Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited (2001)

B~·

-

CJ)

c

·Q) I .J CJ)

c

Q)

(\j

c c Q)

bO·I

·- > .J

I

$

.J

uQ) .J

··> I

CJ)

Q)

~

~

~

~

::::J

·~

~ ~

~ ~

~ ~

~

c

IJl c ,_-o

•

Q)

c

..cC IJl_;

::= "'0 ..,DC

.,::~ c< 0~

·~::::J

u-

ro~ IJl u

c·-

ro tr. 3

,_

I- c

....:J

a::

3

c;

z

2./.5 Z I dJf-_4 'f _ (1

'

U~t!t.J''""';;"' "· .,.,.,

-........,.-" ... ~4

Universi!elt Maastricht

~~===-------------·

I

I

I

I

I

\',dk.:n['l.IJ~!!,'rwcg 177 t,•ll
I

/

I

I

!

I

/

I

)'fe
/

I

i

I

Copyright © 2001 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers-The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 088548042. This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 00-054383 ISBN: 0-7658-0050-0 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Janik, Allan. Wittgenstein's Vienna revisited I Allan Janik. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0050 1. Wittgcnstcin, Ludwig, 1889-1951. 2. Vienna (Austria)lntcllcctual lil'c ·20th century . 3. Logical positivism-History. I. Tille.

IUHC1. Wf\M .1\M 200 I

For three friends in philosophy: Dick, Dominique, Rudolf

Contents Foreword Introduction: How Not to View Vienna 1900

lX

1

I.

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer

15

2.

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

37

3.

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

59

4.

Ebner Contra Wagner: Epistemology, Aesthetics, and Salvation in Vienna, 1900

85

5.

Offenbach: Art between Monologue and Dialogue

105

6.

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

119

7.

Saying and Showing: Hertz and Wittgenstein

147

8.

Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View"

171

9.

Kraus, Wittgenstein, and the Philosophy of Language

185

10. Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

197

11. Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics,

213

and Method 12. "Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins": Wittgenstein and Trakl

225

Notes

247

Index

281

Foreword Although the essays below were mostly written as lectures for specific occasions, and thus can be read independently of one another, they in fact expand upon and complement Wittgenstein 's Vienna. In that book two philosophers set out to expand the horizons of their discipline by posing problems in three principal areas: the history of philosophy, inasmuch as it bears upon the early Wittgenstein's philosophical development, the history of ideas, inasmuch as Wittgenstein can be seen as emerging from the Central European background of cultural criticism in Vienna circa 1900 and finally the critique of the technocratic tendencies of modern culture generally. The essays below continue those investigations by amplifying a number of very specific, especially significant points concerning the genesis of Wittgenstein's thought, the nature of fin de siecle Viennese culture, and the criticism of our own culture raised in the earlier book. It is by no means comprehensive and makes no pretensions of being so. These essays move from analysis of the cultural factors militating against self-knowledge at the dawn of the millennium to a consideration of the origins of a critical attitude to modernity in Vienna and ending with a consideration of the genesis of Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy and its significance both in Vienna 1900 and for European culture today. The little-known Austrian precursor of Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner, penetratingly identified the source of the obstacles to self-knowledge in the modern world as a typically modern tendency to encapsulate ourselves in our dreams of the world as we would have it rather than encounter it as it actually is. In short, our aspirations, then and now, have tended to take on the character of intellectual fantasies, that ultimately prevent us from seeing and experiencing the world as it is, i.e., as populated by individuals of flesh and blood who suffer in the absence of a concerned Other. The central theme of this book develops various aspects of the thesis

x

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

that both this typically modern tendency to intellectual fantasizing and a highly powerful critique of it emerged from Vienna 1900. If we have failed to appreciate the true character of Viennese modernism as well as Viennese "critical modernism," it is because we are too accustomed (1) to seeing Vienna in terms of a fin de siecle malaise full of waltzes and whipped cream and (2) we have not looked closely enough at the fabric of the debates about ethical and aesthetic values in that culture. These essays, then, are, inter alia, a reminder of the importance of a sense for history strong enough to take us beyond the level of cliche. Wittgenstein's philosophical efforts to show us things so evident that we cannot perceive them has a special significance in this context, for it challenges philosophical modernism in its most radical form-Viennese logical positivismhead on and attempts to dismantle it from within. The story of how he got to that concept of philosophy is absolutely central to understanding his view that the most important things simply do not permit themselves to be said. In leaving things as they are, Wittgenstein in fact reminds us that we find ourselves in the middle of the world and not outside of it. We are "encompassed" by reality as Karl Jaspers was wont to put it; we do not encompass it. In the last quarter century hundreds, if not thousands of books have been written about Wittgenstein, Vienna, and modernity. Many of them are superb, others, less so. Be that as it may, there is something to be said for the thesis that we still have not penetrated the full depths of our original subjects of study. The problem with both Viennese rationalism and Viennese aestheticism, not to mention their contemporary counterparts, is that both fail to recognize that there are limits to what we can know in the formal sense but that those limits by their very nature can only be shown and not said (i.e., in the sense of being put into a "modern" theory-or a "postmodern" counter-theory). Wittgenstein 's efforts to get straight about the limits of thought and language in all of the stages of his development and thus to be fair to science, religion, and art account for his place of honor among critical modernists. These essays thus aim at elucidating that perspective on our culture and Wittgenstein's way to it. Allan Janik Tnnsbruck 2000

Acknowledgments The individual essays below contain copious references to people who have made valuable suggestions to me concerning various aspects of the themes discussed here at various points. However, a special word of thanks is necessary in the case of a number of espedally important figures. Kjell S. Johannessen gave me the idea of producing such an anthology in the first place. His profound knowll'dge of Wittgenstein's later philosophy and its implications for the humanities has helped me in clarifying my own philosophical thinking as no one else has. Steven Beller has been a thorough critic of lWerything I have written about Vienna in the .last fifteen years. I have avoided many a pitfall due to his canny eye and his comprehensive knowledge of Austrian culture. In all matters bearing upon philosophy and literature Walter Methlagl's knowledge of Austrian letters has been a source of enormous stimulation and support. The same holds true for Rudolf Haller's knowledge of Austrian philosophy. Bo Ooranzon's commitment to the importance of the humanities in a technological culture as well as Rob Riemen's deep commitments to the importance of the Judea-Christian tradition for the twentyfirst century have been extraordinarily important to me in the matter of setting intellectual priorities. Most of all the innumerable conversations with all of the above-mentioned as well as knowledgeable Viennese friends such as Marcel Faust, Herbert Czermak, Raoul Kneucker, Emil Brix, and Hans Veigl have made this easier and more pleasant than it otherwise might have been. I am very grateful to all of them for their intellectual generosity and tolerance. They bear no responsibility for the shortcomings of this book, for which I alone am responsible. The essays below originally appeared in journals or anthologies. All have been revised for publication here, some considerably. They arc reprinted here with the permission of the respective editors or publishers.

xii

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

The introduction "How Not to View Vienna 1900" was originally a lecture at the Swedish Center for Working Life in 1984 entitled "Creative Milieux: The Case of Vienna," which I have often delivered over the years due to the great interest in the topic. It has appeared in Swedish and German translations but in English only in the anthology from my writings on Vienna 1900 that I published for my students in my course on "Foundations of the Humanities" in the Philosophy Department stencil series of the University of Bergen under the title How Not to Interpret a Culture (Bergen, 1986). "The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer" was a lecture at the Nexus Institute-Royal Dutch Opera Schoenberg Symposium in Amsterdam in September 1995. It later appeared in Dutch translation in Nexus 12 (1995). "Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture" appeared originally in the anthology Vienna: The World of Yesterday, eds. Stephen Eric Bronner and F. Peter Wagner (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997). "Weininger, Ibsen, and Viennese Critical Modernism" was originally prepared for the 8th International Ibsen Congress, GossensaB, Tyrol 1997. "Ebner Contra Wagner" was published in an earlier (German) version in Kreatives Milieu: Wien um 1900, eds. Emil Brix and Allan Janik (Vienna: Verlag fiir Geschichte und Politik, 1993). "Offenbach, or Art between Monologue and Dialogue" originally was a lecture before the Stockholm Dialogue Seminar in 1986. It was published in Swedish in Dialoger IV (1986). "Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism" is a revised version of an article with the same title in Der Fall Wagner, ed. Thomas Steiert published by the Bayreuth Institut fiir Musiktheaterforschung (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1991). "Saying and Showing: Hertz and Wittgenstein" began as a lecture to the Department of Mechanics at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology in 1993. It later appeared in the Grazer Philosophische Studien (1994/5). "Weininger and Wittgenstein's 'Religious Point of View"' was originally presented at the Bulgarian Cultural Institute's 1997 Symposium on Wittgcnstcin, Ethics and Religion and later printed with the ph)cccdin!-!,s in MisC'dlant'll IIIIIRarim 13 (1999).

Ackowledgments

xiii

"Kraus, Wittgenstein, and the Philosophy of Language" was originally presented at the University of London Karl Kraus Symposium in September 1999. "Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and European Culture" was originally a lecture before the Belgian Academy of Science Symposium on Austria and Europe in December 1995. It was printed in the proceedings of that conference. "Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics, and Method" originally appeared in an earlier version in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Donald G. Daviau (Vienna: Atelier, 1995) in English. "Wittgenstein and Trakl" was published in an earlier version in Modern Austrian Literature Vol. XXXIII, no. 2 (1990).

Wittgenstein's Works I refer to Wittgenstein's works parenthetically in the text as follows. Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI with paragraph number= Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). BBB with page number= The Blue and Brown Books. ed. Rush Rhees (New York: Harper's, 1956). C&V with page number= Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). E with letter number= Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, trans. L. Furtmiiller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967). F with letter number= Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. G.H. von Wright ("Brenner Studien," vol. 1; Salzburg: Otto Miiller, 1969). GT with date= Geheime Tagebiicher, ed. W. Baum (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1992). K with page number = Denkbewegungen [the Koder Notebook] ed. Ilse Somavilla (lnnsbruck: Haymon, 1996). L+C with page number= Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. C. Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966). N with page number= Notebooks 1914-16, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961). 0 with letter number= Letters to C.K. Ogden, ed. G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973). OC with paragraph number = On Certainty, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and Denis Paul (New York: Harper's, 1969). OCL with section and paragraph number = Remarks on Color, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1978). R, K, M with letter number= respectively to Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G.H. von Wright (2"d ed. rev.; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). TL-P with proposition number= Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.P. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961 ). WV with page number= Worterbuchfiir Volksschulen (Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977). WWK with page number = Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis shorthand notes by F. Waismann, ed. B.F. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).

Introduction: How Not to View Vienna 1900 When Elias Canetti was informed that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature he accepted the honor in the name of four Austrians who had not been so honored: Franz Kafka, 1 Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch. 2 There can be little doubt that C'anctti's remark was highly ironic. It was not simply that one great Austrian writer had been neglected in his eyes, but a whole series of tlwm-Canetti's very heroes and exemplars-had been passed over. ( >n the surface, then, Canetti was reminding those who would honor him of the remarkable richness and critical potential in Austrian lett~·rs and at the same time emphasizing the lack of recognition that I h~sc writers had suffered. He thus chose to underscore that in hontll'ing him, an Austrian, born in Bulgaria, living in London, and writmg in German, the Swedish Academy would be honoring his heroes too. This anecdote serves as a reminder at once of the magnitude of lhl.! Dual Monarchy's contribution to modem culture as well as its tWnchant for ignoring, if not actually abusing, the geniuses it bred. It' Swedes could ignore brilliant Austrians, it was only because Austrians had already set the fashion and no Austrians were better at that than the Viennese. Indeed, the Viennese treatment of home).',rown talent only serves to remind us of the city's amazing capacity to ignore creative individuals at best and persecute them at worst while they lived, only to adulate them once dead. If we need examples we need only look to her treatment of her composers: Mozart, always happier and better received in Prague, Schubert (for most of his life), Bruckner, Mahler, and Hugo Wolf. The failure of the Vienna Circle, which revolutionized philosophy in the English-speaking world, to have any impact upon philosophy in its native city till after World War II is no less depressing, as are the cases of Sigmund l•'r~ud, Robert Musil, and Karl Kraus. If we arc to understand Vienna

2

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

as a creative milieu, it is of paramount importance that we recognize the role that Vienna's almost incredible hostility to her most illustrious sons played in forming that milieu. So it should not be surprising that Vienna should breed critical spirits like the late Thomas Bernhard who have rewarded her hostility in kind. In short, here, as in everything else, to understand Vienna is to understand her as a city of paradoxes. 3 Three of Canetti's heroes, Kraus, Musil, and Brach, were Viennese. Kraus in fact spent his life as a sort of professional anti-Viennese. Indeed, so vehement was his opposition to the powers that be that he is all but incomprehensible apart from the cultural context of Alt Wien. 4 His satires and polemics were directed at the shallowness and hypocrisy which permitted the Viennese to ridicule the gifted and heap praise on the mediocre. His campaign against superficially dazzling shoddiness was rewarded, as in the case of his enemy Sigmund Freud, with a conspiracy of silence (Totschweigen) on the part of the Viennese press, his archenemy. Thus only the Socialist Arbeiterzeitung among Viennese papers reported the obituary of Kraus's friend and colleague, Adolf Laos, because Kraus gave the graveside eulogy. Musil was never at home in Vienna. It is not for nothing that the Habsburg imperial capital is depicted as a pathological phenomenon fit only for phenomenological dissection in his chef d'oeuvre, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities). If Freud, Mach, and Laos were in some sense spiritually and culturally Englishmen, Musil was a Berliner. 5 Brach may have matured in Vienna but it was in New York and at Yale that he did much of his best work and finally attained the recognition he so well deserved. Canetti, like Kraus (i.e., in Germany, France and Czechoslovakia during his lifetime at least), has fared much better abroad than at home. It is the merit of Fredrick Morton's lively-and aptly namedsurvey of the events of 1889 in Vienna, A Nervous Splendor, to have pointed out that but a single figure of note in the city's cultural life that year was entirely free of tormenting self-doubts: Johannes Brahms. 6 Not even the immensely successful Johann Strauss was entirely free from insecurity-not to mention the cases of Bruckner, Freud, Schnitzler, Hugo Wolf and the Crown Prince, who would take his own life along with that of his mistress at Mayerling in the rpmantic Vienna Woods before that fateful year was out. It is precisely this insc~.:urily incidentally which helps to explain why gifted

