Frank was determined to make the most of the opportunity presented by the 1929 meeting. He successfully petitioned to attach a conference entitled “Epistemology and the Exact Sciences” to the Prague event, bringing together the groups that had been developing the philosophical framework known as logical positivism from both Berlin and especially Vienna, the latter being an offshoot of the small discussion circle he had formed with Neurath and Hahn in his days as Privatdozent. The cohort from Vienna, now under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, called itself the Verein Ernst Mach (the Ernst Mach Society), and Frank took advantage of the local connection to catapult the epistemological movement to wide recognition among the visiting physicists.
The Prager Tagblatt covered the proceedings in detail, dispatching none other than the novelist and art critic Max Brod—Frank’s Fanta circle colleague and, as we shall see in the next chapter, an indispensable interlocutor for various circles of the Prague intelligentsia—to report on the event, as well as a caricaturist to capture Frank and Sommerfeld among the physicists and Neurath and Reichenbach among the philosophers. “Symbolically the lecture hall in which Ernst Mach taught was chosen as the gathering place for the scholarly discussion,” Brod observed. “The institute on the Windberg was built according to Mach’s plans, his instruments are displayed in the vestibule.”59 Brod had long been fascinated with the philosophy of causality, a topic he had at times discussed with Frank, and he recorded the discussions with informed sympathy and a soupçon of satire:
If someone were to enter the hall in the middle of Reichenbach’s lecture, he [or she] would have marveled how the curves and equations of chances of winning the adventure of roulette, rouge and noir, were discussed before a ring of serious scholars—until it became suddenly clear to this clueless listener through a turn by the lecturer that the discussion was not about Monte Carlo but of a much larger establishment and casino, as the once so venerable cosmos now seemingly presents itself to modern physicists.60
The debates were not without their fireworks: it was here that Sommerfeld openly confronted Frank with evidence that Einstein had in fact distanced himself from Mach’s epistemology over the past decade, a surprising setback for the Prague physicist, who also used the occasion to stress the legacy of Mach in what many of the visitors had come to view as a Slavic backwater.61
The most significant consequence of this meeting, however, was that it erased the Bohemian setting from the history of positivism. At this meeting Hahn, Neurath, and Carnap, all of the Ernst Mach Society, presented a manifesto entitled “Scientific World Picture” to their leader, Moritz Schlick, laying out the fundamental tenets of logical positivism: the organization of sense perception through logical relations, the quest to eradicate metaphysics from philosophy and science, and the importance of modeling future thought on the sharp analysis manifested most clearly in the work of Albert Einstein on special relativity. This would serve as the foundational document of what came to be known as the Vienna Circle, and indeed the text took every opportunity to extol the Austrian capital. Buried in a parenthetical statement in the middle was a recognition of the lineage of its teachings in Prague: Mach to Einstein, Einstein to Frank.62
The 1929 Prague meeting became a model for a number of conferences, such as the “International Congress for the Unity of Science,” which met in various cities over the coming years—including Prague in 1934 and 1937—and the social core of the enormously influential logical positivists.63 Prague proved crucial again in the 1930s as positivists fled from Nazi Germany and Vienna's rightwing dictatorship and took refuge in the democracy of the First Republic, where Philipp Frank exercised his superhuman capacity to find temporary perches for them before they departed to the United States or other safe havens. Looking back from the Anglo-American tradition, Prague was the friendliest of cities for a philosophical tradition that considered itself an extension of Albert Einstein’s innovations in physics.64
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Not everyone in Prague was delighted by this advent of logical positivism. In 1930, a review of the Vienna Circle’s manifesto appeared under the signature of a professor of philosophy at the German University. He did not care for it; in particular, he believed that to reject metaphysics was to annihilate the very essence of philosophical inquiry: “This metaphysics, which due to its value is the first and highest philosophical discipline, is however at the same time the seal and the crown of the entire structure of knowledge, of the physical and psychical. It is scientific worldview and world-conception.”65 Nonetheless, he recommended that philosophers everywhere read the manifesto. It was important to know what your enemy was thinking. The review was penned by Oskar Kraus.
