Carnap on the matter of philosophy’s
relation to politics, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap,
Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 15–16.
29 See Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, Thomas Uebel, Otto Neurath:
Philosophy Between Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 60.
30 See Janik and Tulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 241.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 61.
33 It is also notable that the architect Joseph Frank, whose brother Philipp
Frank was a member of the Vienna Circle, had been one of the leading
figures associated with the housing movement.
34 See Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (Cambridge MA:
MIT Press, 1999), 484.
35 See Cartwright et al., Otto Neurath, 65.
36 As Galison (‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 717) points out, Mayer had thought the task
of the architect was not that of an artist (as it had traditionally been
conceived) but that of a specialist in organisation. According to Mayer
‘building is only organization: social, technical, economic, mental
organization’ (quoted in ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 717), and the particulars in
each of these fields are to be left to the experts. Mayer’s views found
Neurath in full agreement.
37 Quoted in Friedman, Parting of the Ways, 18; see also ibid., 17.
38 Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, 365–6.
39 R. Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of
Language’, trans. A. Pap, in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (Glencoe IL:
Free Press, 1959), 80.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 See Gottfried Gabriel, ‘Carnap’s “Elimination of Metaphysics through
Logical Analysis of Language”: A Retrospective Consideration of the
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 81

Relationship between Continental and Analytic Philosophy’, in Logical

Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Paolo Parrini,
Wesley C. Salmon, Merrilee H. Salmon (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 30–42.
43 Carnap, ‘Elimination of Metaphysics’, 78.
44 Ibid., 79.
45 Ibid., 80.
46 Ibid.
47 See also Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, 370.
48 Quoted in Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, 370.
49 Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, 369.
50 See Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 2010).
51 Among the thinkers exemplary of his contemporary situation, Heidegger
also considers the mystical philosopher Ludwig Klages, whom coinci-
dentally Carnap also criticised in his presentation at Dessau; see Dahms,
‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, 368.
52 A lot of the ideas presented here, most of which were shared with Neurath,
are mirrored in the Circle’s manifesto, drafted by Neurath, Carnap, and
Hans Hahn in September 1929.
53 Carnap here follows Neurath, who had also seen architecture as foremost
in the modernist shaping of future forms of life; see Galison,
‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 716.
54 Janek Wasserman’s ‘Black Vienna, Red Vienna: The Struggle for Intellectual
and Political Hegemony in Interwar Vienna, 1918–1938’ (PhD Dissertation,
Washington University, St Louis MO, 2010) shows that almost all of the
early Vienna Circle members had actively participated in Austria’s adult
education centres (pp. 126–52).
55 Quoted in Friedman, ‘Parting of the Ways’, 17.
56 It might be noted that the elements Carnap mentions here were com-
bined in the cooperative housing movement’s alliance with modernist
architecture.
57 Quoted in Friedman, ‘Parting of the Ways’, 21–2.
58 Such reductions lead to ‘a mode of thinking according to which truth is no
longer disclosedness of what is and thus accommodation and grounding of
Dasein in the disclosing being [. . .] The conception of truth as the securing
of thought led to the definitive profaning [Entgotterung] of the world’
(quoted in Friedman, ‘Parting of the Ways’, 22).
59 Quoted in Friedman, ‘Parting of the Ways’, 22
60 Otto Pöggeler, ‘Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding’, in The Heidegger
Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1991), 198–244 (pp. 218–19).
61 Friedman, ‘Parting of the Ways’, 22.
62 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of
Thinking’ (1964) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 324.
63 Ibid.
82 Critical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3

64 See e.g. Rudolf Haller, Questions on Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1988),

74–89.
65 See Galison, ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’, 725–31.
66 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘On Heidegger on Being and Dread’, in Heidegger and
Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1978), 80–83 (p. 80).
67 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Waismann, Brian F. McGuinness, Ludwig
Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis: Gespräche, aufgezeichnet von Friedrich
Waismann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), 68.
68 See Michael Murray, ‘A Note on Wittgenstein and Heidegger’, The
Philosophical Review, 83:4 (1974), 501–3.
69 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Macmillan,
1990), 275.
70 See Jonathan Beale, ‘Nonsense Par Excellence: Wittgenstein on the Question
of Being’, Proceedings of the Southeast Philosophy Congress, 3 (2010), 13–27.
71 ‘From the beginning of 1929 on, Wittgenstein wished to meet only with
Schlick and Waismann, no longer with me or Feigl, who had also become
acquainted with him in the meantime, let alone with the Circle. Although
the difference in our attitudes and personalities expressed itself only on
certain occasions, I understood very well that Wittgenstein felt it all the time
and, unlike me, was disturbed by it. He said to Schlick that he could talk
only with somebody who “holds his hand”’ (R. Carnap, ‘Intellectual
Autobiography’, in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La
Salle IL: Open Court, 1963), 3–81 (p. 26)).
72 According to Carnap, at some point during their meetings between 1927
and 1929, Wittgenstein had, to Carnap’s surprise, defended a metaphysical
statement by a ‘classical philosopher’ (possibly Schopenhauer) against
criticisms by Schlick (Carnap, ‘Intellectual Autobiography’, 25–6).
73 See J. Hintikka, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-truths and One-and-a-half-truths
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 131.
74 Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann, The Voices of Wittgenstein:
The Vienna Circle, ed. Gordon P. Baker (London: Routledge, 2003), 69–77.
75 Ibid., xvi.
76 Ibid., 69–71.
77 Ibid., 71.
78 Ibid., 75.
79 ‘But if our disquiet arises from some unclarity about grammatical relations
in some domain of language, we will then, on the one hand, be tempted by
force of habit to apply here the useless remedy of tracing things back to
more fundamental propositions, and, on the other, we feel sure that we have
no use for a foundation in the down-to-earth sense of the term’ (ibid., 75).
80 Ibid., 73.
81 Heidegger, ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ 84.
82 Wittgenstein and Waismann, Voices of Wittgenstein, ed. Baker, 75 and 77.
 Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s critique of Heidegger 83

83 I have adopted this view from Dennis McManus’s hitherto unpublished

paper titled ‘The Unity of Being in General and the Being and Time Project’,
as presented on 9 December 2011 at the ‘A Dangerous Liaison? The Analy-
tic Engagement with Continental Philosophy’ conference held at the
University of York.