Introduction • Uow Not to VIew Vienna 1900

3

111dividuals often chose not to know each other when it was easily pilssible to do so, if there was a danger that their originality might be nunpromised-witness the case of Freud and Schnitzler. 7 This should lw emphasized because people often get the false impression that t•wrybody was on intimate terms with everyone else in Old Vienna, which was hardly the case. The point is, then, that Vienna was indt•l•d a cultural "hothouse," 8 as Carl Schorske insists, but the tendt•ncy of the gardeners was to let what blossomed wilt. With the pumdoxical truth captured in Franz Theodor Csokor's description or Vienna 1900 as a "flashy collapse" (farbenvolle Untergang) or Bmch 's "cheerful apocalypse" (frohliche Apokalypse) in mind we nn• ready to examine the factors which fertilized that garden. The first factor which must be emphasized is sheer size. Alt Wien was a huge metropolis with two million residents, the capital of an t'lllpire of fifty million. With such a large population it is simply ~latistically more probable that creative individuals would emerge IIH'I'C than in a little town, i.e., it would be mightily surprising if they d1d not. Between the mid-nineteenth century and 1914 Vienna grew hy leaps and bounds. In 1857 there were 476, 220 Viennese, by 11)10 there were 2, 031,420. 9 One noteworthy feature of the city's 1-'.mwth is that to this very day Vienna seems smaller than it actually 1~. In Vienna you never have the feeling of being in a large city that you do, say, in London, Paris, or New York (which are all, of course, hq.!,p;er cities than Vienna, but similar to Vienna as metropolises). Indeed, in Vienna one could almost say that perception of the size of tlw city varies inversely with the social class of the residents-the hitJ,her their class, the smaller the city would seem due to the conL'l'lllration of the upper classes in the city's center with its small scale. A second factor in explaining why Vienna became a great culllll"ill center is its multiple role in the Dual Monarchy as imperial L:apital, economic hub, and provincial capital as well as being the lur~cst city in the realm. As imperial capital it was the focus of imperial patronage of the arts as well as seat of the empire's administration-and we should not forget the old saying according to which Austria is not ruled but administered-so great was the challenge of unil"ying an empire of fifty million speaking eleven official languages, not to mention dialects, on the one hand, so Byzantine, the practices or the imperial bureaucracy, on the other, that to this day it has proven dil"fi~.:ult to form an accurate estimate of the achievement involved. l'"nlln the administrative point of view the judicial system, say, was a

4

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

highly efficient Zweckrational institution; yet, it is not wholly accidental that Franz Kafka's The Trial was written under the Dual Monarchy. Part of the explanation for this paradox lies in the schizoid origins of the Habsburg bureaucracy. 1° Founded as an instrument of radical social reform by the "revolutionary" Emperor Joseph II, the bureaucracy was re-oriented by the ultra reactionary Emperor Francis I in the direction of maintaining the status quo without ever being transformed into a genuine vehicle for reaction. Francis was so reactionary that he would not go so far as to abolish an existing revolutionary institution. The schizoid character of the bureaucracy, then, lay in its Josephine concept as it came into conflict with its Franciscan modus operandi. If Vienna's role as the business and financial center of the monarchy was for the requisite concentration of wealth for the support of cultural activities on a large scale, bourgeois imitation of aristocratic traditions of patronage of the arts-at least as far as the "baroque arts" of painting, architecture and music were concerned-insured that the bourgeois so employed their riches. From 1860 onwards as Carl Schorske has graphically and gripplingly delineated in his essay on Ringstrasse architecture, the newly dominant bourgeoisie sought to emulate Habsburg practices by stamping new public buildings: the university, the opera, the theater, parliament, the city hall, etc., as symbols of its civic aspirations.11 As provincial capital of Lower Austria Vienna housed its own bureaucracy in addition to the imperial administration. As the empire's largest city, Vienna required newspapers, theaters, cafes, and all that appertains to the elegance of modern municipal life. Naturally enough, the requirements of such an administrative and financial center included the demand for solid educational institutions. To that end, secondary education was completely overhauled already under the absolutist regime in the 1850s. The success of this reform, which produced the superb Viennese classical Gymnasium, was highly distressing to absolutism's liberal foes, whose ideal of Bildung it pre-empted. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the classical gymnasium: years spent translating Latin and Greek classics sensitized the Viennese pupil both to rhetorical structure and architectonics as well as to the nuances of style which make elegant self-expression possible. 12 However tedious this may have been for the pupils, this rigorous regimentation produced minds of a caliber seldom seen today outside of an English public school or a French lvn'l'. Indeed, it was and remains one of the great ironies of

Introduction • How Not to View Vienna 1900

5

11111dern culture that the very classical learning which produced so IIIHIIY brilliant thinkers and stylists wa~ so widely condemned by its 11Wil products. Be that as it may, rigorous classical education was uhsolutely crucial in making Alt Wien into the creative milieu that it was. This consideration of Vienna's multiple role in the Dual MonarL·hy leads us to the third factor in explaining how Vienna became a L'llltural center and a creative milieu. All of the functions we have nwntioned stimulated movement to and fro between the capital and t ht• provinces, a movement which already accounted for Vienna's polyglot character in the eighteenth century. But the provinces of t hl• Habsburg Empire were unique in that the Empire was studded with metropolitan cultural centers, some of which, like Prague, were older than Vienna itself but were nevertheless oriented to that city l'ur the reasons already mentioned. Prague, Budapest, Trieste, Cracow, l,aibach, Lemberg, Czernowitz, and a host of yet smaller urban cenlt't'S continually fed Vienna with talent 13 (only the role of Edinburgh 111 the development of London seems comparable to the relationship ur Vienna and, say, Prague). Moreover, unlike Berlin, Paris, or New York, there was a reciprocal character to the movement between the t·apital and these towns. An aspiring Viennese musician or scientist 111ight begin his career in, say, Czernowitz and then, once having t•stablished himself, return to Vienna. He would, however, bring something with him as he moved in each direction. The importance of this interplay has only begun to be rediscovered since the opening of the former Communist bloc and has hardly really begun to be l'Xplored in depth. Be that as it may, this to and fro movement of peoples speaking so many different languages accustomed the Viennese (in comparison, say, with the Berliner) to an extraordinary variety in diet, idiom, and cultural expression. However much the native Viennese might resent the Czech, the Dalmatian, the Magyar, or the Galician Jew, he was familiar with all of them. That familiarity bred a cosmopolitan wit--even if it were to have scurrilous, racist, und sardonic overtones. However, this was not the only sort of mi~ration to the Habsburg capital. For all of the reasons we have mentioned Vienna attracted foreigners such as Metternich, Leibniz, BrOcke, Meynert, Krafft-Ebing, Beethoven, H.S. Chamberlain to her us well as providing temporary residence for figures like Wagner, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mussolini-and the list could be extended indd'initely. Vienna would hardly have had such a magnetic effect

Introduction - How Not to View Vienna 1900

6

7

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

were it not for her relative economic prosperity after 1860 and especially after 1867, which certainly cannot be omitted from any account of its emergence as a cultural center. Huge fortunes were made overnight when the economy was liberalized in the wake of the Compromise with Hungary in 1867. The next set of features we must discuss in aid of explaining how Vienna became such a matrix for creativity is perhaps the most important: her talent-fostering traditions. It has rightly been pointed out that creativity depends upon excellence; however, excellence, in turn, depends upon the existence of practices and customs which further that excellence. We can begin with Vienna's excellence in medical science, which was already well established by 1848 and second to none by the tum of the century. In 1745 Maria Theresa invited a number of Dutch doctors to Vienna to teach medicine under supervision from their countryman, Gerard van Swieten. 14 Her successor, Joseph II, founded the General Hospital as an institution for providing state care for the populace. It was not only that a tradition of medical excellence was 100 years old in 1848, but also a tradition of liberal humanism as well-as Arthur Schnitzler, a doctor by training and the son of a doctor, never ceases to remind us in his writings, whose conflicts often turn upon the opposition between the values of a callous army officer and those of a kindly doctor. Nor is it accidental that a Freud should have emerged in Vienna-or for that matter that he should have encountered such stiff opposition there. Vienna's eminence in medicine, which is in fact the source of American medical excellence, was, like almost everything typically Viennese, Janus-faced. However, medical excellence went hand-in-hand with (1) a certain dogmatism, which manifested itself variously as "therapeutic nihilism", the refusal to prescribe cures for fear of perpetuating quack remedies and was itself not incompatible with (2) a certain callousness with regard to the treatment of patients. Further, it went hand-in-hand with (3) a certain intolerance with regard to innovation as was the case with the reception of Freud's views on the aetieology of hysteria and Semelweiss's suggestion that doctors could eliminate childbed fever by washing their hands between dissecting cadavers and assisting women in childbirth. Finally, (4) it went handin-hand with a certain professional elitism or clannishness, which munifested itself in America where Viennese-trained doctors led the 1 campaign to abolish midwifery. ~

We find a similar ambiguity in Vienna's musical heritage. Musical life has blossomed in Vienna at least since the mid-eighteenth cenlUry. Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, were great patrons of the musical arts. Joseph was especially concerned with the development of German-language opera, with which he hoped to sway popular taste away from the crudities of Italian commedia dell' arte farce, which had been well-ensconced in Vienna since the Renaissance. 16 Aristocratic families like the Lobkowitzes, the Kinskys, and, of course, Haydn's patrons, the Esterhazys, were also staunch patrons of music. Gottfried van Swieten, whose father, Gerard, we have alll~ady encountered, was not only a friend and patron of both Haydn nnd Mozart, but was largely responsible for the rediscovery of Bach and Handel. Such patrons of the arts were, as Arnold Schoenberg, ucver tired of pointing out, highly sophisticated connoisseurs, who were often talented performers in their own right. The Viennese musical tradition got a big boost from the French Revolution. In the reactionary realm of Emperor Francis I music, opera apart, was considered a safe art, uncontaminated by revolutionary ideology and incapable of criticizing the regime. No small part of Vienna's eminence in musical history, then, is tied to official fear of the word. Interest in music was essentially bound to censorship of the spoken and written word. This represented a blow to the Viennese, espel'ially as it meant a fairly strict censorship of the favorite Viennese popular entertainment, theater. However, the less-than-Draconian stringency of the censorship itself became an opportunity for gifted satirists, like the very Viennese Johann Nestroy, to try to fool the l'Cnsors and thus itself became a source of Viennese creativity. 17 To appreciate the full significance of the Viennese obsession with theater, drama, and the like is ultimately to tell a long story about the role of spectacle, symbol and ornament in Austrian life, which could hmdly even be summarized here. However, it is crucial to point out 1hat fascination with theater is but one aspect of a certain theatricality which was-and still is-part and parcel of Viennese life. This is 111ore relevant to our discussion of Vienna 1900 as a creative milieu than theater per se. Hardly anything is more important in the crucial task of understanding the uniquely Austrian and typically Viennese wuy of demarcating the public and the private. The story of how spectacle, symbol, and ornament became so central to Viennese cultural life takes us seemingly far afield, for it begins with the forcible rc-Catholicization of what is today east and southeast Austria. These

8

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

regions, including Vienna, had gone over to Protestantism a few scant years after Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. 18 In the religious wars of the Reformation the Habsburgs, like their Bavarian cousins, the Wittelsbachs, were wholly identified with Catholicism after 1608. Thus those distinctively Counter-Reformation styles, the Baroque and the Mannerist, became symbols of Habsburg authority. The imposing majesty of a Baroque cathedral or monastery, say, was a wholly political reminder of Habsburg political might to the dissenting. The same is true of the pageants on Church holidays such as Corpus Christi, which came to characterize public life, mitigating absolutism with spectacle. As the political significance faded away, the taste for spectacle did not; rather, it was transformed in an enormous variety of ways. The Baroque, then, at once established a standard of public taste and sowed the seeds of later social criticism by providing secularized dissenters with a natural target, ornament. At this very time the imperial theater provided Vienna with its first taste of "modern," secular culture and the meeting place for the aristocracy and the new bourgeois class, so anxious to legitimize itself by imitating the splendors of aristocratic style. Thus the art that the small haute bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century cultivated was principally "baroque": music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, in short pictorial and edifying, rather than verbal and critical (as it was in Protestant lands such as England, Sweden, or Holland). Growing concern for luxury evoked a critical moral (or better moralistic) response in the witty sermons of the court preacher Ulrich Megerle, alias Abraham a Santa Clara. For some forty years starting in the 1660s Abraham effectively turned the charm of secular culture, its very theatricality, against itself in hilariously devastating 19 sermons castigating the Viennese for their worldliness. Abraham is a particularly important figure for our story, for he marks the beginning of a Viennese rhetorical tradition and a mode of social criticism, which is distinguished by its efforts to turn Viennese obsession with style against itself. Abraham's rhetoric foreshadows Vienna's populist, anti-Semitic, fin de siecle mayor, Karl Lueger, in its exploitation of local idiom, its wit and emotional appeal, but also, paradoxically, Lueger's archenemy, Karl Kraus, in its resourceful efforts to turn the tables on the corrupt comically-although it must be hastily added that Kraus's values were hardly Abraham's. Abraham is a figure, then, who helps us to draw two crucial features of the