Despite the enthusiasm for logical positivism in some corners of the German University, if you had wandered its halls in the interwar years overhearing what the philosophers in the faculty of philosophy were saying, there would have been no way to avoid Kraus’s hostility. He was convinced that Einstein’s relativity theory was the harbinger of a looming obscurantism in the world of thought, a cancer of which the Viennese manifesto was but a symptom. “Kraus” is not a name that features prominently (if at all) in histories of philosophy, or even of the German University, but in the 1920s he was a force to be reckoned with, as demonstrated by his inclusion on the stage in 1921 to debate with none other than celebrity scientist Albert Einstein. Kraus’s path to vociferous antirelativism reveals another way in which Einstein’s legacy was mediated by the local environment in Prague. Kraus’s views would in the long run not be nearly so influential as Frank’s, which for a long time represented the central popular understanding of the conceptual significance of relativity, but for these two interwar decades Kraus’s anti-Einstein activism accompanied the Germanophone intellectual world into its darkest hour.
Kraus was born on 24 July 1872 in Prague, and his whole life revolved around the city—at least the German-identified parts.66 He came from a solidly middle-class Jewish family: his grandfather Ignaz Kraus had worked as a midwife, and his own father, an observant Jew, had gone into trade; his mother, Clara Reitler-Eidlitz, also hailed from a merchant family. Seven years older than Einstein, Kraus followed a path away from religiosity that was remarkably similar to that trodden by the physicist, even down to the same book—Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff—that served to foment an interest in science and rationalist atheism. (This interest did not last; Kraus later described his career as “the metamorphosis from atheistic pessimism to a theistic optimism.”)67 Sent to one of the elite gymnasia of the city, he distinguished himself well in studies but perhaps rather more in his lampooning of his classics teacher. The mock-Homeric epic he composed at age 16, the Meyeriade, was first printed in 50 copies and passed from hand to hand, but was soon reissued in multiple editions, becoming a staple of comedic reading among Prague’s youth. (Franz Kafka loved it.)68 Kraus was not fated to be a classicist.
In 1890 he enrolled at the German University to study law, producing some theoretical writings on the theory of obligations and contracts and earning his doctoral degree in 1895.69 He fully expected to continue in this field, in accord with his parents’ wishes, but became both intellectually and then professionally sidetracked by philosophy. While taking courses he met his future mentor, Anton Marty, the chief disciple of Franz Brentano. Engagement with Brentano’s legacy—and to a slightly lesser extent Marty’s—would be the single most important guiding thread of Kraus’s career. Alfred Kastil, himself a “grandchild” of the Brentano school, called his fellow Brentanist Kraus “indisputably the finest mind of the second generation of students, and its most productive.”70 The two of them (though mostly Kraus) labored for years editing Brentano’s mostly unpublished manuscripts, under the direct patronage of Tomáš Masaryk, who himself had been a student of the master. (Regrettably, Kraus’s editions are highly problematic and of limited scholarly use today.)71 Kraus’s attempts to follow Brentano’s teachings to the letter colored everything he did, not least his opposition to Eins
teinian physics, even though a charitable reading of both his mentors’ works indicated some comfort with the notions of relativized space and time on metaphysical grounds.72 This was not how Kraus read his Brentano. (Brentano was aware of the problem, lamenting in 1908 in a letter to Ernst Mach, of all people, that he despaired of “even the good Kraus, who—without saying anything false—makes me seem like a mystic.”)73
Brentano is known today mostly by specialists in intellectual history, overshadowed by the overwhelming influence of his most famous student, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, Brentano was a powerful force in philosophy in the Habsburg Empire. Born in the northern German states to a distinguished literary family, he studied theology and entered a Catholic seminary in Munich and then Würzburg, before being ordained as a priest in August 1864. His specialty in those early years was the scholastic philosophy derived from Aristotle, and he began lecturing at Würzburg to great success. There he met Marty, who was also an ordained Catholic priest. In the early 1870s, however, Brentano had a crisis of profession, though not of faith, resigning (as did Marty) his clerical office in protest of the declaration of papal infallibility by Pope Pius IX. He continued to lecture at Würzburg and Vienna, expanding his range to just about every area of philosophy. Controversy soon struck, however, when he became engaged to be married in 1880. Austrian law held that a priest, even one who had left the calling, could never be married, and so Brentano resigned his ordinary professorship at Vienna and was only allowed to return as a Privatdozent after a protracted legal case. In 1895, shortly after his wife’s death (and also the year Mach moved to Vienna), he retired to Italy and later Zurich, dying in 1917.74
