Once upon a time, logical empiricism,
or logical positivism, was buried under its (allegedly) defeated,
dogmatic, intellectualist and abstract-technical package of problems
and paradoxes. As a prominent member of the movement, after his death
in 1945, Otto Neurath was regarded also as a bad guy, a narrow-minded
logical positivist. He was attacked from various angles already in his
life: in the early-1940s, the New York philosopher, Horace Kallen
eagerly insisted that Neurath was a(n at least pink) fellow-traveler
and his ideal of social and economic planning was not compatible with
the democratic, liberal, and anti-communist era of the Cold War United
States. But Neurath had problems also with his Vienna Circle friends:
Moritz Schlick and Carl G. Hempel hold that his style was
commercial-like and ambiguous, lacking solid and precise
argumentations; he fell out with Rudolf Carnap over semantics and
probability and disliked Friedrich Waismann’s and Herbert Feigl’s
uncritical attraction towards Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was no accident
that Neurath’s usual signature at the end of his letters was a huge,
though kind elephant.
Nonetheless (thanks to the works of Rudolf Haller, Friedrich Stadler,
Thomas Uebel and others) Neurath’s exegetically reconstructed ideas and
personal context played an important role in rehabilitating logical
empiricism during the last two decades. Though during this process,
most often he was remembered in the philosophical community, he was
more than an academically inclined philosopher. And this is not just
due to the fact that Neurath’s theoretical inquiries and writings arose
from such specific
practical interests
and
social settings that
were
always reflected by him, but because the ideal route to his goals did
not necessarily cross the paths of philosophy
per se.
Besides his posts in sociology and economics, the two most important
non-philosophical fields of Neurath were pictorial education and the
practice of museums. Angélique Groß’s
Die Bildpädagogik Otto Neuraths:
Methodische Prinzipien der Darstellung von Wissen (Otto Neurath’s
Pictorial Education: Methodological Principles of Representing
Knowledge), which was published as the 21st volume of
Veröffentlichungen des Instituts
Wiener Kreis series, deals exactly
with these subjects. Due to its concise organization and structure, the
book shall be an important contribution to the recent historical and
practical re-evaluation of Neurath’s legacy and relevance.
During the age of mass communication and education, when entertainment
was replaced by infotainment, Neurath’s ideal of pictorial education
and transmission become an intensive interest of philosophers and
communicational experts. Neurath developed in the 1920s the so-called
Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik [
Vienna Method of Pictorial
Statistics] because he thought that conceptual languages are
ambiguous
and able to serve metaphysical aims. Pictorial languages, or pictorial
representation of knowledge, on the other, aim to convey information to
educate everyone irrespectively of one’s social class, nationality, and
sensorial skills. As Neurath famously declared, ‘words divide, pictures
unite.’
The Vienna Method was, in course of time, renamed and slightly
restructured (with his future third wife, Marie Reidemeister) as
ISOTYPE,
that is,
International System Of TYpographic
Picture
Education. The most
important idea behind this educational ideal was to
represent the quantitatively changing information not with an enlarging
image, but by a greater number of the same symbol (or pictogram,
designed by the artist, Gerd Arntz), though the ISOTYPE method was also
able to transform another type of linguistic information into pictures
(like how tuberculosis spreads in a community, etc.).
Neurath’s method and approach, while often without his name and in
different contexts, remained inevitable in the twenty-first century
too: we are faced with almost the same characters and pictograms
everywhere in our social era. These symbols convey and transform to us
the relevant and important information at the railway and bus stations,
at hospitals, in the media, on the road signs, and the list could be
continued. This huge and in the literature highly underappreciated
achievement of Neurath is the subject of Groß’s book: at the end, the
reader shall be satisfied since she got what she is promised, namely a
detailed treatise on Neurath’s life-work.
After a summarizing introductory chapter that sets the tone for the
later investigations, in the second chapter Groß turns to the manifesto
of the Circle: “The Scientific World-Conception: The Vienna Circle”
(SWC, for short). The manifesto has many translations (also a
Hungarian, published in 1991) and is viewed as one of the most
important documents from the so-called official phase of the Circle.