Introduction- How Not to View Vienna 1900

9

creative milieu that was Vienna into relief. First, by considering the case of Abraham a Santa Clara we begin to see how Viennese moral fervor could take on unusual forms as it would later in, say, Arnold Schoenberg's theory of harmony or a book of technical aphorisms which tries to get clear about just what you cannot put into words at all with the young Wittgenstein. Second, it helps us get a grasp of how it could be that both Lueger and Kraus, for all their differences, both manifest a single aspect of the Viennese heritage (albeit not in the same way or in the same sense). 20 However, there is yet more to say about the implications of the Habsburg forcible re-Catholicization of Vienna. Reflect for a moment upon the state of mind of the recently re-Catholicized Protestant. He had only recently learned that his conscience was the sole legitimate guide in moral matters as well as that all religious symbols and ceremonies were idolatrous. Now the state, as it were, forced him to commit idolatry, i.e., to act exactly counter to his convictionsY It is not difficult to see how cynicism about public life and a certain fatalistic alienation with respect to ethical matters could come to go hand in hand in Vienna. Thus we find fatalism and alienation lurking everywhere in that quintessentially Viennese art form, the Wienerlied: "wenn der Herrgott nicht will, niitzt es gar nix" (roughly: "if the Good Lord ain't willin' fergit it"). In effect, the forcible reCatholicization of Vienna and its environs amounted to a curious kind of semi-secularization, for religious beliefs became something ornamental and extraneous to public life. Over generations as the memory of Protestant Vienna faded, and even more so after the failure of the French Revolution as reaction set in and the possibilities for Enlightenment vanished, the temptations to cynicism grew even greater. Certainly, it was possible to capitulate and enjoy the show, or even contribute to its orchestration in the way that, say, a Makart or Strauss did, or you could go into a kind of inner "emigration" as some Biedermeier intellectuals did. 22 A third possibility was to attack the very role that spectacle had come to play in society. However, to take this path you had to beat the enemy at his own game. In effect the forcible re-Catholicization policy of the Habsburgs, strongly reinforced by the triumph of the forces of reaction in the Napoleonic wars, laid down premises upon which a good part of subsequent Austrian culture and counterculture was to rest. The events of the Counter-Reformation set in motion sociocultural force which later were capable of making, say, the Loos Haus am Michaelerplatz

10

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

with its unadorned facade, which so annoyed Francis Joseph that he ceased to use the entrance to the Imperial Palace opposite it, a symbolic commentary upon and confrontation with the mores and institutions of a whole society. Thus Georg Trakl could write in its guest book: "Countenance of a building: seriousness and silence of stone full, forcefully formed: to Adolf Loos in admiration." 23 Nor in this light is it altogether accidental that the work which most epitomizes the self-delusions of fin de siecle Viennese, Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, should prominently feature an aria which begins "Glticklich ist, wer vergiBt, was doch nicht zu andern ist" (roughly: "happiness is forgetting what cannot be changed"). The phrase "the whole society" should not pass without commentary here, for it has a special significance. It is crucial to emphasize that there was in Vienna at this time, unlike Berlin, a genuine popular culture with roots as far back as Mozart's day and even farther. Indeed, Joseph's concern to develop opera in German, which is responsible for Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Magic Flute, is part of a response to a demand which was growing up in what was then the suburbs of Vienna. Already at this time there was a tradition of local comedy, which was itself rooted in the Italian commedia dell' arte and Shakespeare. Already the conventions of mocking and fondly tampering with the "high culture" of the Burgtheater were altogether well-established in such pieces as Othellerl, Moor of Vienna. In Vienna: Legend and Reality Ilse Barea suggests that the cultural conundrums surrounding the plot of The Magic Flute, the odd juxtaposition of Tamino and Papageno, are at least a bit less puzzling when you realize that the work belongs to a locality, the Freihaus auf der Wieden, which was Vienna's biggest 24 tenement house and virtually a self-contained suburb. The myriad contradictions in Schikaneder's plot are easier to fathom when you realize that the work was written to appeal to the simple-minded, earthy sense of humor of the suburban bourgeoisie and yet, at the same time reflect their aspirations. In the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Raimund and later Johann Nestroy developed these traditions in different ways. However, lest we roam too far afield of our subject, the point of introducing all of this is to emphasize that Habsburg autocracy was not incompatible with a full cultural life for the whole populace. There was in Vienna already in the eighteenth century a kind of democratization of culture that one did not hnvc in, sny, lkl'lin until considerably later. Thus the ordinary

Introduction - How Not to View Vienna 1900

11

Viennese-in-the-street was no less appreciative of a well-turned phrase that his haut-bourgeois fellow townsmen. This too was a Viennese culture-fostering tradition. Clearly, it would be possible to go on listing historical examples of the way Viennese traditions nurtured competence in the populace which were conducive to creativity. Our aim here has not been to be comprehensive but to explain the kind of considerations which are relevant to understanding how it was that Vienna became the creative center that it was. In doing so we have only been able to scratch the surface. For example, we have said little about the groups that migrated to Vienna. Above all, we have not mentioned the Jews, whose contributions to Vienna at the height of her creative phase is way out of proportion to their numbers. Both as creative individuals and as patrons of the arts the Jews of Vienna played a very special role in making Vienna 1900 the kind of place it was. Indeed, one must agree with Steven Beller that Vienna's Jews provided both the talent and, what is even more crucial, the element of cultural leadership which accounted for the impact, i.e., the recognition and dissemination of radically new achievements at the turn of the century as Jewish artists and patrons of the arts forged links between tmdition and novelty. We refer here to the Jewish salons such as those of the Wertheimstein sisters. 25 What cannot be denied is that Viennn was never as interesting before or since as she was during the pcriud from 1860 to 1938 when Jews largely dominated the cultural scene/'' At this point, then, it is important to make explicit what is to be learned about creative milieux from the case of Vienna. The results will be surprising to many, for much of what made Vienna into a cultural center was less than desirable in itself. We forget at our peri I that Vienna was also the toughest and most thorough school of his I if'e in the mind of Adolf HitlerY Similarly, we forget at our peril that the obverse of Vienna's soft side, cafe society and Strauss waltzes, was the hard side represented by wretched housing for the poor and philistinism with respect to the arts on the part of the official bureaucratic intelligentsia. Forcible re-Catholicization, Byzantine bureaucracy, semi-efficient censorship and even hostility to innovation itself all contributed to producing an environment conducive to what we today with the wisdom of hindsight can recognize as creativity hut they are most unlikely candidates for cornerstones of policymaking on the part of those who would call a creative milieu into existence. Another set of factors such as size, position, wealth,

12

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Introduction - How Not to View Vienna 1900

secular atmosphere, and so 0n cannot be left out of the story. They are necessary but they are by no stretch of the imagination sufficient for explaining how Vienna became the "hothouse" of culture that she did one hundred years ago. When we tum to factors like excellence in education and culture-fostering traditions of patronage we are getting closer to what we seek, but in the end these factors too fail to be sufficient for explaining how the quality of intellectual life became so conducive to creativity. Lest we give up in despair, two factors need to be emphasized. First, the interplay of all the aforementioned factors, of conscious efforts and chance effects, is clearly just as important as any important single factor. The interplay of the factors is, after all, the milieu. Secondly, the Viennese idiosyncrasies of the implementation of policies (the mode of rule-following, in Wittgenstein's terms) with regard to factors such as censorship lent a peculiar character to those institutions and, thus, helped constitute the environment. If this is right, if there is a lesson to be learned from the case of Vienna, it has to be that creative milieux cannot be decreed into existence. They must grow, however inorganically. This is because a stimulating environment, as Arnold Toynbee recognized long ago, is a challenging one. However, what makes the environment challenging has to do with the way in which it both nourishes and fails to nourish its inhabitants, with the way in which it proportions its inhabitants to respond to it. However, this is a matter of the way it conditions us, not simply to do what we do, but how we do what we learn to do. Yet, this is precisely what is so devilishly difficult to capture. Paradoxically, it is often the outsider who can catch this when natives themselves cannot. Thus Americans have to tum to de Tocqueville when they seek to get a good glimpse of themselves. If there is anything to be learned about creativity from the case of Vienna, then, it seems to be the Hegelian truth that creativity is the product of the "cunning of reason." However, we should not be dismayed by that thought, for it is the very unpredictability connected with creativity which makes it so precious in the first place.

*

*

*

The conditions conducive to cultural creativity probably are always linked to ambiguity. So the case of Vienna should hardly be c.•xpcc.·tc.•d to he uniqul'. II is llHll'l' that the ambiguous character of

13

Viennese institutions is more pronounced than those elsewhere. The Viennese bourgeois form of what would later come to be called alienation was an alienation with society not an alienation from society as Carl Schorske has emphasized. The Viennese form of alienation was intimately tied to what was basically an uncritical fixation on culture with its extreme fondness for theatricality as well as an obsession with one's identity in a social situation where one's public persona often had precious little in common with one's private thoughts. What we have termed critical modernism was one peculiar Viennese response to this situation of being alienated with society, which seems to be the destiny of Western society. Arnold Schoenberg was a principal representative of the critical modernist attitude to culture and society. Thus it is to his cultural critique that we now tum to introduce the crucial notion of critical modernism.

1 The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer "You are beautiful, but dangerous too, ... you Capua of the mind .... Music all round, as when the choir of birds wakes the trees. One does not speak, one scarcely thinks, and feels what is half thought ... " -Franz Grillparzer, "Abschied von Wku" "Schon bist du, doch gefahrlich auch, ... Du Capua der Geister .... Wei thin Musik, wie wenn im Baum Der Vogel Chor erwachte, Man spricht nicht, denkt wohl etwa kaum Und fiihlt das Halb-Gedachte ... "

~

In his insightful essay "Arnold Schoenberg-A Perspective" Glenn Gould wrote, "The fact that people tend to make ... [a] distinctiun between the theories which Schoenberg tried to substantiate and his actual product as a composer haunted and tortured him throughout most of his life. He regarded himself simply as a composer, and he believed that whatever formulations he developed pertained only to his compositions." 1 While Gould is certainly basically right to insist that composition was always Schoenberg's primary concern-the composer insisted that he wanted nothing more than that a contented public would go home whistling his. melodies after a concert2-there is more to the matter than meets the eye. Schoenberg's writings, especially the critical essays in Style and Idea, are by no means to be passed over lightly as Gould might seem to intimate. In order to be the composer that he wanted to be in the cultural "hot15

16

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

house," 3 that was the Vienna in which he grew to maturity-we forget at our peril that much that we have come to see as typically "modern" in areas such as Jugendstil art and architecture, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, the poetry of Hofmannsthal and Trakl, the fiction of Musil and Brach and the painting of Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka, not to mention so much modern music, had its origins there-it was necessary for him to become a cultural critic4 as well as a composer-ironically in much the same way that Gould himself in some sense had to be an essayist to be the performer he wanted to be in North America during the latter half of the twentieth century. Like so many typically "modern" artists, Schoenberg had to struggle to make room for his demanding art in a society that was suffused with music. However, unlike so many of his colleagues, his efforts to create elbow-room for his compositions did not take the form of the manifesto with all the histrionics that often come with it, but was a form of cultural critique intended strictly to parallel his lifelong effort to compose "logically" by articulating both the logic of musical composition and its pendant the logic of music appreciation. Moreover, the fact that he composed out of Vienna's immensely rich musical tradition did much to determine the form that his cultural criticism would take. Finally, despite so many superficial dissimilarities, the very confusions with respect to the relationship between art and entertainment that we have in some sense inherited from fin de siecle Vienna and their continuity with the Hollywood-dominated cultural scene today in which French philosophers and American fundamentalist preachers become television stars; while American actors get elected president, make Schoenberg's reflections upon music, deeply embedded in fin de siecle Vienna as they are, as fresh and relevant now as when he wrote them. In fact Schoenberg's project to develop a genuine musical culture for Vienna was part of a more general campaign on the part of critical intellectuals there to come to grips with what Hermann Brach would later in his celebrated essay on Hofmannsthal and his times term the Viennese "value vacuum." By the "value vacuum" in Viennese society Broch meant that fascination, nay, obsession with novelty that comes with the simultaneous awareness that the old values whkh hav~..~ informed nrt have ceased to be compelling without huving been rcplur~..·d by anything solid. ln other words style for stylt•'s own snkc devoid or any morul dimension became the central

The Critical Modernism of 11 Viennese Composer

.17

111111\:iple of Viennese aestheticism's non-aesthetic. 5 At the same time m·-.lhctic considerations tended to dominate public life. Carl Schorske hu-. described the ensuing situation trenchantly and succinctly: I •.hew here in Europe, art for art's sake implied the withdrawal of its devotees from a ~m·inl class; in Vienna alone it claimed the allegiance of virtually a whole class, of which thl' artists were a part. The life of art became a substitute for the life of action. Indeed, a~ l'ivic action proved increasingly futile, art became almost a religion, the source of llll'tllling and the food of the souP

