Issue 6 Horticulture Spring 2002  Professor Naess's Alpine
Garden  David Rothenberg  Arne Naess, 90 years old, may very
well be the last surviving member of the Vienna Circle, that
erstwhile group of grave philosophers who set the previous
century on the steel road to logic and reason. Naess is the only
one left to poke his nose into the 21st century. Back in 1930,
sent to Vienna to become a concert pianist but soon stuck at the
roundtable with analytic thinkers like Carnap and Quine, the
18-year-old Norwegian pipsqueak raised his hand to complain, “I
think you are spending too much time quoting Wittgenstein. Why
can’t I be quoted a bit more?” He has been causing trouble like
this his whole life.  A few years later, while his analytic
buddies were talking on and on about a philosophy based on
“common sense,” without metaphysical flights of fantasy and
other forms of continental mush, Naess wrote up a questionnaire
and passed it out on the street. There was only one question:
“How do you decide what is true?”