Though the authors, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Neurath, and partly Feigl
and Waismann, did not consider the question of pictures and pictorial
education, the manifesto contains almost all those relevant social and
political factors and life conditions that help us to understand how
the Vienna Circle (or at least a part of it) conceived the relation
between science, politics, and society.
The SWC is, after all, “the continuation of the close connection
between science and society and stands for a formation program
[Gestaltungsprogramm] of the social and political life” (p. 25.). In
order to support this claim, Groß painstakingly elaborates the various
educational, social, theological, and scientific backgrounds of the
Vienna Circle and the so-called Austrian enlightenment.
She guides us through Neurath’s “Museum of Society and Economy in
Vienna” (“Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien”) established in
1925, which was, in many respects, a forerunner to the pictorial
education ideal, we got to know Neurath’s ideal of “Utopie” and the
exact meaning of “humanismus” in an age of disaster. The two most
important notions of the chapter are “enlightenment” [“Aufklärung”] and
“Bildung”, which could be rendered into English in many ways, the most
often used versions being “personal development” and
“self-cultivation”. Neurath was quite determined to educate masses and
to help people in shaping their own character via reliable scientific
methods.
While no one shall be excluded from the domain of knowledge and
education, one social class seems to be positively discriminated:
working class. In the section about “aufklärischen Arbeiterbildung” (p.
52.), Groß reconstructs Neurath’s ideas about how and why the working
class supposed to be the holder of metaphysics-free knowledge and
practices. “It is the working class that builds up that social
stratum,” reconstructs Groß (p. 54.) the ideas of Neurath, “which has
been so far excluded from the scientific Bildung and social
constructions, but that shall not remain so.”
Chapter 3 (“The Practice of the Pictorial Education”) is perhaps the
most fascinating and engaging chapter of the book. It contains more
than one hundred pictures, photos, posters, pictograms, advertisement
related to Neurath’s pictorial education method. The six main sections
of the chapter are about important milestones in the history of the
pictorial education and ISOTYPE. Groß shows us how Neurath’s method
changed and evolved over time with the help of different artists and
friends: as she claims (p. 92.), Neurath did not have an explicit and
detailed theory of education or depiction, he just practiced his ideals
and developed the required forms and patterns through a “trial and
error” methodology over the years. This is shown by the aforementioned
sections: Groß presents us all the famous and less-known pictures from
the important books, maps, and illustrations and thus reconstructs how
Neurath’s practices achieved their final and internationally known
design known as ISOTYPE. Her reconstructions and discussions helps to
understand the contexts of such works as
Die bunte Welt [
The Colorful
World, 1929],
Gesellschaft
und Wirtschaft [
Society and
Economy, 1930],
Technik und Menschheit [
Technology and Mankind, 1932],
Die
Gesundheitserziehung [
The
Health Education, mid-1930s], and
Modern man
in the making [1939].
Though Neurath did not have a detailed and comprehensive theoretical
background and theory of pictures and education, certain regularities,
and principles that had a constitutive force (p. 234.) regarding the
evolving character of the ISOTYPE could be detected. Groß collected
many of them in Chapter 4, providing the implicit
conceptual background
of Neurath’s longstanding method.
After a summary chapter about the method, education, and practices of
Neurath, the book is closed with a detailed biography of Neurath’s
life, his exhibitions, films, institutions, museums, etc.
Enriched with the many pictures, figures, and tables,
Die Bildpädagogik
Otto Neuraths will be an important monograph devoted entirely to
the
method, principles, and practices behind Neurath’s perhaps longest
standing contribution to twentieth and twenty-first century social and
cultural life: ISOTYPE. In 1936, the American magazine,
Survey Graphic,
devoted to visual information and communication, celebrated Neurath,
who just visited the United States, with a two-page long editorial
article entitled the “Social Showman” and introduced him as the “Big
Man who created the little man.” Given that narrative, Angélique Groß’s
book will introduce to the reader the Little Man who created the Big
Man.
[1] Angélique Groß: Die
Bildpädagogik Otto Neuraths: Methodische Prinzipien
der Darstellung von Wissen. Dordrecht: Springer. 2015, pp. xii + 288
and 116 figures. Hardcover, $129. ISBN 978-3-319-16315-4.