And, if art became religion, politics became theater, as the opportulllslk anti-Semite Karl Lueger came to dominate Viennese public llll' in the years from 1895 till his death in 1911. I •'m Schoenberg the Viennese "value vacuum" manifested itself 111 111usic in that sense of comfort and ease which makes people too lu:t.y to look actively for anything worthwhile at all. Long before 1\rm:h and Schoenberg, Franz Grillparzer had described Vienna us u "( 'apua of the mind," where sensual delights could easily corrupt tlw unwary intellectual in the same way that the delights or ( 'upuu undermined the morale of Hannibal's troops paving the wuy lu dch·nt in battle. 7 In a sense one could compare the role cultui·nl niticism in Schoenberg's project to construct a musical culturl' ror u .. udety that already had a musical culture of sorts to Kierkeguurd '11 tusk of introducing Christianity into "Christendom." 8 The unulogy with Kierkegaard is appropriate because the task at hand in both l'ascs was very much one of replacing a set of counterfeit values with genuine ones. In any case, both Schoenberg's music and his writings aimed at dutllenging that complacency. Consider the preface to his Treatise on Harmony of 1911: "it's easy to have a 'world view' if you only view what is pleasant and you don't deign to glance at the rest." 9 It is highly significant that he praises August Strindberg and Otto Weininger for resisting that temptation by presenting life as essen! ially problematic. 10 However, it is even more significant that he coul.d have appended the following dedication to the copy that he sent to Karl Kraus-and that he insisted on reprinting that dedication in the tribute the Innsbruck periodical Der Brenner paid to Kraus in its "Rundfrage iiber Karl Kraus" defending Kraus from defamation: "I have learned more from you than one can learn if one wants to remain independent." 11 Why was Kraus so important for Schoenberg? When we have the answer to this question we shall be in a position to gain the proper perspective on the

or

18

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

relationship between Schoenberg's compositions and his cultural criticism. Who was this Karl Kraus that Schoenberg so admired? 12 In 1899 Kraus (1874-1936) began his life's work of holding a mirror up to the dubious values that permeated Viennese high culture. In the periodical Die Fackel (The Torch), which he founded in that year and which he wrote alone in from 1911 till1936 Kraus subjected Viennese values to a ceaseless critique so scathing that it earned him the honor of becoming the object of a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Viennese press (with the exception of the Socialist Arbeiterzeitung). An altogether vile constellation of corrupt politicians, greedy entrepreneurs, and unscrupulous journalists as well as fickle aesthetes, Zionism, psychoanalysis, the horror of World War I, in short, everything that made the world of Vienna at the tum of the century an "inverted world," 13 came to be the object of his relentless attacks. The effectiveness of his polemic was assured by his capacity to wield language dazzlingly. He "analyzed" his opponents' character in a barrage of quotation and word play that ended up extracting the true meaning from their duplicitous, superficial, pretentious, and absurd assertions. His principle was that a person's moral values were intimately related to his typical modes of expression. Style, on this view, reflected not only the logical fallacies but also the very character of the writer-or the publisher. Indeed, the press itself became increasingly the object of his wrath for its readiness to present distortions of the news for a price. As a vigorous campaigner for the right to privacy in sexual matters he was wont simply to publish headlines condemning moral laxity and the depravity of homosexuals alongside advertisments for "massage" parlors and "escort services" from the back pages of the same papers. It was his task to bring that lack of integrity to the surface. He was so adept at doing so in an unforgettably hilarious way that before long in many cases it was merely necessary for him to quote miscreants in order to make his point. His success at clearly demarcating character from mere pretentiousness made him the center of a movement that he led along with his friend the pioneer functionalist architect, AdolfLoos (1870-1933), to restore a lost (some might prefer to say missing) integrity to public life. 14 For Loos the introduction of truly modern, truly functional architecture into Vienna demanded a rigorous critique of Viennese "good tasleY," sturting. with such simple matters as table manners and fashion. To this end he l'ditl'd ror n time il periodical called The Other, whose

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer

19

purpose was "to introduce Western culture into Austria" as its subtitle ran. If the challenge was great, the goal was simple in the words of Kraus: Adolf Laos and 1-he literally and I grammatically-have done nothing else than to show that there is a distinction between and an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all which provides culture with elbow room. The others, who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as urn. 15

In a culture so fascinated by ornamental "beauty" that it sought to embellish a butter knife by turning it into a Turkish dagger, an ash tray into a Prussian helmet, and a thermometer into a pistol, and in which every material tried to look like more than it was, Loos fought desperately to demonstrate that there is a fundamental distinction between art and utility, between functionality and fantasy, that we ignore this at the price of our incapacity to understand anything at all except superficially. In this sense, Kraus would later insist that World War I was happening precisely because we could not imagine it. 16 Viennese aestheticism in its fascination with decoration wus on the verge of criminality in its disavowal of fundamental values and, in the end, rationality and objectivity itself: "cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use." 17 Thus Loos proclaimed a revolution against revolution, not because he was a counterrevolutionary, but because the very term "revolution" had been co-opted into the mainstream of Viennese conventionality. In his writing as in his building, Loos demanded that scntpulous attention be paid to precisely that craftsmanship that conventional Viennese "good taste" tended to ignore. Kraus's and Loos's acutely critical attitude towards the Viennese tendency to ignore the moral dimension of art was shared by a small number of intensely serious intellectuals beyond their immediate circles. Its most intense expression in philosophy at the turn of the century was in the work of the frequently misunderstood Otto Weininger (1880-1903). 18 Weininger argued on the basis of Kant's categorical imperative that "logic and ethics are at bottom the same, they are no more than duty to oneself.... All ethics is possible only by means of the laws of logic, all logic is also ethical law. Not only virtue but also insight, not only sanctity but also wisdom is the task of men" (207). For Weininger it was precisely the narcissistic desirc to ignore the boundary between the Self and the world that characterizes immorality in the most basic sense. Just as passionately as

20

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Kraus or Loos, Weininger argued that rational behavior is always a "will to value," 19 which is nothing other than respect for the inherent limits, i.e., integrity in Nature and in ourselves. The most important echo of this character-centered way of thinking was to come from another philosopher inspired by Kraus and Weininger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus aimed at drawing the limits to language rigorously from within the very logical structures that make it possible, and that in tum with a view to discriminating between what can be meaningfully asserted in order to put an end once and for all to squabbles about what is morally worthwhile and simply letting 20 what is-or is not-worthwhile show itself as such. After 1912 even the painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), who had previously pandered to the tastes of wealthy young men for semi-pornographic "art", 21 tended to become increasingly aware that his true task as a an artist was to come to grips with the Viennese "value vacuum" by utilizing the drawing technique that he had taken over from Rodin for capturing the loneliness and alienation of those women who were reduced to sex objects in the Viennese "value vacuum." Although conventional cultural history has scarcely come to realize the fact, Austria's greatest poet, Georg Trakl, was also very much part of this group. Converted from aestheticism to Dostoevskian Christianity, Trakl confronted the "inverted world" in what he termed a godless, cursed century by turning its poetic language against itself in much the same way that Schiele's mature drawings turned pornography into powerful social criticism. Devising stunningly beautiful images with full command of all of the pictorial and musical resources that modem writers after Rimbaud and Baudelaire had at their disposal, he would suddenly transform them, not into other symbols, but into an experience of emptiness and nausea as if to parody the Gesamtkunstwerk. 22 His wholly unconventional syntax, once confused with primitivism and incompetence, later with Expressionist pathos, was in fact the ultimate critique of that inverted world that was Viennese society. The constellation of values that binds these figures together could rightly be called critical modernism. Here it is necessary to make a very important distinction: the rejection of naturalism and social commitment that was heralded by Hermann Bahr under the title of "die Modcrnc" has virtually nothing to do with "die Moderne" in the· sense or the project of Enlightenment. Indeed, there is much to he suid for the thesis that the Viennese "Modcrne," that irrational

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer

21

"nervous romanticism" or "mysticism of nerves" 23 and narcissistic glorification of ephemeral psychic states which the Viennese "Modeme" cultivated, is in fact more postmodem than modern. In that sense the Viennese "Moderne" has rightly been termed "conservative modemism," 24 since it pandered to rather than challenged, conventional "good taste." What, then, should we understand by "critical modernism"? In general the figures who can be subsumed under that category were all deeply disturbed by the way in which it was possible to "get high" on culture in Old Vienna. Critical modernism in its disparate forms was a strategy for combating the sort of narcissistic solipsism that was associated with the Viennese religion of art. The critical modernists considered that the aesthetes had encapsulated themselves into a dream world of subjective states (jrissons) with the help of a post-Wagnerian art that was as theatrical as it was monumental. If Viennese "modernism" anxiously awaited the "shock of the new," the critical modernists remained skeptical. They did not reject innovation in the arts or philosophy, rather they qucstiot1cd the value of novelty rigorously on the basis of an immanent crit iqur of the logical structures that made achievement in the various uris possible, Hermann Broch made an effort to capture what is csst•ntinl to this attitude toward culture in an essay of 1913, which was only published after his death, "Notes Towards a Systematic Aesthetics": All art... strives for the extension of its medium. That end must also be its fulfillment; it must give art all its methods .... The work of art can only follow "the lt~w or illlll'r necessity" .. .in that law lies [its] unity... balance... universality.... Style, the concise ~~x­ pression of balance, will [thus] be vanquished and with it ornament. The crystal evupo· rates. Color and tone exude from their own laws and become liberated .... Aesthetic formulae dissolve into ethereal spirituality and sail away. 25 ·

For Broch and the critical modernists reduction of art to its medium, poetry to words or painting to colors (Kandinsky) is nothing other than a radical reconsideration of the limits of expression rooted in concern for both the integrity of the artifact and that of the artist. It moves away from monumentality and theatricality in the direction of the miniature and the everyday. Critical modernism challenges the spectator, the listener, the audience to seek the beauty of poetry in the order and sounds of words, that of painting in the structure immanent in the very juxtaposition of colors, rather than in what words or colors represent. Thus critical modernists have had a way of being misunderstood or neglected, so demanding are their works.

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer

22

2.1

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

In fact they made art out of posing problems for their public rather than solving them. Thus the sense for problems in the references to Strindberg, Weininger, and above all Kraus in the preface to the Harmonielehre provides us with critical clues about Schoenberg, namely, that he numbered himself among the sober minority who were not content to participate in a "cheerful apocalypse" (jrohlichen Apokalypse, Brach) or a "flashy downfall" (jarbenvollen Untergang, Csokor) as were typical representatives of the Viennese "Moderne" such as Hermann Bahr and "Jung Wien" or even Arthur Schnitzler in some of his more frivolous moods. Like Kraus, he was not at all opposed to radical innovation in art; and like Kraus, he was not prepared to accept novelty for its own sake nor could he tolerate the Viennese penchant for confusing theater with theatricality. In their rejection of avant-gardism Kraus and Schoenberg were not anti-modernists but critical modernists. Indeed, there is much to be said for the thesis that our most abiding cultural legacy from Old Vienna is just this critical attitude to avant-gardism, and indeed to modernity itself that distinguishes, say, the great Austrian writers from Kraus and Robert Musil down to Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard. It is less that these writers want to reject modernity for postmodernity than that they want to understand what is healthy and what is sick in each in the sense that their prime concern is with the integrity of their culture-or the lack of it. Rather than confront the double standard on a broad "moralistic" front, they concentrate upon their own metier as a subject for immanent critique and the seemingly innocuous detail in which the devil lurks. In any case, from the start there was no doubt in anybody's mind in Vienna, including Arnold Schoenberg's, that Karl Kraus was the undisputed leader of the movement of moral protest of "critical modernism"against what Schoenberg termed laziness. To understand what is meant by that term more specifically we should take a look at the 1910 polemical essay, "Heine and the Consequences" which Kraus directed against his archenemy, Hermann Bahr and "Jung Wien." 26 In good Aristotelian fashion, Kraus seeks to characterize lack of ,culture (!JildunR or paideia) as arising from two extremes, which he ith.:ntilks as typkally German and french respectively. For the Germun\._ whu urc dcfl~nsclcss in the race of matter, art becomes a tool,

for the French, who are equally defenseless in the face of form, life· becomes something merely ornamental. The danger to Viennese culture after Heine (really after Bahr's sojourn in Paris) is mindless imitation of French literary models (in particular the feuilleton or cultural essay) which are simply foreign to the German language nnd can only be wielded by a few Germans of great talent like the l.hen much-admired Heine. To grasp the point of Kraus's attack we must get a clear idea of just what the feuilleton was all about, for in his eyes it was the epitome of everything morally dubious in Viennese culture. Carl Schorske, has given us the best description of the art of the feuilleton: The feuilleton writer, an artist in vignettes, worked with those discrete detuils and episodes so appealing to the nineteenth century's taste for the concrete. But he ~0\l(.thl to endow his material with color drawn from his imagination. The subjective responNt' of the reporter or critic to an experience, his feeling-tone, acquired clear primm:y ovr1 the matter of his discourse. To render a state of feeling became the mode of flliiiHIIul i111o1 a judgment. Accordingly, in the feuilleton writer's style, the adjectives ~·n~ulli·d lhr nouns, the personal tint virtually obliterated the contours of he object of disi'IIIIINt' 11

Schorske's description leaves no doubt about the problcnwtk 1111, lure of the very form. In a culture like Old Vienna's in which nrt Willi becoming a sort of religion the form could exercise un uttructioll that was as fatal as it was powerful upon young aesthetes thut confirmed them in their narcissism rather than challenged it.. J<'or KntuM the feuilleton was nothing more than a disastrous concatcnuliun uf' fact and fiction that encouraged clicheed thinking at the cxp~:nsc uf' clarity. But it is best to let Kraus speak for himself. The fcuillctonist's writing, he insisted, works out of the Latin temperament into the German view of art [Kull.l'lllll.\'dlllllll/1~ 1. And in this formation it offers the sweet and easy solution, it ornaments the Ocrmnn point with the French spirit. Thus in this perspicuous mish-mash of form and content, in which there is neither discord nor unity, it is the great legacy, from which journal isis have subsisted till the present day, a perilous mediator between art and life, parusilic on both, bard where he has to be but a messenger, reporting, where he should sing: the point lies in his eyes, where a color shines, blind to its meaning with joy at the colorful: literary utility's curse, the unliterary spirit. 28

The very form of the feuilleton required a theatrical talent for sentimentalizing the news by decorating it with sweet adjectival sonorities (we neglect the musical dimension of Kraus's polemic at our peril) which became an end in themselves, lulling the public to sleep at precisely the point where critical journalism should be waking it up. In failing to draw a sharp line between literature and journalism,

