Dilthey and Carnap: The Feeling of Life, the Scientific Worldview, and the Elimination of Metaphysics

In this chapter the author examines how Dilthey’s philosophy formed part of the background of the Vienna Circle’s project of eliminating metaphysics and justifying a scientific life-stance (Lebenshaltung). Dilthey had promoted empirical scientific inquiry and critiqued metaphysics as an indemonstrable attitude rooted in a “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl) and articulated as a “worldview.” Concepts of the feeling of life, worldview, and life-stance were mobilized to confront traditional authority while emphasizing the priority of experience and a more critical and experimental scientific and artistic spirit. Carnap adopted elements from Dilthey’s critique and sensitivity to the possibility of a logic of the singular and the historical. Carnap’s early project can be interpreted as a logical empiricist hermeneutics promoting the task of pragmatic formation, cultivation, and education (Bildung) that furthers life by elucidating it.