Kraus was captivated by Brentano’s thought and personality, and his commitment to defending the reputation of his teacher’s teacher forced a radical change in his career. In 1895, while still a jurist, Kraus applied to habilitate in the law faculty at the German University. Professor Horace Krasnopolski, whom Kraus had criticized publicly in protest against the interpretation of canon law that had justified Brentano’s demotion, blocked Kraus’s advance. Kraus took up a position working for the city for several years, until Marty proposed to the aspiring academic that he habilitate in philosophy instead. In 1902 he was promoted under Marty’s guidance with a dissertation on Jeremy Bentham’s theory of value while still working as a lawyer, in the evenings attending Bertha Fanta’s first philosophy discussion circle at the Louvre Café. His career was once again blocked, this time by his Jewish confession. The former priests Brentano and Marty both counseled that he convert to Catholicism for professional reasons, and in 1908 Kraus was baptized.75 The following year he was appointed an extraordinary professor in the philosophy faculty of his alma mater. Marty died in 1914 and Kraus took over his teaching load, earning a promotion as Marty’s successor in 1916 as ordinary professor of philosophy.76 He became prorector in 1918–1919 and again in 1922–1923, and served as dean of the philosophy faculty in 1921–1922. This career trajectory indicates that for the entire time Albert Einstein was professor of physics at Prague, he and Oskar Kraus were colleagues.
That fact did not seem to register for either figure in 1911–1912, nor did Kraus pay much attention, at least in his publications, to Einstein during the remainder of the second decade of the twentieth century. Both before and during the Great War, his research focused on topics relatively distant from epistemology or the philosophy of physics. Kraus deepened his work on Bentham’s philosophy—continuing Brentano’s push to introduce British empiricists to Germanophone philosophy—applying it to questions of international law. In 1915 he published a commentary alongside Camill Klatscher’s translation of Bentham’s Principles of International Law, a controversial choice in the middle of the war both because it hailed from the English foe and also for its arguments in favor of pacifism and nonviolent confrontation.77 His continued writings on the philosophy of punishment, a legacy of his time as a lawyer, arguably served as a resource for his former student Franz Kafka, who might have drawn on some of Kraus’s theories in his posthumous novel The Trial.78 Kraus’s most sustained area of research, however, was the theory of value, in which he advanced the notion that “preference” rather than “utility” should be the basis of valuation, essentially claiming economics as a subdivision of applied psychology.79 His arguments were in line with those of the emergent school of thought that would later be called “Austrian economics,” granting Kraus a lasting, though largely unrecognized, legacy.
Kraus wrote fairly consistently about the theory of value over his entire career, but in the 1930s his publications began to include arguments against relativism (long a bugbear) that were simultaneously explicit attacks on relativity as a physical theory.80 The general homogeneity of Kraus’s thought over time—his unwillingness to revise his views in part a consequence of his unwavering fealty to what he understood as Brentano’s philosophy—leads one to suspect that perhaps as far back as the early 1910s, he might have been already harboring a distaste for the new theory of spacetime. And in fact, this suspicion would prove true. In October 1913, Kraus wrote a letter to the Berlin experimental physicist Ernst Gehrcke with a strikingly heartfelt confession:
People are suffering from extreme fatigue, and an irritability that is due not least to the absurd theories of the relativists. I have a burning desire to see the source of error revealed for all of the absurdities that you yourself, honored sir, have accurately characterized. I also see that you have already revealed internal contradictions and absurd consequences multiple times. But where is the source of error? Because despite my calculation errors, I am still able to recognize the fact that the theory of relativity is false.81
This was the first of a flurry of letters he sent to Gehrcke. So would begin a connection that would increasingly tarnish Kraus’s good reputation over the decades to come.