24

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

the feuilleton effectively distorted both by cultivating the cliche. Thus Karl Kraus was to find a mission in what Wittgenstein's architect friend, Paul Engelmann, referred to as "creatively separating" the spheres of fact and fancy 29 in what was certainly a prescient critique of the dangers that the mass media present in producing rather than reporting news. In Vienna the worst part of this was that the best paper, the Neue freie Presse, was the worst offender. It becarne the principal object of Kraus's scathing satire. Now we can begin to see the meaning of Schoenberg's dedication in Kraus's copy of the Harmonielehre. For everything that applied to Vienna's literary culture with respect to lack of self-knowledge was equally pertinent to its musical culture, which was equally ripe for Socratic interrogation. If Kraus was Vienna's literary Socrates, Schoenberg was its musical Socrates: he demanded from the Viennese public both in his music and in his writings that it examine such basic assumptions of its musical culture as, say, the notion that to be good music must "sound good." In order to grasp the scope of Schoenberg's task we shall do well to remind ourselves of the enormous role that Vienna has played in the development of rnusic. 30 So at the risk of being tedious it is necessary to present a superficial overview of the most important aspects of Vienna's musical past. It would hardly be an overstatement to assert that no single city has been more closely associated with the development of Western music than Vienna. Not even New York with the Metropolitan Opera, Broadway, and "Tin Pan Alley" or today's London, with its five superb orchestras, can rival Vienna in historical importance. Its musical prominence began with the socalled "First Viennese School" whose most celebrated members were Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Haydn perfected the sonata form and from it invented the two instrumental forms which have dominated classical music down to our time: the symphony and the string quartet. His greatest pupil, Beethoven, has rightly become the personification of "classical" music itself for his achievements in expanding and yet further developing his legacy from Haydn. Mozart's uncanny gift for inventing melodies unsurpassed in musical history gave the world a feast of instrumental sonorities and several magnificent operas: certainly opera could never be the same after him. Franz Schubert gave the emerging middle class its musical form, the ·t.:lassical Ued, which he turned out in prodigious quantities at breakneck speed. At mid-cen!llry Bn1hms settled in Vienna where his con-

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer

25

summate craftsmanship raised the great tradition of instrumental music of Haydn and Beethoven to new heights without in the least neglecting the vocal repertoire. His great rival in the 1880s and 1890s was Anton Bruckner, who had taken his cues from Richard Wagner, in developing a new and controversial symphonic style out of Wagner's operas. Wagner was himself a longtime resident of a Vienna, whose musical world paid him relatively little hommage during his lifetime. By the tum of the century, three great neo-romantic Wagnerians, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Hugo Wolf, graced the Viennese musical scene. Briefly, Schoenberg's Vienna may have been described as a cultural "hothouse" generally, but the phrase is nowhere more appropriate than with respect to music. However, the Viennese musical legacy does not stop there. No account of the Viennese contribution to our musical culture could leave out the most Viennese of forms: the waltz and the operetta. Indeed, it was by virtue of its highly developed popular culture, including musical "pop," that Vienna distinguished itself from, say, Berlin in the nineteenth century. What, then, about the waltz? The waltz is a sophisticated off.. spring of a German folk dance called the Landler from which il developed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It grl~W to become the rage of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. And a nl!l,l' it was! "Le congres danse, il ne marc he pas," people said. It is all too easy for us at the end of a century of jazz and rock to forget how revolutionary the waltz was. To us the waltz is at best delightfully old fashioned in it elegance, at worst, corny and stilted. But consider the picture we get of Johann Strauss, Sr. and the dance thut is perennially associated with his name from one German visitor (presumably from the more puritan north) to Vienna in the early nineteenth century: African and hot blooded, crazy with life ... restless, unbeautiful, passionatc ... hc exorcises the wicked devils from our bodies and he does it with waltzes ... capturing our senses in a sweet trance .... A dangerous power has· been given into the hands of this dark man ... that music stimulates our emotions directly, and not through the channel of lhought....Bachantically the couples waltz ... lust let loose. No God inhibits thcm. 11

The waltz could so shock because it was the first European dance performed by partners facing one another in an embrace. Moreover, the whirling motion made one light-headed and tipsy-all in all, waltzing was a genuine Dionysian experience in the Good Old Days. No wonder that the waltz could moves us emotionally without pass-

26

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

ing through the channels of thought. It was this aspect of the waltz that would lend the Viennese operetta its distinctively sentimental character, leading Schoenberg to call into question the Viennese willingness to rest content with conventionally "beautiful" music. Indeed, Wittgenstein was fond of pointing out that "beautiful" is the kind of word that people who do not know how to express aesthetic opinions properly use frequently (L+C, 3). But let us consider further the operetta as developed in Vienna at the hands of Johann Strauss, Jr. 32 Nothing more fully incorporates and confirms the carefree image we have of Old Vienna, so like Grillparzer' s image of Vienna as the "Capua of the mind," than the operetta. More than any other single cultural form it epitomized that Viennese delight in replacing thinking by feeling what is half thought that Grillparzer found so seductive in Vienna. Taking its point of departure from French domestic comedies by the likes of Sardou or Feydeau, the plot typically turns upon the dream of escaping from a tedious marriage of convenience into a magical world of romance without ever really breaking the marital bond, whose validity is sentimentally preserved in the proverbial happy ending. In this escapism Strauss's Viennese operetta (and that of his Viennese and Hungarian successors, Franz Lehar, Emmerich Kalman, Oscar Straus, et al. in Central Europe) is wholly different from Offenbach's opera buffa, in which the sentimental dimension is always strictly subordinated to an ironic and satirical treatment of the subject such that it becomes clear that the happy ending is only a stage device, a deus ex machina, i.e., exactly the opposite of what happens in real life. Little wonder that Kraus could salute Offenbach as the greatest satirist of all time. What could be a more perfect tactic for setting an "inverted world" on its feet. It is precisely the abiding influence of the operetta in our culture through its successor the American musical comedy 33 (the Czech, Rudolf Friml, and the Hungarian, Sigmund Romberg, as well as Americans like Vincent Youmans, Victor Herbert et al.-in fact you might call a history of this medium "From Batsi.e., Die Fledermaus-to Cats") and indirectly into the film (though not a composer of operettas, Max Steiner helped to imbue Hollywood with the spirit of Viennese operetta). It is precisely the unobserved continuity of Old Vienna with the fantasyland of American television which makes the critical modernist stance of a Kraus with · rcspe<.:l to the escapist superficialities of Viennese operetta so importunl fill' us today.

The Criticul Modernism of a Viennese Composer

27

However, these were by no means the only problematic aspects of Viennese musical culture at the turn of the century when Schoenberg entered the Viennese musical scene. Distressing as it may seem, Old Vienna had a deep-seated penchant for neglecting precisely those figures who contributed most to its image of urbanity and cultivation. Vienna's musicians were no exception. Their Viennese public hardly treated them like the geniuses that they were. One need merely consider the case Mozart, always happier in Prague, who was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave only to become the ubiquitous symbol of Vienna's musical grandeur and receive a magnificent memorial in a cemetery where his remains most certainly do not rest, and finally to suffer the final indignity of lending his name to an Austrian bon-bon, the "Mozart-Kugel." The poverty that haunted Schubert through most of his life is another case in point us is the widespread misunderstanding that Beethoven's "Eroku" and "Fidelio" met with among the Viennese public. Musical genius WIIN something that could only be appreciated ex post facto. Closer to our own time the German Richard Strauss wrolt• hili most famous operas with the darling of the Viennese litcrury rNinh· lishment, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but the fruits of thdr lnhorN were routinely premiered in Dresden and played in Munich hr fore they were heard in Vienna. Moreover, Viennese cl'itks l'IHtld at one time admire Bruckner as the most accomplished or~otnniNI of his day, while condemning his symphonies as forml~ss. The Viennese reception of Mahler presents us with a similur cusc of dubious discrimination, for Mahler could be at the sume lime the critic's darling when it came to conducting or as a witty und flamboyant celebrity-Mahler was the first conductor to stand rather than sit while conducting opera- but his compositions wert! largely ignored by the very public, including critics, which adulated the conductor. Schoenberg's printed dedication of the Harmonielehre to the recently deceased Mahler attests to his deep sensitivity to the older composer's lot: This dedication aimed at giving him a little pleasure while he lived. And with respccllll his work, his immortal compositions, it should express and attest that, whereas educated musicians ignore it with considered shrugs of the shoulders, indeed with contempt, that this work is revered by someone who perhaps understands something uhout music. 14

These examples could easily be multiplied, for the story by no means ends with Mahler as Schoenberg himself would know too well.

28

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

The problem we are discussing was not one that was restricted to ignorant audiences. We forget at our peril, for example, that even Wagner's Tristan took ages to be premiered in Vienna. Even, Eduard Hanslick, the father of modern music criticism, with whom Schoenberg's own cultural criticism can be constructively compared, for example, with respect to the rejection of "program" music or the primacy of structure over sound in musical aesthetics, was not immune to a narrow-mindedness in his absolute rejection of Bruckner and everything else that stemmed from Wagner. Henry Pleasants reports of the conservative Hanslick that He once confessed that he would rather see the complete works of Heinrich Schi.itz destroyed than Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem, the complete works of Palestrina than Mendelssohn's, all the concertos and sonatas of Bach than the quartets of Schumann 35 and Brahms, and all of Gluck than Don Giovanni, Fidelia, orDer Freischiitz.

This attitude too was part of the problem Schoenberg confronted: his audience was in some respect too well-informed in musical matters inasmuch as it had internalized very sophisticated views, which were, nevertheless, merely conventional. It knew the price of everything but the value of nothing in Oscar Wilde's words. But the story does not end there. Simultaneously with the elevation of musical composition from a craft as it was with Haydn to an art as it was with Beethoven, the musical public was transformed from a small coterie of wealthy nobility, who were often themselves highly gifted musicians, to a wide variety of enthusiasts, whose musical knowledge and talent varied immensely. Thus the concert hall supplanted the aristocratic salon as the locus of musical activity. 36 Music appreciation tended to become an increasingly passive activity-something Schoenberg the critic never ceased to polemicize against. By the end of the century the marriage of high culture with popular culture represented by the operetta helped to complete the transformation of music into a form of mere entertainment as opposed to learned connoisseurship as it had been in the age of Haydn and Mozart. Conceiving music essentially as entertainment meant little else than demanding that the music amuse by telling a story, i.e., by evoking mental images or sensations of, say, mystery, evil, grandeur, or passion as so much Romantic music did. This view of music as pandering to a cliched sense of sound by seeking to express our preconceptions of these experiences ran entirely counter to the approach thtll the mature Schoenberg would adopt to composition, for that reason h~ had to polcmici:t.c against it. But that is to run ahead.

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer

29.

The fact that many or most concertgoers were themselves musical novices led to new demands on the part of the public for information about the latest developments in music. Thus were born Viennese music criticism and the academic subject of music appreciation. They were the offspring of none other than the great enemy of Bruckner and Wagner, Eduard Hanslick, the music critic for the Neue freie Presse for a half century from 1855 till his death in 1904 and professor of musical aesthetics and the history of music at the University of Vienna from 1861. He was the very same Hanslick whom Wagner in his rage scathingly satirized in the figure of the pedantic Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg. The central question that Hanslick posed in this capacity was whether music was self-sufficient or not: was it merely a coherent assemblage of sounds that formed a language unto itself or was it essential to music that it "express" ideas or feelings? Did-or should-music symbolize something beyond itself, i.e., other than the ordering of sound itself? In his celebrated treatise on musical aesthetics On the Beallli· ful in Music (Vom Musikalischen-schonen) Hanslick argued against the Romantics that music is not a language of feelings, but a lo~il' of sound in motion. He offered highly persuasive examples of how tlw same tune can with equal ease be made to express joy or sadrwss, the sublime or the ridiculous. He admitted that music docs in fuel often evoke a powerful emotional response in the listener, hut IK· took this feature of music to be something secondary which music in fact shares with every other art. His opponents erred, he argued, by taking the examples that they would use to prove the that music is actually a language for expressing emotions from the vocal or operatic repertoire. In vocal music, Hanslick argued it was not possible to separate the emotional effect of the words from that of the music. Thus the question of the actual properties of music could only be answered on the basis of an analysis of instrumental music. Hanslick proceeded from the question: what is in fact the subject of a musical composition? He replied that a musical composition has no subject other that the "musical idea" of the piece. The theme or themes as they are articulated by "certain elementary laws, which govern both the human organism and the phenomena of sound" arc the real subject of a piece of music. The most important of these is the "primordial law of harmonic progression" by means of which themes are developed and transformcd." 17 Thus .Hanslick sees the composer much as Schoenberg and Gk~nn Gould will later, i.e., as a

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer 30

31

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

kind of logician whose operations cannot be adequately expressed in any metalanguage. By the very nature of the enterprise of composing music any attempt to describe composition must fail. The sort of "pre-established harmony" that listeners often experience between a musical composition and the feelings its sweet sonorities evoke has nothing to with the act of composition. Schoenberg was moved to become a cultural critic because he was convinced that it was only possible for him to compose with integrity if his audience understood what the musical autonomy of the composer was all about. It is hardly accidental that his major work in the field of musical culture criticism, not to say, pedagogy, is called Style and Ideanor is it wholly accidental that Schoenberg contrasts the two at a superficial level only to identify them ultimately in a more profound sense. Perhaps we should begin our considerations of Schoenberg himself by reviewing the problem of composition as the young Schoenberg saw it, for, as Gould insists, it is only then that we can make sense of his development from post-Wagnerism into his experiments in dissonance and finally into his development of the twelve-tone technique. Moreover, a consideration of the problems he faced as a composer will also help us to grasp why the composer involved himself so deeply in cultural criticism. In his own words Schoenberg's development was dominated by the need to come to grips with the "harmonic, formal, orchestral and emotional innovations" of Richard Wagner. 38 Thus in his first phase Schoenberg composed masterpieces such as Verkliirte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande in the language of late romantic tonality. However, he was growing increasingly aware, as Gould puts it, that "all that was left to this language was the abortive gesture, the deliberate slackening of discipline, the willingness, in fact, to do for an expressive reason the wrong thing." 39 It is a curious fact of history that the uninformed have often associated Schoenberg himself with this very slackening into empty gesture and "atmosphere" for its own sake, and not with the effort to understand the musical significance of dissonance in its own terms. 40 Nevertheless, in his second period he composed works such as Das Buch der hiingendenen Garten, Pierrot Lunaire and Erwartung. This period has sometimes been described as Schoenberg's effort to immerse himself completely into the neoi:omantic world of the /,ehensge.fUhl in his abandonment of harmony. Thl'l"l' is a ~.:crtain amount of truth in this; however, we should not

ignore the fundamental fact, as Gould emphasizes, 41 that Schoenberg's experiments with dissonance were first and foremost a matter of reflecting upon certain specifically musical problems, problems that had been widely discussed in the debates over the relative merits of Brahms and Bruckner in Central Europe, in the end the very problems that Wagner presented about the relationship of the intellectual and the instinctual in music, problems, among other things about the relationship between formal theory and compositional skill, that are every bit as pressing now as they were one hundred years ago. In the established theory of harmony, dissonance had to be derived from and resolved into tonality. With increasing daring Schoenberg challenged orthodox wisdom with remarkable success. However, this was anything but a leap into the musical irrationalism of effects for their own sake. Schoenberg was then as always principally preoccupied with the consequences of Tristan und Isolde for the logic of composition. How could dissonance be organized into a coherent atonality? (a word he strongly disliked because it seemed to suggest that mere dissonance, rnthl•r than its musical organization, was an end in itself). How could dissonance become the basis for musical composition? Schul'llhl'l")l., like Wagner was deeply concerned to develop a total work of nrt; however, much more than Wagner Schoenberg emphasized that the sense of totality had less to do with the effects that his musi~o: produces than with their organization into a coherent unity. 4l .I k wuntcd explicitly to develop a "logic" of dissonant composition: "My works are twelve-tone compositions, not twelve-tone compositions," 41 he insisted in criticizing the inventor of the twelve-tone technique, Josef Matthias Hauer, who was more interested, Schoenberg thought, in conveying feelings and transporting mysticism, Pythagorean and Chinese, with the technique he had developed. 44 Hauer was too much the avant-gardist, too much the "modernist," in the eyes of the critical modernist Schoenberg. The aim of composition was never to produce mere novelty in his eyes, rather it was the production of novelty that could be shown to be worthwhile according to the strictest canons of musical logic. He strove for an art that was really new, not to turn novelty into art. To do so he had to show how Wagnerian intensity could be legitimated in terms of Brahmsian craftsmanship. In order to grasp why Schoenberg so desperately sought nothing less than a moral renewal within music we must look at the way his music relates both to Richard Strauss, whom he damned with faint

