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The material memory of history: Edgar Zilsel’s epistemology of historiography

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Abstract

The paper focuses on the concept of matter and the material in Edgar Zilsel’s considerations about historiographical methods in the context of the Marxist debates on the materialist conception of history in the 1920s and 1930s (György Lukács, Max Adler). It sheds light on Zilsel’s understanding of matter as fluctuating, interfering processes in the lapse of time and the related concept of irreversible laws and relates it to Ernst Mach’s philosophy and to Richard Semon’s theory of mneme. Finally, it shows the practical consequences of the concept of materialism in Edgar Zilsel’s epistemology.

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Notes

  1. For an overview of Zilsel’s life and philosophical and historical work, as well as his connection to the Vienna Circle and the contemporary social democratic scene, see Krohn and Raven 2000; Stadler 1997; Dvorak 1981.

  2. Lukács furthermore emphasized that the transformation of the personality cult had to be based on an analysis of the transformation of the social functions of societal strata—an aspect that Zilsel increasingly integrated into his historical considerations from 1930 on, particularly in his studies related to the emergence of modern science (Cf. for example Zilsel 1930; Zilsel 2000).

  3. Original: „Höchstwahrscheinlich steht die Sache so:”.

  4. Original: “Elektronen, Tonklumpen, Gehirne, Iche und Dus”.

  5. Whereas Zilsel in 1930 still positively referred to Carnap’s conception of basic elements and relations, he decisively criticized Carnap’s continuation of this project in the logical formalization of protocol sentences and instead proposed a procedural epistemology based on the research of empirical data and its statistical and inductive processing (Carnap 1969, 1931/1932; Zilsel 1932b).

  6. The relevance of Mach’s conception of matter for Marxist materialist philosophy and its anti-metaphysical as well as anti-mechanistic consequences was also emphasized by Friedrich Adler in his book Ernst Machs Überwindung des mechanischen Materialismus (1918). In opposition to Lenin’s rejection of Mach in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism 1909 (Lenin 1967), he pointed out that Mach’s theory was the appropriate natural philosophy and theory of knowledge for Marxist historiography. In this context, he also pointed to the impact of Mach’s philosophy on the very specific conception of variable objects. Physical science is a “phenomenological” science in as much as it aims at the description of the interrelations of the variability of objects given to our experience. The transformation of objects is thus understood as a fluctuating variation for which physical science seeks regularities in the overall flow of elements (Adler 1918, pp. 54–60 and 92–94).

  7. Cf. the chapter “Introductory Remarks: Antimetaphysica” (Mach 1996). In this relation, advertence is also not understood as a conscious, individual activity, but instead only as a product of the consolidation of empirical, neutral elements.

  8. Original: “zeitlich fließende Geschehnisse”.

  9. The first appearance of the concept of mneme can be found in Zilsel 1926b.

  10. For details about the context of Semon’s theory and contemporary positions relating memory and heredity see Schacter 2001.

  11. In his epistemological approach, Zilsel introduced two essentially interrelated claims in order to establish the production of knowledge as an inductive enterprise: the law of large numbers—a probabilistic assumption that states that in the occurrence of a large number of cases, irregularities are balanced out (Zilsel 1916)—and the condition of disorder (Zilsel 1928, p. 118). These two assumptions establish the production of knowledge based on an agglomeration of quantitatively occurring phenomena changing in the course of time. The assumption of “reality” as a flow of mutable processes, as well as the premise that the empirical phenomena of these fluctuations are actually diverse and essentially unorganized methodologically, brought Zilsel to establish a procedural concept of the production of knowledge. In contrast to a mere quantitative enumeration of empirical data, the law of large numbers and the condition of disorder were—for Zilsel—the two fundamental conditions for a concept of knowledge as an infinitely provisional extrapolation based on a large amount of empirical data. His concept of the condition of disorder and the correlative law of large numbers were the basis for all scientific propositions as well as for everyday experience. They introduce an essential irreversibility of the empirical actualities in all complex processes and they, simultaneously, enable an irreversible kind of knowledge about what is referred to as “reality”.

  12. Both Mach and Semon refer in this relation to the work of the German physiologist Ewald Hering.

  13. The question whether the so-called natural laws are to be understood and examined only statistically preoccupied the Viennese debates on physics in the tradition of Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann and Franz Exner. This statistical turn in the physical sciences and its generalized outlook introduced an indeterministic understanding of all physical processes and thereby strongly influenced the discussions on physicalism and the feasibility of unified scientific methods in the Vienna Circle (Stöltzner 1999, 2003).

  14. Also in this relational understanding of the concept of law, Zilsel referred to Mach’s writings that proposed a purely functional understanding of the concept of natural scientific laws (Zilsel 1927, p. 280).

  15. An approach that had already suggested Friedrich Albert Lange in his book Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart. Lange emphasized the pragmatically prolific role of materialism for all positivistic sciences researching only the relational dependencies. He pointed out that they essentially relied on hypothetically introduced agencies of these relations that are treated as real objects in the course of an examination. Materialism therefore, for Lange, had the advantage that it enables a positivistic research and at the same time “gives an insight into the infinity of problems” as long as the hypothetical objects are not treated as dogmas but still as epistemological problems (Cf. Lange (1907), p. 146).

  16. The basis for a materialist attitude consisted for Zilsel in the very general experience that mental processes never occur without brain activities. For Zilsel, this is the attitude to experience which characterizes materialism. It is opposed to a metaphysical historiography assuming an independent meaning of history beyond empirical experience (Zilsel 1931b, p. 213).

  17. Cf. e.g. Zilsel 1926a, p. 320ff. (with reference to statistical astronomy); Zilsel 1931c, p. 477f. (with reference to the mathematical method of “harmonic analysis” in the research of fluctuation phenomena).

  18. Contrariwise, Adler emphasized the disciplinary difference between physics, biology, and sociology since he assumed that they were researching different types of being and thus different types of causal relations (Adler 1930).

  19. In this context, it is noteworthy that Lukács as well understood historical materialism as a practice and a task—namely to rewrite history from the perspective of Marxist theory and to relate the changes in social developments to the present. Contrary to Zilsel, Lukács, however, did not connect the mutability of knowledge about these transformations to the methodological practices of a continuously empirical research and an ongoing process of formalization and inductive inferences concerned with variable mass objects. Instead, he proposed a dialectical leap that was to be realized as the application of conscious practices to the totality of social relations. In this way, he aimed at a method to take the “changed direction of the process” practically into account (Lukács 1919, p. 249ff.).

  20. Although criticizing Zilsel’s conclusion in his book about the concept of genius, Albert Salomon, however, favorably mentioned this attitude of Zilsel’s methodology in his review of the book (Salomon 1926, p. 513).

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Wulz, M. The material memory of history: Edgar Zilsel’s epistemology of historiography. Stud East Eur Thought 64, 91–105 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-012-9159-1

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