Zilsel, Edgar

The Scholar-craftsman thesis, one of the most critical problems in the study of science and technology history in early modern Europe, aims to reveal the mutual learning between scholars and artisans and therefore to interpret how this reciprocity influenced or even caused the birth of the new science. In Edgar Zilsel’s point of view, the emergence of the scientists as a new social group was the symbol of the fusion of scholars and artisans, for these two groups of people had been separating since the ancient times. Modern science was born when scholars absorbed experimentation, causal interest, and quantitative method from craftsmen. Panofsky emphasizes the interaction of science and art as a defining characteristic of Renaissance science. The numerous collaborations between humanists and artisans triggered a revolution in the realm of visual representation, which then became an essential step toward modern science. A. R. Hall, however, argues that the Scientific Revolution in nature was no more than to offer new answers to the questions left by medieval natural philosophers, was a movement only within the sphere of the intellectuals. Scholars did learn from artisans, but the merits were limited. Indeed, the mutually beneficial reaction between the two groups had not formed yet during the Scientific Revolution. Pamela O. Long eliminates the dualism of scholars and craftsmen by introducing a new concept, trading zone, which is to describe a concrete or virtual meeting place in which people from different background exchange their substantive knowledge and expertise during the fifteenth and sixteenth-century​ Europe. The identity of scholars and craftsmen blurred and the value of experience study promoted in the trading zones, that paved the way for the birth of modern science.

In this paper I investigate how intellectual problems concerning an epistemology of  history and a historical view of knowledge played a role in the network of logical empiricist philosophers between 1930 and 1945. Specifically, I focus on the practical efforts of Hans Reichenbach and Otto Neurath to incorporate these intellectual stakes concerning history. I argue that Reichenbach was mainly concerned with creating more  institutional space for scientific philosophy. Consequently, he was interested in determining his relation to historically oriented philosophy on the practical level only. Otto Neurath, I claim, was interested in promoting an intellectual incorporation of an epistemology of history and a historical view of knowledge into the Unity of Science movement. His attempts, however, largely failed. I conclude that the intellectual stakes concerning history did have an effect within the network of logical empiricist philosophers, but by 1945 these stakes were entirely dissolved. The displacement of the network to the United States removed Reichenbach’s practical problems, while Neurath was unable to persuade enough actors before his death.

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In 1918, Edgar Zilsel—a Marxist-Jewish philosopher who was soon to be exiled from Vienna—published a sociological study that later readers have found prescient of fascism. In Die Geniereligion (“The Religion of Genius”), Zilsel cautioned against the hidden dangers of elevating secular figures to the status of deities. As early as 1912, Zilsel was disturbed by how art-religion shaped music culture: his earliest published essay ruminated on timelessness and canonicity, on striving for heavenly tones while cast down to the earthly squalor of the concert hall. Indeed, in Zilsel’s Vienna, art-religion had come to dominate the music world—biographers made Beethoven a surrogate Christ, composers’ mementos circulated as relics, and historic houses became sites of pilgrimage. This article argues that Zilsel’s Geniereligion was not only an extension of his disdain for timelessness, but also bears subtle traces of Jewish disillusionment at the impossibility of assimilation to a secular arts culture. To enact their “civic self-improvement” (bürgerliche Verbesserung), Jews pursued educational self-cultivation (Bildung) that immersed them in the German national canon; and while this canon purported to be a secular neutral space, its Catholic practices of artist-veneration forced Jews to assimilate to a distinctly Christian brand of art-religion. When read against this cultural backdrop, Zilsel’s Geniereligion emerges as a subtle Jewish response to the promises and failures of secularity.

In the summer of 1943 Edgar Zilsel resigned from his membership in the exile organization of Austrian Social Democrats, a political movement he had joined as a young man back in Vienna. Zilsel (1891-1944) is known as an innovative scholar bridging philosophy, history and sociology of science, and belonging to the so-called left wing of the Vienna Circle of Logical Emipricism. Details of his political convictions are less recognized. A recently detected manuscript illuminates his worldview: His resignation letter had been accompanied by a short exposition of his interpretation of socialism near the end of World War II. The article introduces Zilsel, his life and work and publishes for the first time Zilsel's statement from 1943.