32

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

praise by terming the only "revolutionary" of his time 45 and Gustav Mahler, whom he took to be its musical "saint." 46 Strauss was on any account the most gifted composer in the tradition of Wagner circa 1900. However, despite his enormous gifts Strauss remained content to compose in Wagner's monumental manner. In the words of one knowledgeable commentator, "Strauss committed himself fully to the business of making music perform a non-musical function: making it describe characters, emotions, events and philosophies."47 Ever the opportunist (even though he was by no means ungenerous to impecunious colleagues like the young Schoenberg), he made a huge fortune and an equally huge reputation doing so both for conservative Austrian Catholics in the context of the Salzburg Festival 48 and later under the Nazis. Taking over the most dubious aspects of the Gesamtkunstwerk, his music fully exploited music's power to move the emotions, to break down any critical distance that the listener might have to the composer, in short, to ornament the operatic text: ... he wanted everything to be "exact and realistic" insisting on real sheep and bulls for Clytemnestra's sacrifice [in Elektra ] .... Equally realistic in his music, he virtually took the role of words from Hofmannsthal. The tinkling of Clytemnestra's bracelets is heard in the percussion; when Chrysothemis speaks of a stormy night the storm rages in the orchestra; when the beasts are driven to sacrifice to noise of their hoofs makes the listener want to get out ofthe way .... The composer's mastery of his technical resources seemed superhuman.'9

And this precisely was the problem in Schoenberg's eyes: enormous talent and dubious character combined in Strauss to produce entertainment that confused itself with art. The technique and the sounds may have been different but the effect was not qualitatively different from that of the operetta. At first hearing Mahler's works would hardly appear different from those of Strauss in their Promethean post-Wagnerism. Nevertheless, appearances are often deceiving. In fact Schoenberg saw a world of difference between the opportunist Strauss and the "martyr" Mahler. 50 Despite the monumental proportions of works like the Song of the Earth its theme is really existential. Briefly, Mahler's enormous symphonies and song cycles for all their length and for all the instrumental, vocal, and dramatic resources they require remain existential works alternati~g between exhilaration and despair in the face of existence. They are the perfect expression of romantic heroism· isolated in a hostile society, i.e., of Mahler himself. Mahler

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer

33

was his whole life long a seeker after truth whatever the personal cost. He sought the answers to the question of the meaning of life and suffering wherever he might find them: in the music of Mozart and Wagner, as well as Anton Bruckner, in poetry as well as science, in the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. His music was his unique personal effort to express himself in sensuous, ornate harmonies and he succeeded in finding a highly original way to compose that was on that account forever closed to others. Mahler's legacy to Schoenberg lay in the dominance of "authenticity" over "convention" in matters of sound. He did not compose in order to produce pleasant sounds, but in order to express himself. It was precisely because Schoenberg believed in this so passionately that he had to blaze a new trail in composition. Future composers could only express themselves in music if they were prepared to submit themselves to the most rigorous tests of integrity and the most rigorous discipline. Mahler was an exception, for these things came naturally and spontaneously to him. He was an exception, who could produce an exceptional life's work. As with all authentic music, his innovative fantasy was the source of his musical ideas: Music is not merely another kind of amusement, but a musical poet's, a musical thinker's representation of musical ideas; these musical ideas must correspond to the laws of human logic. 50

Thus fantasy produces the themes, the musical ideas; whereas musical logic, the theory of harmony, provides the laws of its development. Thus the twelve tone system, far from reducing composition to a kind of mathematical algorithm, presented a new form of systematizing the fantasy rationally. It was a new and rigorous way of submitting oneself to the sort of musical discipline that makes real creativity in the form of Weiningerian disciplined self-criticism possible. In the end, the twelve tone system was for Schoenberg nothing less than a method for achieving what we have seen Paul Engelmann refer to as a "creative separation" of art from entertainment. In all of this it was Schoenberg's destiny to be deeply misunderstood by the public. In this he was hardly different from Karl Kraus or Wittgenstein, even less so from Adolf Loos, whose architecture was, and often still is, confused with the sterile formalism to which the Bauhaus tended, or the subtle Trakl, who is still continually taken for a junkie, a lunatic, a primitive, or an Expressionist by the uninformed. Throughout his life Schoenberg sought the logically ad-

The Critical Modernism of a Viennese Composer 34

35

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

equate form for the emancipation of dissonance, but was continually and unjustifiably reproached for reducing music to a mere matter of technique when nothing could have been further from his mind. In fact, his technique, like his theory of harmony was conceived as a method for laying bare the rules that are implicit in musical compositions. Like the later Wittgenstein, who insisted that the most rudimentary form of knowledge is a matter of following a rule where there are no explicit rules, only examples to be imitated, Schoenberg believed that formal rules were only part of compositional technique and hardly the most important part. Indeed, it is often overlooked that the function of theory for Schoenberg is to derive rules from compositional practicesY The most important "rules" of composition were those that the great composers, for him Bach, Handel, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner, applied without the need to reflect, simply on the basis of their compositional skill. Throughout his career he was deeply concerned with his identity, or rather with the problem of the "revolutionary" identity that had been cast upon him: his very successes made him lonely, because misunderstood. Far from being the abstract theorist-prophet of a new musical elite, Schoenberg was from the start, like Loos, very much part of the revolution against revolution, more concerned with restoring the handicraft dimension of music than with producing new 52 musical effects or dabbling in "theory" for its own sake. His writings on musical culture articulate the presuppositions of this attitude to music both with respect to composition and with respect to appreciation. Schoenberg no more wanted to make musical culture a matter of elite taste than Wittgenstein did philosophy into the private domain of a class of Oxbridge mandarins. Indeed, Wittgenstein's greatest hope was that we would someday develop a way of living that would make the need for his sort of philosophizing superfluous. Schoenberg simply wanted to hear the public whistling his tunes after the concert. Neither despised the man-in-the-street in the least. Indeed, both tended to criticize the mere technicians in their respective fields precisely on that account. Schoenberg was always quick to point out, for example, that it wa~ the public, rather than the critics who first really appreciated Wagner's gifts. Nor did he despise public taste. f
George Gershwin, not to mention Mozart, were naturally in step with the taste of uneducated people. These composers understood instinctively that music was first and foremost a matter of memory. That means nothing more than that a musical craftsman produces a memorable composition by repeating himself in a memorable manner. It was much more the pseudo-sophisticates among musicians and audience, who considered that music had to be written according to fixed conventional canons, that he attacked, not the man-inthe-street. Schoenberg's enemy was always, "ready made judgments, wrong and superficial ideas about music, musicians, and aesthetics."53 Schoenberg may have been an elitist, but he was not on that account a snob. Schoenberg was dissatisfied with popular music less on aesthetic than on moral grounds. To be content with sweet sonorities is simply to be uncritical with respect to music. For the Socratically-mindcd musician, to enjoy pop tunes is to enjoy the unexamined life, a life that is not worth living: To be musical means to have an ear in the musical sense, not in the natural SCIISl'. 1\ musical ear must have assimilated the tempered scale. And a singer who pmdurr~ natural pitches is unmusical, just as someone who acts "naturally" in the street 11111y hl' immoral. 54

In fact the stress on order, the role of memory and the duty, both on the part of the composer and the listener, to self-overcoming, briefly, the moral dimension in Schoenberg, is highly reminiscent of Olio Weininger's critique of aestheticism especially in relationship to the logical unity of a person's life, i.e., what we often refer to us thut person's identity. 55 Just as he considered music to be essentially u matter of logic and order, he considered that basis of musical understanding to be sound judgment. Thus the problem with popular music it that it is not conducive to waking the public up to what is really essential in music, rather it lulls listeners into daydreaming:% Conventionally "beautiful" music becomes memorable through its length and is thus equally conducive to daydreams at the expense of rertection. Genuine musical beauty is a matter of learning to appreciate repetition with variation in all of its complexityY Genuine musical culture is joy in grasping the unifying principle within the variations. Once we can do that his curious new music will sound just as sweet as Mozart, argued Schoenberg, in a behaviorist vein. To sum up: Schoenberg's own aim was to develop rigorously new ways of producing repetition with variation. lie found the cru-

36

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

cial clue for doing this in the Wagnerian Leitmotiv, a phrase of two measures "so to speak open on all four sides," that is, open to both horizontal and vertical development, as he put it. 58 The Leitmotiv provided Schoenberg with a mode of abrupt but rigorously logical transition and thus paved the way to the development of radically varied repetition in short pieces which could be simultaneously elaborated horizontally and vertically. Thus the six pieces for piano Op. 19 that announce his breakthrough to a new musical logic are, in toto, five minutes long. For all that, they require extraordinarily intense concentration on the part of the audience, for they are, nevertheless, monumental miniatures. In short, Schoenberg new musical logic demands active participation on the part of a public that has to strain itself to hear Schoenberg's musical ideas. The moral demand that he built into his music that audiences abandon the comfortable complacency that they had grown accustomed to in the course of the nineteenth century was nothing less than the flip side of the categorical imperative that was his total commitment to musical integrity. So, even if it is an error to approach Schoenberg's music via his writings, as Glenn Gould seems to suggest, those very Viennese writings remain, like Gould's own, among the most challenging reflections upon musical culture that have been produced in our time. *

*

*

As soon as we begin to look at the Viennese critique of modernism two figures jump out at us as its chief literary and philosophical representatives: Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger. The former is the subject of considerable international scholarly research, whereas the latter is, for the most part, dismissed as a crank. The fact that Schoenberg thought so highly of Weininger, commonly regarded as the source of all evil by feminists and anti-anti-Semites, will strike many readers as shocking-especially in the light of the penchant that right-wing extremists in France and Italy currently have for citing him in aid of their nefarious causes. Little wonder that he should be so difficult for us to approach. Yet, Schoenberg was neither a misogynist nor a racist. What did he see in Weininger that turns out to be so difficult for us? With th~ question in mind we shall turn our focus upon Weininger as the phil'osophical source of Viennese critical moth£rnism.

I

I

2 Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." -L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Hartley's assertion contains a truth whose importance for historians as well as for mere mortals can scarcely be overestimated, so difficult is it often to understand the ways of the past. And this is not merely a matter of the remote past as opposed to the more recent past: we are hardly surprised to find, say, ancient people radically different from ourselves; whereas our differences from our grandfathers are frequently incomprehensible to us in ways that we find difficult to accept. This is because they are at once so close to us inasmuch as we can clearly identify their mores and values and at the same time so far away that we reject those very values with a particular vehemence. For a homely example, think only of the venerable nineteenth-century institution, so avidly cultivated by, say, U.S. Senators (and amply attested to by the state of the Senate's carpets), tobacco chewing, and the concomitant spitting it involves, for a simple but nonetheless trenchant case of how differently-and incomprehensibly-things have been done in the recent past. There are many reasons why what is close to us should often be difficult to understand. Some relate to that form of cultural politics we normally refer to as "good taste," which prompts repugnance at, say, spitting in public; others relate to the sorts of moral considerations that lead us to reject, say, gladiatorial combat to the death as a form of sport; and still others relate to the sort of differences in intellectual habits that Thomas Kuhn has referred to under the rubric "paradigm shifts," although the three are considerably more difficult to distinguish strictly than we often think, at least at first glance. 1 "1'7

38

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

So it is with Otto Weininger. No figure in fin de siecle Vienna is farther removed than he from the taste, moral values, and intellectual orientations of contemporary intellectuals. If we need reminding of this, we need simply consider the following quotations from his work: "Woman has existence and meaning only inasmuch as man is sexual: her nature is bound to the phallus" (400) 2 or "the Jew as well as the woman lacks personality" (411). They are as barbarous to our ears today as spitting in public is barbarous to our eyes. The point of introducing Weininger this way is to emphasize how much our social attitudes and intellectual disciplines differ from his. The Holocaust causes us to read his alleged anti-Semitism and antifeminism in ways that differ wholly from his intentions. We are inclined to place emphases at points other than those that he did. More importantly with respect to our understanding of Vienna at the turn of the century, the disgust such remarks prompt in us tends to lead us in our well-intentioned desire to distance ourselves from them, to ignore the context in which they were uttered and therefore their meaning. 3 However, repugnance at the Nazi slaughter of the Jews and other "inferior" peoples is not our only source of problems in understanding Weininger's work in a way that approximates his own understanding of it. Paradigm shifts in our conceptions of scientific social reform, psychology, psychoanalysis, biological theory, and sexology as well stand between us and him. It is, of course, possible to respond with the question as to why we should bother with his intentions in the first place when it is the reception of his work rather than its genesis that is really so problematical. Two sorts of considerations indicate that we pay an extremely high price for rejecting a Weiningerian perspective on Weininger. The first is that apart from the reception of his work by half-educated, cretinous racists and sexists his work had a positive impact of significant proportions on the two most influential philosophers to emerge from Vienna in our time, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sir Karl Popper, 4 whose works have had anything but a malign effect upon our culture. It ought to be of some importance to establish just what it might have been in Weininger's thought that could have so impressed two such dazzlingly critical spirits. Second, we have the paradox that Weininger fully anticipates Carl Schorske's view of fin de siecle Vienna as a sex-obsessed society, whose very politics was thoroughly imbued ~ith narcissism. 5 This will be our point of departure in exploring Weininger's Sex and Character.

