which by the 1930s Husserl was perceiving as the downfall of the entire
Western cultural tradition was the usual condition of intellectual life: its
creative bursts which come through exploiting the deep troubles of previous
movements, forming new movements which undergo splits and clashes of their
own. With Husserl, the explicit invocation of crisis became a key intellectual
resource. This was not the least of the cultural capital which was appropriated
by his followers.
The Ideology of the Continental-Anglo Split
The realignment of philosophical parties produced a double dose of intellectual
conflict. There was the expectable polemic of the new versus the old, as well
as new lines of dispute taking over the center of attention. All this is normal.
At the same time, each of the several post-realignment movements of the early
twentieth century became unprecedentedly vehement in their condemnation of
any other mode of doing philosophy. This partisanship outlasted virtually every
other substantive feature of their programs.
Although verification, physicalism, unified science, and logical foundation-
alism were gradually given up, the central characteristic of the Vienna Circle
became defining for a large wing of philosophy. Its hallmark was militant
rejection of all philosophies that could be styled metaphysical. The position
had its blind spot, insofar as the militants themselves usually had their onto-
logical preferences, and in fact there was an outburst of systems that reduced
large areas of reality to fundamentals: atomic states of affairs in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus, Platonic reals and then sense-experiences in Russell’s successive
systems, the entities of physics in Carnap and Neurath. These militant reduc-
tionists and demarcationists jolted everyone into awareness of a deep-seated
change in the bases of intellectual production: the old identity of the general-
purpose intellectual had given way to that of one specialist among others,
speaking a language and dealing with problems that are no more accessible to
outsiders than the technicalities of mathematics or chemistry. This would be
true, too, of the opponents of the logicists; phenomenologists, existentialists,
and later in the century poststructuralists would also speak in the technical
jargon of insiders. The militant ideology of the formalizers, even though it was
unable to make good on its substantive claims, sent a shock wave throughout
the intellectual world because it presented in exaggerated form what was
becoming inescapable in the ordinary conditions of academic work.
The lineup of enemies differed in the various national arenas. In Germany,
first it was Neo-Kantianism to be disposed of; with the popularity of Husserl’s
phenomenology by the 1920s, that too became a target (for instance, in
Popper’s attack on “essentialism”). When Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit came on
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^751