The German Genius

an influential philosopher after World War II. Schlick’s original label for the kind of philosophy that evolved in Vienna in the 1920s was Konsequenter Empirismus , or consistent empiricism. However, after he visited America in 1929 and again in 1931–32, the term “logical positivism” emerged—and stuck.
    The logical positivists made a spirited attack on metaphysics, against any suggestion that “there might be a world beyond the ordinary world of science and common sense, the world revealed to us by our senses.” For them, any statement that wasn’t empirically testable—verifiable, or a statement in logic or mathematics—was nonsensical. And so vast areas of theology, aesthetics, and politics were dismissed. There was more to it than this, of course. As the British philosopher A. J. Ayer, himself an observer of the circle for a short time (one of only two outsiders ever allowed, the other being W. V. O. Quine), described it, they were also against “what we might call the German past,” the Romantic and to them rather woolly thinking of Hegel and Nietzsche (though not Marx). 17 Otto Neurath would hum “metaphysics” every time the circle strayed from the logical positivist path. 18 The American philosopher Sidney Hook, who also traveled in Germany at the time, confirmed the split, saying that the more traditional German philosophers were hostile to science and saw it as their duty “to advance the cause of religion, morality, freedom of the will, the Volk and the organic nation state.” Ayer observed that there were more philosophical books published in Germany than in all other places put together. 19 The aim of the circle was to clarify philosophy, using techniques of logic and science. 20
    T HINKING WITH THE B LOOD
     
    Much opposed to the Vienna Circle was a man ill at ease with the whole of Weimar culture, with modernity in general and Berlin in particular. Martin Heidegger was arguably the most influential and certainly the most controversial philosopher of the twentieth century. Born in southern Germany in 1889, he studied under Edmund Husserl before becoming himself a professional teacher of philosophy. His deliberate provincialism, his traditional mode of dress—knickerbockers—and his hatred of city life all confirmed his philosophy for his impressionable students. In 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, he published his most important book, Sein und Zeit ( Being and Time ) . Despite the fame of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger was—besides being earlier—a more profound existentialist.
    Being and Time is an impenetrable book, “barely decipherable,” in the words of one critic. Yet it became immensely popular. 21 For Heidegger the central fact of life is man’s existence in the world, and we can only confront this central fact by describing it as exactly as possible. Western science and philosophy have all developed in the last three or four centuries so that “the primary business of Western man has been the conquest of nature.” Heidegger saw science and technology as an expression of the will, a reflection of this determination to control nature. He thought, however, that there was a different side to man, which he aimed to describe better than anyone else and which, he said, is revealed above all in poetry. The central aspect of a poem, said Heidegger, was that “it eludes the demands of our will…The poet cannot will to write a poem, it just comes.” This links him directly with Rilke. Furthermore, the same argument applies to readers: they must allow the poem to work its magic on them. This is a central factor in Heidegger’s ideas—the split between the will and those aspects of life, the interior life, that are beyond, outside, the will, where the appropriate way to understanding is not so much thinking as submission. This sounds not unlike Eastern philosophies, and Heidegger certainly believed that the Western approach needed skeptical scrutiny (he had a famous exchange with a Buddhist monk), that science was becoming intent on mastery rather than understanding. He argued—as the philosopher William Barren has said, summing up Heidegger—that there may come a time “when we should stop asserting ourselves and just submit, let be.” 22
    What made Heidegger’s thinking so immediately popular was that it gave respectability to the German obsession with unreason, with the rejection of urban rationalist civilization, with, in effect, a hatred of