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

39

On Schorske's view, Vienna at the turn of the century became a cultural "hothouse" when the (German) liberals, who came into power in the Monarchy in 1867 and the city in 1860, lost it irretrievably in 1879 and 1895 respectively. They were unable to bring the spirit of constitutional politics to what was ostensibly a constitutional monarchy but anything but that in practice. Their failure opened the door to what Schorske terms "a politics of fantasy" whereby ideological wish-fulfillment, thinking typical of modern mass movements such as Georg von Schonerer's German nationalism, Karl Lueger's Christian Social movement, and Theodor Herzl's Zionism, came to replace the liberal moral and scientific approach to culture and society. The entry of the masses into the political arena was accompanied by a concomitant withdrawal of the younger generation of liberals from public life into a parallel hedonist fantasy world. The cultural manifestation of this flight from society was the aestheticism that Schnitzler so lovingly and painstakingly diagnosed as pathological in his contemporaries, which also typified the works of Hofmannsthal from his early world-weary lyricism to his later fairy-tale plays of social regeneration after the war, which would create a refuge from the real world for the alienated aesthete. The sensual antihistoricism of the Secessionist painters, especially Klimt, also typified this narcissistic withdrawal from society into the self. At every turn in Schorske's narrative, Nietzsche emerges as the irrationalist thinker who legitimated the flight from reason and responsibility to a dream world permeated with obsessive concern for selfgratification rather than social commitment. Political manifestations of the new, self-centered irrationalism amounted to nothing less than a collective solipsism or somnambulism and ultimately paved the way for National Socialism. It is a most curious fact that Schorske does not even mention Weininger in developing his thesis, for Weininger anticipates his views at every turn, albeit in a way that requires paying just such close attention to his text that our post-Holocaust perspective makes so very difficult to attain. Once we have recognized this point, we shall be in a position to lay out Weininger's problem in Sex and Character in a way that makes his reasoning intelligible without forcing his conclusions upon us. To do that we must take a close look at the closing chapter of Part I on "The Emancipated Women," the last chapter but one of Part II on "Judaism" in Sex and Character, and at his estimate of politics in chapter 10 of Part II. The posi-

40

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

tions Weininger takes in all of these places identifies him as just the sort of liberal whose demise, on Schorske's view, accounts for both the emergence of narcissism and the "politics of fantasy" in fin de siecle Vienna. A careful reading of Weininger's discussion of women's emancipation in the context of Vienna c. 1903 yields a picture that is hardly 6 that of a fanatical mi~ogynist but a particular sort of liberal. The most revealing point here emerges quickly if we examine what Weininger is affirming at the same time that he opposes emancipation: the idea that wives should have a voice in the running of their households equal to that of their husbands, the idea that women should be allowed freedom of movement without male companions even in "dubious" parts of town at night, and the right of women to live alone, to receive male visitors, to discuss sexual themes, or even to attend institutions of higher learning (80). There is no question of Weininger wanting to subordinate women to men. In fact, women ought to have the chance to develop whatever talents they possess even if, as Weininger wrongly thought, only a few were really intellectually equipped to do so. If it is unclear that these attitudes are in fact "enlightened," indeed, in their way "feminist," we need merely reflect a little upon the last two points on this list in the context of Vienna 1900. In regard to the discussion of sexual matters, Stefan Zweig emphasizes that young women of the upper middle class were deliberately left completely in the dark until marriage with respect to their sexuality. 7 The same is true of Weininger's attitude to higher education for women: we forget at our peril that this was a highly controversial, hotly debated topic in Old Vienna. Actually women entered Vienna University for the first time in 1897, the year before Weininger did. 8 So when Weininger wrote the number of female students was as small as general resentment against them was large, here again Weininger's position turns out to be radically "enlightened." Why, then, should he be so opposed to women receiving the vote? Weininger's main argument against women's emancipation in matters political is that the parti--ipation in political life will have a corrupting effect upon them because it involves participating in a mass movement (87). Weininger's insistence that the underlying explanation for what he takes to t\e an unnatural desire on the part of women tn possess the inner life of the male can only be explained in terms ot' !/.t'lll'lic inh.•riority hns tcn,kd to make "critical" readers consider

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

41

him a strong advocate of patriarchy, which he in fact clearly and explicitly rejects when he rejects the family as an ideal (457-59). Actually Weininger's reason for wanting to keep women out of politics is that he takes politics itself to be corrupting of all that is rational and worthwhile in human nature. In the best traditions of paternalistic progressivism, he wants to save women from themselves. Although this may not be very flattering to women, it is far from misogyny. It is highly significant that Weininger's all too short discussion of politics in Sex and Character is embodied in his discussion of prostitution: "Every politician is somehow a tribune of the people and in the tribune there lurks an element of prostitution" (299-300). The power of the politician is fundamentally the seductive force of emotional rhetoric, in fact a kind of lying, which distinguishes the "man of action" from the true "genius" (to employ Weininger's expression), who is always a rational and moral figure. Politicians, for whom Napoleon remains emblematic, are speculators and actors, whnsl' seductive rhetoric at once constitutes the mob and depends on it for his existence. Weininger's rejection of political emancipation for women is hardly what it seems to be, at least on his own view of thr matter (whose relative merits, of course, are themselves dchutnhlc) for he is, in fact, arguing that involvement in this form of scdm:tion can only further debase rather than liberate women. We shall need to spell out the contours of his whole theory to see why he makes this claim. In short, politics is a disaster for human beings as such: it has only debased men and promises to be even more disastrous for women (and through them for society generally as we shall sec). It is for this reason that Weininger considers his epoch to be "Jewish": "The spirit of modernity is Jewish wherever you examine it. Sexuality is affirmed and contemporary species-ethics sings a hymn to sexual intercourse" (441). Society has become thoroughly imbued with erotic drives. These drives have come to dominate culture and thought as well as politics as the spirit of conformity, the party mentality, replaces the critical spirit. "Judaism," as Weininger understands it, is above all a cast of mind, as opposed to a racial trait (406); although it is, Weininger thinks, a matter of sociological fact that the "Jewish" attitude is most widely spread among persons of Jewish extraction (something that makes his individual assertions often confusing and the question of falsification complex), which is a possibility for any human being. "Judaism" in this sense entails

42

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

rejecting reason and all forms of delayed gratification, not on the basis of some sort of choice but simply by giving way to our instincts for pleasure and comfort in personal matters (hedonism, narcissism), social matters (mass politics, anarchism, symbolist, or "decadent" aestheticism), and intellectual matters (Machian positivism, capitalism, Marxism, and a general fascination with technique). The primary political manifestation of this unhealthy mentality is to be found in the conformist anti-Semitism of the Christian Socials (418). Curiously Weininger never mentions German nationalism in this or any other context where he could easily have done so had he wanted to-another indication that he was hardly the racist fanatic that he is often portrayed to be. Unlike Schorske, but curiously like Herzl, he takes Zionism as an idealistic challenge to which Jews must rise, although he doubts whether this is possible given the current state of the Jews. Be that as it may, however, the point here is that "Judaism," which the convinced assimilationist Weininger (419) finds so opprobrious, is a conformist mentality that is thoroughly imbued with eroticism and actually is an exact parallel to the narcissism of, say, the Secession artists. Weininger's demand for sexual restraint, to transcend the "coffeehouse concept of the Dionysian," the "coitus culture" (443) as he puts it, which is nothing other than his rejection of "Judaism," is in fact a plea for reason, which there is every reason to identify with liberal individualism and the liberal rationalist critique of the plight of man in mass society of the sort that we find with, say, Karl Jaspers or Gabriel Marcel later in the interwar period. Viewed from this perspective, Weininger the social critic and reformer finally comes into sight; for we are now in a position to see why, say, he should be so committed both to reform of the laws against what we would today term "victimless" crime such as homosexuality and prostitution (59-61) and generally to developing a theory of human nature according to which these individual differences would be seen as "normal." Moreover taking the liberal view of Weininger, we also come to grasp why he could so enthusiastically endorse Binet's views about the differences in intelligence between children as the basis for a reform of educational practices (69).9 Indeed it is against the background of what were then taken to be liberal and enlightened programs for social reform that Weininger wrote Sex and Character as a generalization, articulation, sympathdic critiq(.c, and philosophical justification of programs

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

43

like those of Cesare Lombroso and Magnus Hirschfeld for enlightened social reform through the application of scientific principles to social problems. 10 In fact, Sex and Character is an ingenious, often insightful commentary synthesizing an enormous amount of material from several disparate literatures (i.e., biological, psychological, philosophical, literary, and, such as it was, sociological) relevance to the problem of sexual differences in all its aspects. If we want to understand, for example, why Sex and Character had to be a two-part inquiry with a biological and psychological preliminary part and a logical and philosophical second part, we must examine how Weininger sought critically to expand upon the programs for social reform of contemporary criminologists and sexologists. Let us begin with a consideration of the options open to the opponents of laws against homosexuality, then the premise for brutal discrimination and blackmail in the German-speaking world at the turn of the century. 11 How could one argue that these Jaws Wt.'rc unreasonable? The laws in question were based on assumptions nhoul what is natural that were ultimately rooted in moral theology; tlu:y condemned all sexual activity outside of marriage as, not si111ply impermissible, but "unnatural." If it could be demonstrated thut homosexuality was a natural proclivity, then the force of arguments against it would dissolve. It was, therefore, to the nascent science ol' biology that social reformers turned in the hope of finding persuasive arguments for the natural character of homosexual instincts (as indeed defenders of gay rights still often do). What does bio.logy offer that might help here? There are two possibilities for a "natural" account of homosexuality according to biological theory: either it is inherited or it is acquired from the environment. The latter, then as now, has not been a favorite candidate for the explanation of homosexuality by homosexuals themselves for reasons that are not hard to fathom. If homosexuality is an acquired trait, it ought to be possible to "deprogram" homosexuals by a radical change of environment. And this indeed was suggested in Weininger's Vienna by one doctor, who hypnotized homosexuals to suggest that sexually "normal" behavior is what they really desired and then sent them off to brothels to induce "normal" sexual activity behaviorally (59-60). One can well imagine the reason why this solution was hardly welcomed by homosexuals (it was better, of course, than castrating them, which another German doctor suggested as a solution to the problem in 1900 to Weininger's shock).

44

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

The alternative biological account was much preferred for if homosexuality is inherited like, say, the color of our eyes or a disposition to gout, there can be no question either of changing a "natural" behavior pattern or of morally condemning it. So the hereditary explanation was very much favored by homosexual liberation groups such as Magnus Hirschfeld's "Scientific-Humanitarian Committee" in Berlin. However in the absence of the notion of dominant and recessive traits, any hereditary explanation of homosexuality would founder on the fact that homosexuals are seldom the children of homosexuals. The enlightened approach to the subject in Weininger's day took its cues from Darwin in supposing that variation rather than uniformity is the rule in nature and challenged stereotyped notions of the sexual roles by suggesting that all creatures were in fact bisexual or "sexually intermediate." Weininger's infamous theory of plasms presented in chapter 2 of Sex and Character is a speculative attempt to specify that a scientific account of sexual differentiation would have to explain heredity differences on the basis of a mixture of masculine and feminine fluids, which can vary in all sorts of proportions. 12 Because gross anatomical differences from the start were ruled out as evidence of true sexual nature of an individual, vestiges of the opposites sex, such as female facial hair and male nipples, having provided the crucial anatomical evidence for bisexuality in the first place, the notion that sexual differentiation could be accounted for on such a biochemical basis was, however misguided, anything but implausible then as the author of the article on "Protoplasm" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica noted, explicitly mentioning Weininger's conjectureY So we have an account of how Weininger came to the set of problems that preoccupied him in the first part of his study, which purports to account for the causes and consequences of sexual differentiation empirically. His opening chapter treats of the notion that individuals are intermediate forms. The second chapter sets forth his conjecture with respect to the two types of plasm. The third is an updating of Schopenhauer's account of sexual attraction in terms of a law of the attraction of opposites that the mother of American feminism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, herself found overstated but by no means absurd. 14 The fourth chapter explains homosexuality as the result of a plasmic imbalance, whose result is a person who is anatomically male but biochemically and also psychologically female (the opposite is not possil)lc Weininger asserts for reasons cu-