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Ernst Gehrcke was the head of the optical department at the Reich Physical-Technical Institute—the German Empire’s bureau of standards—and also a professor at the University of Berlin. Gehrcke began publicly attacking relativity in 1911, and over the next several years he would blame mass suggestion and hypnosis for the so-called hysteria that he believed blinded people to the physical and philosophical incoherence behind relativity.82 His publications and organizing efforts behind the scenes assembled the core of what would eventually blossom into an antirelativity movement in Germany. What might seem like an esoteric complaint fostered, through the strategic use of mass media and by playing on the antipacifist and especially anti-Semitic right-wing politics that flourished after Germany’s defeat in World War I, the emergence of a surprisingly powerful cabal. The smoldering embers of resentment burst into hot flames upon Einstein’s sudden ascent to stardom after the 1919 eclipse expedition—now the defense of Newtonian spacetime could be a shibboleth for incipient völkisch politics.83 This band of vituperative polemicists and hypernationalist conspiracy theorists brought together by Gehrcke welcomed Oskar Kraus, the baptized Jew from Prague, into their ranks.
Kraus fired his opening salvo at a meeting of Lotos, a German-identified natural history society that had been founded in Prague in the wake of the 1848 rebellions and dedicated itself to popularizing knowledge in its journal of the same name. (Ernst Mach had been elected to Lotos in 1870, serving as vice president and as a member of the executive board, but resigned from the group in 1884 in the aftermath of the split of the university.)84 At a meeting in late February 1920, as reported on the front page of the Prager Tagblatt, Kraus picked a fight with Philipp Frank, the leading local representative of the pro-Einstein, pro-positivist line, by mocking relativity with a parable. In the story, Kraus told of a virgin who wanted to always stay young and sought the help of a magician, who advised her to run quickly so that time would slow down. The report in the newspaper—which also documented Frank’s objections from the floor—is quite amusing, but unfortunately did not include Kraus’s orig
inal wording.85 In his archive, however, there is an undated manuscript almost certainly hailing from this period, entitled “A Miracle of Science: A Shrove Tuesday Joke by Prof. Neinstein,” which not only bears a similarity to the reported story but recalls the Meyeriade of Kraus’s schooldays. The tale is set in Prague and involves the romance of Kasper and Kasperline, the Devil, and the latter’s grandmother. Once again, the lady wants to be young forever, and the Devil explains that relativity could help fulfill her desire. “Why then for example are little boys and girls so young?” he asks. “Because they are constantly running, jumping around, and making a lot of movement.”86 Shenanigans follow, and the Devil concludes with Kraus’s philosophical clincher: “Einstein says: Motion is relative. It is all the same whether Earth turns around the Sun, or the Sun around Earth; he couldn’t care less whether you are calmly sitting and the others are running or whether you are running and the others are sitting. The effect turns out to be the same. Become skinny and remain young.”87
In more sober terms, Kraus published his major objections in the society’s journal, lamenting the corrosion of the philosophical foundations of physics as represented by claims about the relativity of simultaneity and other concepts that he insisted must be, on Brentanist grounds, absolute. “All this is in truth meaningless. All of modern physics suffers from this meaninglessness, indeed its counterintuitive nature,” he maintained. “Even those opponents of Einstein who concede relativity for rectilinear uniform movement but deny it for the general fall into it. No! Relative motion alone is either quite simply nonsensical or it pertains just as much to rotational motion as to rectilinear uniform motion.”88 Introducing a frame that he would invoke repeatedly over the next two decades, he declared all of Einstein’s reasoning to be a “fiction”: “Einstein and his followers misinterpret the formulas and symbols of their theory when they consider the so-called relativization of time, the four-dimensionality of the spacetime continuum, and the bending of space to be anything other than symbols and fictions that are perhaps appropriate to provide certain services as calculational, descriptive, and heuristic auxiliaries for theoretical physics.”89
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