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PARTISAN REVIEW
former dominance of logical POSItIVIsm. It would seem that not only
nature but intellectual fashion abhors a vacuum. Analogous to other arts,
a self-professed austere idea of modernism has been surrounded by a self–
defined postmodernist conception of inclusiveness, albeit inclusiveness
with an ideological slant.
The philosophical chronology, however, does not show that logical
positivism lost its place in the battlefield of ideas because of the need for
a more ideological philosophy or for one with greater focus on ultimate
spiritual concern. It is true that even in the period of its greatest aca–
demic dominance, the philosophical voices of phenomenologists, exis–
tentialists, and many others outside the framework of language analysis
continued to resonate. Yet the significant factor was the internal subver–
sion of logical positivism by its own protagonists, working out its own
implications.
Kurt Godel was a member of the Vienna Circle who went into ex–
ile at the Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study. There he
carried out his brilliant demonstrations on the requirements for consis–
tency proofs and completeness proofs in mathematics. His results in–
cluded,
contra
the vision of Whitehead and Russell, the demonstration
that any proof of the completeness of mathematics as a language would
inevitably generate an inconsistency.
Equally ironically, Ludwig Wittgenstein, even though he had studied
with Russell before World War One and walked the streets of Vienna
with Schlick and Carnap, arguing the themes of the Circle, was generally
considered the lonely genius of logical positivism. He was to come to
the conclusion that the theory of meaning central to the classificaion of
language by logical positivism was deeply flawed . There could be no ex–
clusionary wand to eliminate metaphysical nonsense. The meaning of any
statement was its use in its language game, so meaningfulness had to be
explored relative to context. Hence neither logic nor the positive sci–
ences offered the paradigms of meaning.
It is noteworthy that the Wittgensteinian language analysis which
subverted logical positivism led to classic philosophical works in the
1950s by Ryle, Austin, and Hart on concepts of mind , morals, and law.
These works were ideologized after the 1960s by their philosophical
critics who contend that all cultural artifacts are inevitably ideological.
The philosophical routes of Ayer, Popper, and Quione converged to
a degree around Vienna, but they have each followed many roads from
Vienna. To some extent, Ayer in
The Meaning oj Life
was still squaring
his accounts with the Vienna Circle. Karl Popper, however, has spear–
headed so many controversies over the nature and implications of the
