Thanks to Michael Friedman's heroic efforts, the outright distortions that governed much of our common sense concerning the logical positivists is finally beginning to fade. For example, most of us now know that the so-called "Quine-Duhem hypothesis" was explicitly (e.g. "one can hold true a proposition come what may") stated and defended by A.J. Ayer before Quine, and that Carnap was every bit as holistic. For example, the Aufbau contains the sentence, "The unit of meaning is the language as a whole." A lot of salutary reassessment of Carnap's philosophical value and standard Whig histories of analytic philosophy have taken place in light of Friedman's labors.*
One of Friedman's major contentions is that both phenomenology and logical positivism must be seen in terms of the "back to Kant" movements in Germany. Heidegger's dissertation advisors were the two dominant Southwest School neo-Kantians, Windelband and Rickert. His very first lecture series, where something like the tool analysis actually appears, is on these two thinkers. Carnap also was writing in the millieu of key Marburg School neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen.**
Friedman does not just establish various anxieties of influences, but actually provides substantive philosophical sense to the claim that twentieth century philosophy was overwhelmingly dominated by neo-Kantianism. He does not, however, do much with the fact that "back to Kant" was a rejection of German Idealism, and indeed wishes to take us back to a form of neo-Kantianism distinct from both Marburg and Southwest school, Ernst Cassirer's.
Though I find Friedman's variety of neo-Kantianism fascinating, I don't think that Cassirerian notions of the relativized a priori (and both Rorty and Brandom are doing something similar) go far enough. I am more excited about re-examining the entire German Idealist tradition in light of the fruits of positivism and phenomenology, a project I have argued in the blogosphere and in print to be at the very heart of the recent "return to metaphysics" in Continental Philosophy.
Part of what makes Carnap so fascinating is that he is to some extent the anti-Quine in this respect: Carnap actually knew far more history of philosophy than one would ever directly glean from his books. A logic professor from my graduate school once told me about being a graduate student in Chicago while Carnap was there. During a dissertation defense on Aristotle the director was doing the European thing where you humiliate your own student if she disagrees with you. Carnap got more and more agitated for about an hour and finally raised his hand to ask a question. He then went on to wipe up the floor with the professor, and could quote chapter and verse of Aristotle far better than the specialist. He was apparently such a sweet man that no one thought, "where did this come from?" in terms of him defending the graduate student. But no one at Chicago had had any idea that he knew Aristotle so well until that point.
In this spirit, I want to suggest that Carnap might have known Hegel much better than we might think.
Here is my evidence. The primary building blocks of the Aufbau are not in fact "sense data" in the sense of Russell or Goodman, but rather whole gestalts comprising a sort of snap shot of a given time of everything perceived. Carnap then uses set theory to try to define sense data and ordinary objects in terms of these. It is a weird choice, especially since in the same book he holistically says that he could have started with physical objects and nothing would have been lost.
Why make such a werid choice then, neither physical objects with common sense nor sense data with the empiricist tradition (as do Russell and Goodman in their similar projects)?
To anyone who has read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Carnap's choice makes perfect sense. For if the Aufbau project is successful, then the argument that starts Hegel's book does not get off the ground. The "sensible certainty" that Hegel critiques is not the empiricism of sense data, but rather the view that we can have a pure receptivity to all of our experience at once and that such an experience could be an object of knowledge. But of course for Hegel, sensible certainty cannot do such work because for something to be an object of knowledge for him it must be stateable. But for something to be asserted, something else must be excluded. Not implausibly, Hegel holds that consciousness is necessarily selective. But pure receptivity as an openness to the entirety of one's current impingings is by definition not selective. So we must aufheben and move on.
However, one could argue that if Carnap is successful at defining sense data and ordinary objects in terms of gestalten, then Hegel's Phenomenology never gets off the ground, for Hegel's main argument against sensible certainty will have been shown to be invalid.
As far as I know, it's pretty speculative to think that Carnap was aware of this. But it does explain a lot of what otherwise seems inestimably weird about the Aufbau. More importantly for all of us I think, it shows much more clearly what is at stake in the failure of that great project.
[Notes:
*Why was this necessary in the first place? From talking with those of Quine's students who have read Friedman, I hypothesis the following. Quine read less philosophy than Wittgenstein was even reputed to have. For decades he read popular science magazines and people responding to his own work. But even earlier, much of what he is responding to is from conversations. He of course knew Carnap well, helping him escape the Nazis. But he was also at Harvard during the year when Russell was there. Much of Quine's opus was actually using Carnap to argue against the views Russell was defending at Harvard. But Quine's citational habits are so awful that people who have read neither Russell nor Carnap don't get this. Then, since Quine himself is quite explicit about where he does disagree with Carnap (for example on convention) people tend to think of (1) Carnap as having beliefs of Russell's, and (2) Quine as criticizing Carnap for having those beliefs. The perversity is that many such criticisms were already made by Carnap, and are indeed in Ayer's "Language, Proof, and Logic."
I am heartened by the fact that Friedman's work has had an impact not just on the reconsideration of Carnap as a philosopher worth attending to in his own right, but also on how standard Whig histories are being told. For example, Alexander Miller's Philosophy of Language textbook is very careful to delineate Ayer from Quine's holism.
**Indeed, the "rootless cosmopolitan" type slurs against Carnap of the (what were later scrubbed) conclusions to Heidegger's truth essay make complete sense as an anti-semitic slur on Marburg school neo-Kantianism. In fact though, as we all known, the positivist diaspora didn't happen because the principles were fond of travelling, but rather because of the homicidal vision of those who, like Heidegger in his later Nazi era lectures, argued that it was of metaphysical necessity*** that semitic people could have no home and thus would be a threat.
***The low point in every decade's "Heidegger controversy" is where people interpret such claims of metaphysical necessity (shared with Hitler and in their particular expression coming out of a romantic German tradition) as exculpatory because they don't track in "crude biological racism." Does this exculpate people who kill Jews because their ancestors supposedly murdered Jesus?
If the price of anti-scientism is this kind of moronic misreading of history, then I'm with Richard Dawkins all of the way. Sorry for going on about this. I have found that unless I do so, someone that I otherwise respect will recycle the canard about "biological" racism, and I'm again confronted by the basic aliteracy**** of our age. Carrying on like this here prevents that.
****Where one can read, but doesn't. See * above. One can make a Hegelo-Nietzschean argument for the necessity of a certain amount of aliteracy stemming from the necessity of forgetting. I think this was probably true with respect to the "back to Kant" movement generally, and especially positivism and phenomenology. Nonetheless, (1) in Hegelian terms, it's time for these concepts to realize themselves and be overturned (and I think their main virtues is that a hundred years of forgetting now allows us to see German Idealism with fresh eyes, perhaps in the sense of Eliot's Four Quartets, I don't know), and (2) at some point the modern university will reach a sad tipping-point where the passing of a certain threshold of aliteracy among the professoriate will auger something terrible yet not in the least magnificent.]
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