canons.^47 Anti-Nazi feeling coincided with the positivist ideology—most vehe-
mently expressed in Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies—that
metaphysics is not only nonsensical but dangerous. The fact that Husserlian
phenomenologists too had gone into exile, and that French existentialists were
active as Resistance fighters, should have neutralized some of this political
animus; but the anticommunism of the cold war broadened the doctrine to
count all extremisms as pernicious.
At its core, the anti-metaphysical movement was an internal battle in the
disciplinary politics of philosophers; that the analytical camp was able to gain
external allies on political grounds gave extra heat to the conflict. The political
name-calling imported at midcentury into internal struggles among philosophi-
cal factions became a generalized technique, used in turn by the self-styled
“post-positivist” movements from the 1960s onward, when political tides
shifted and analytical hegemony weakened in its former strongholds. But even
here, the hostility of phenomenologist-existentialist-deconstructionist lineages
to their analytical rivals is not merely or even primarily an expression of
external political hostilities. For at the same time that logical positivism and
ordinary language were originally condemning the meaninglessness of meta-
physics, the camp of phenomenology, religious neo-orthodoxy, and their allies
were developing their own condemnations of naturalism and scientism. The
deeper factional divisions which still exist at the turn of the twenty-first century
are the same as those which emerged with the realignment at the turn of the
twentieth; there has been no subsequent realignment, although some edges have
blurred and factional names have changed.
In reality, the two allegedly antithetical traditions are network cousins, full
of common ancestors two and three generations back. All sides of the realign-
ing factions of the twentieth century emerged from the struggles over the
foundations of mathematics at the turn of the century. Working from much
the same heritage of problems, the several branches have tended to move
in parallel in their basic conceptual shifts. In the development of act psychol-
ogy and phenomenology from Brentano to Husserl to Heidegger, we see a
parallel to the exploration of logical hierarchies: the sequence from Frege’s use
versus mention, through Russell’s theory of types, to Wittgenstein’s saying
versus showing resembles the successive uncovering of levels of epochê and the
existentialist repudiation of traditional ontological language, like a melody
played in a different key.^48
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^753