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

45

riously not articulated in the text-something most unusual in Weininger-but crucial to Weininger's whole program). In the fifth chapter, Weininger draws the social consequences of bisexuality such as the legalization of homosexuality and educational reform and his characterological program for psychology generally. It is at this point that his speculations begin to transcend the limits of biology and psychology as we know them and to spill over into an account of character and a-fortiori moral theory, a move that he will justify in Part II of the book. In the final chapter of Part I, we find Weininger's analysis of the fundamental error of the feminist movement, and we find ourselves squarely confronted with what, to say the very least, is a normative account of the perversity of woman's rights. We have clearly left the world of science, even speculative science, and have entered the moral sphere. Part II attempts to justify this move methodologically on the basis of a critique of contemporary accounts of psychology. Before discussing the relationship of the two parts of Weininger's work, it will do well to look at the main source of his view of woman and indeed his very strategy for dealing with the problem of sexual differentiation and all that it implies, Cesare Lombroso's The Female Offender 15 for nearly everything that people have found objectionable in Weininger is to be found already in embryo as it were in the work of this then controversial scientist and liberal social reformer. Lombroso hoped to put criminology on a scientific footing with the help of ideas drawn from biology and mathematics. He wanted to establish a distinction between two types of criminality, one that was prompted by social inequalities and injustices and another that was the result of an inherited disposition to crime. His aim was prison reform. Lombroso was well aware that prisons have a way of becoming universities for the study of crime. Since he was a Lamarckian, he believed that acquired characteristics could become permanent and transmittable. For that reason he was anxious to separate criminals moved to transgress the law by their desperate situation in society (e.g., "anarchists") and therefore capable of being rehabilitated from those degenerates whose constitution predestined them for antisocial behavior. How could he make this distinction systematically? He took his cues in answering this question from Quetelet, who had recently discovered that in any given group a given characteristic, let us say the height of males at Harvard, will be distributed along a bell-shaped curve. 16 On this basis and inter-

46

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

preted according to the principle that there is a rigorous parallel between mind and body, Lombroso inferred that normality was to be determined on the basis of bodily dimension, especially the size of the head. Further Lombroso's blind faith in the bell-shaped curve to illuminate every aspect of human nature led him to insist that great talent, like great depravity, was a deviant, because rare, phenomenon (an idea that would influence Freud's attitude to genius and ultimately determine many reactions to Weininger himself, after his suicide but paradoxically one that Weininger himself roundly rejected). This is not the place to tell the story of the development of "criminal anthropology," "anthropometry" and eugenics generally; suffice it to say that it was a concatenation of what we today can recognize as the most dubious ideas and assumptions of nineteenthcentury science but, nonetheless, then taken to be a most "progressive," if highly controversial, program for social reform. 17 One central problem with Lombroso (and indeed with much of nineteenth-century liberalism and science) is that in the end he postulated that "normalcy" was principally a property of white, European, liberal males (a point hardly discussed by Lombroso's critics). Not unsurprisingly given this assumption, women presented Lombroso with a number of problems. For example he could not understand how they could combine contradictory moral qualities such as pity and cruelty. Similarly woman's tendency to lie was also a puzzle. In general women were more excitable, less inhibited, and more vain than men. Above all there was drastically less criminality among women than among men than there should be according to his canons of "normalcy" and that required an explanation. It came in the form of his study of the female offender. The explanation of the conundrums that woman had presented to him was to be found in the fact that woman was nothing less than a male whose development was arrested. This "triumph of observation," as Lombroso was wont to refer to it, was derivable in purely phenomenal terms: woman was physically smaller in every respect than man so it followed that she was intellectually "smaller" as well. Woman's smaller sense organs explained her intellectual inferiority according to the sound empiricist principle that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. Inferior sense perception accounted for a defective capacity to universalize and therefore for women's incapacity to perform basic logical functions. The concomitant iJ1consistcncy, on thc)iasis of which one could easily rec-

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

47

~ !

oncile her contradictory characteristics such as mercy and cruelty, resulted in an atrophied sense of self. Weakness of intellect explained weakness of character. In this context, for example, Lombroso listed eight reasons why women lie. Among the reasons why women lie are sexual factors such as menstruation, competition for male attention, and the obligation to conceal "the facts of life" from her offspring. All of this recurs in Weininger, who did not have to invent the idea that woman was basically irrational but found it in a program for social reform, whose scientific credentials were increasingly. under fire from the mid-nineties, but whose liberal credentials were impeccable. But Lombroso's importance for Weininger does not end there. Lombroso linked this moral trait to the fact that the female's sex organs were larger than those of the male and thus became the first to link sex to character. Her larger sex organs determined (that favorite word of nineteenth-century popularizers of science) that woman was dominated by her sexuality in a way that man was not and thus more prone to lying than the male. Further, if intelligence varied inversely with reproductive fecundity, as Lombroso thought it did, woman's larger sex organs also explained why she was less prone to crime, that is, because female crime was a halfhearted affair, "victimless crime" as we would call it, namely, prostitution, which was thus "natural" to women. In the end, women cannot control their own sexuality and tum by nature to prostitution. If prostitution was indeed a social problem only the customers, men, could solve it. Woman's decadence was a product of masculine exploitation of her maternal instincts. Woman's deprivation was a function of man's character-or lack of it-and with that we have arrived at the point of departure for a study of sex and character. Males were the villains of the piece in more that one sense: first they take advantage of women; second they build up a myth around woman's saintliness to attain yet more pleasure in possessing her. Men were the real criminals because they could amend their conduct in ways that women could not. The only rational way of coping with prostitution was prohibition and, indeed, the moral stamina required to quit was precisely that required by the temperance movement, for alcohol was then seen to be the causal agent, weakening the male will. The argument for abstinence was identical in each case. We are now in a position to return to Weininger. On the basis of Weininger's almost Manichean interpretation of Kant's ethics all

.!I II

I~ l,i

48

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

sexual intercourse, indeed, all sexual activity, is irrational and immoral: for personality is used as a means and not as an end (even though we cannot hope ever to achieve total chastity given the dualistic constitution of human individuals-as discombobulating as it may seem, Weininger's position here seems to anticipate the views of radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon who consider intercourse intrinsically rapine). Weininger's problem was to criticize Lombroso by constructively providing an updated theoretical account of the nature of male and female sexuality, which would explain both woman's determined behavior, not as that of an inferior male but as differently natural from the male, and the moral cowardice of the males who hold women in subjugation by copulating with them, as well as providing a rigorous account of the foundations of moral obligation, which would anchor Lombroso's liberalism in a critical theory of rationality. Indeed, Weininger's mentor, Friedrich Jodl, rightly drew attention to the ingenuity with which Weininger mustered the most varied literary, scientific, and philosophical sources in illuminating these problems.18 We can now appreciate Weininger's questions in Part II of Sex and Character without endorsing his answers to them. He saw, as contemporary sexologists did not, that the notion of universal bisexuality presented as well as solved problems. True it could in good Darwinian fashion explain the broad variation in human personality, but it also implied that "male" and "female" required defining anew, that is, if everybody is really an "intermediate stage," we must ask, between what? In short the efforts of Havelock Ellis and Hirschfeld to overcome cliched notions of masculinity and femininity by insisting that male and female do not refer to individuals whose characteristics are universally and necessarily fixed landed them with the problem of how these terms should actually be understood. In this they-and Weininger following them-were consciously rejecting Lombroso's notion of "normalcy." But if there are no males and females in the strict sense, what can it mean to assert that individuals are bisexual? That term would in fact be meaningless until an abstract theoretical account of "male" and "female" was provided. This is the goal of Weininger's characterology. His vehicle for attaining it was the Ideal Type, which does not refer to a Platonic essence, but tq what he termed idealized limiting cases that establish a spectrum :\long which the significance of empirical data can be evaluated for

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

49

their cultural significance, that is, to what we would today call "models."19 He was convinced as all critical theorists before and after him that only an idealized account of human behavior could possess a genuine critical potential, that would be capable of determining what is wrong with current mores on the basis of a universal and necessary account of rational behavior. Thus there is every reason to believe that the tragedy in Weininger's work was that in combating one set of stereotypes, that is, the Virile Male and the Devoted Wife, he created another, that is, the omnicompetent Male and the irrational Female. In any case the construction of such ideal types of rational masculinity (which rejects sexuality in all its forms) and of arational (because wholly sexual) femininity and irrational (because incapable of rejecting sexuality) masculinity (i.e., "Judaism") was the program for Part II of Sex and Character. Part II of Sex and Character articulates the normative ideal types (different in content from but definitely related to Max Weber's nwthods for dealing with social phenomena) with which he will redcl"int• masculinity and femininity in such a way as to have content hut permit of the wide variations that the empirical science of scxolo~y have turned up. It would require too much space here to describe the program of Part II in detail but a sketch of its contents is in ordt•r. It is important to point out here that, if the account we have ~ivcn of the origins of Weininger's program in Lombroso is correct, he is, in fact, trying to explain how a critical version of Lombroso would look. So he is less arguing to conclusions as trying to establish how the Lombrosan picture of social reform fits in with science, philosophy, and social critique. The opening chapters deal with the relationship between masculine and feminine sexuality as they relate to the typically masculine and feminine forms of consciousness (distinct and indistinct forms of perception). This is followed by a discussion of the nature of talent and genius that has the force of driving a wedge between rootless aestheticism and true genius, which is always a form of moral creativity. Weininger then articulates the extreme types within the ideal type Woman: the Mother and the Prostitute, with the ironic (and Krausian) emphasis on the notion that the latter is nobler because it is more natural. The final chapters of Part II present the cosmic conclusions of the work, that is, they set out a view of the ways in which the sexual elements in human nature account for good and evil as we11 as mediocrity in society. This view can only be termed Manichean for its utter rejection of

50

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

sensuality. If Lombroso gave him his cues about the basic character of male and female from which he would generalize, Nietzsche, H. S. Chamberlain, Freud, and Kant provided him with the conceptual apparatus he needed to provide the philosophical foundation for Lombroso's program for social reform that he sought. From Nietzsche, Weininger took the notion that conventional mores merely reflect the self-interest of the mediocre majority (what Nietzsche terms a "slave morality" 20 ). They therefore are irrational despite their claim to the contrary. As such they stand in desperate need of critique. The corollary of this view for psychology and sociology is that no empirical study of society could ever be of much help in normative questions, that is, because social relations as they exist stand in need of a radical critique. In short, Weininger accepted both Nietzsche's critique of conventional values and his challenge to develop a science of psychology with genuine depth, capable of grasping "life" in its tragic dimension, but, like Jtirgen Habermas and Lawrence Kohlberg later, he was convinced that only the Kantian account of rationality, a critical theory, was equal to the task of providing the foundations for a genuinely moral psychologyY From Chamberlain he took the view that the cast of mind that thrives on the pseudomorality of conformism and social role-playing, accepting sexual stereotypes and tolerant of the double standard, should be termed "Jewish" (405-7)-a move that was clearly intended to be provocative but in fact has turned out to be a great cause of confusion about what he was actually claiming, as we shall see. From Freud, whose work he was the first to praise outside of the inner circle of adepts (358), 22 he took over the notion that rigidly held conventional values, which stipulated the suppression of sexual instinct, caused mental illness. Weininger went on to stipulate that hysteria was the typical fate of women in a society that required that she suppress her instincts and conform to a set of social values that destroy her. No less than Freud, Weininger wanted to illuminate the etiology of hysteria but more as a moral than a medical problem (without in the least ignoring its medical aspects). From Kant's moral philosophy, Weininger took the conceptual scheme that identified instinct (the ideal type Woman) as irrational, confor~ism as pseudomorality (i.e., what Kant terms heteronomy, acting tlut of duty, say, undp some form of compulsion, as opposed

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

51

to being motivated by duty, which Weininger terms Jewish), and rigorous logical self-examination and respect for personality as an end in itself and never a mere means ("genius"-234) as the criterion of rationality (210-11). In the end the whole of Sex and Character is an effort to provide a critical theory of sexuality by giving Kantian foundations to Lombroso's view of actual and ideal relationship between the sexes. This is not to say that Weininger accepted Lombroso uncritically. His theory of plasms, for example, would show that deviance from conventionally accepted standards was by no means "unnatural" as it was for Lombroso. His aim in all of this, which first becomes clear when one follows the intricacies of his elaborate commentary on the extant literature concerning sexual differentiation in all its aspects, was less to produce armchair speculation than a heuristic, a model, which would help to orient social reformers, medical researchers, psychiatrists, and other social scientists (i.e., mutatis mutandis, more or less what Habermas intended with his theory of communicative action). It is a model that in the end was of no use because the Lombrosan "paradigm" of social reform with its emphasis on mechanism and determinism which respect to female behavior, like the pre-Mendelian view of genetics that Weininger worked with, as well as the pre-Freudian view of psychodynamics have all been rejected as a result of subsequent developments, i.e., "paradigm changes," in those disciplines whose current sophistication make Weininger look unspeakably crude when he is in fact a cut above the run of the mill figures of his time. To see this we need to reflect on his reasons for being so enthusiastic about Freud. It was not mere chance that led him to assert that the future of psychology lay with Freud (358). He understood on the basis of insights drawn from such figures as William James (a "Modern Master" in Weininger's Vienna, 518), Wilhelm Dilthey (512-14), and Edmund Husserl (whose revolutionary Logical Investigations were hot off the press at the time that Weininger wrote-522) that the future task of psychology was tied to the project of providing a fuller and richer account of our "inner lives." One need merely page through Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud's Studies in Hysteria to appreciate the sorts of "paradigm shift" that were taking place within psychiatry: what Krafft-Ebing could describe on the basis of a brief interview and external observation in a few paragraphs, Freud would spin into a complex, lengthy narrative, which

52

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

could only be written after an equally complex, lengthy period of intense dialogue between doctor and patient. In fact Freud was doing little less than wresting psychiatry from the hands of the lawyers and judges to give it a firm footing among the healing arts. That Freud would win the day was far from clear in 1903, but it was clear to Weininger on the basis of a deep understanding of the problems that any putative candidate for the title "science of the mind" would have to face that Freud's contribution was of monumental significance. Indeed, the more one reads Weininger with sensitivity to the contexts in which he wrote the more astonished one becomes at the ways his erudition and ingenuity are mingled with crude, cliched pictures of women and Jews. Had he not identified a-rationality with Woman and conformity with Judaism, there would scarcely be grounds for rejecting the scenario he presents. And indeed why should that not be the case? As moral philosophy he has merely given us a variation on Kant, which as we have seen bears a certain comparison with Habermas. Why was he so intent upon being provocative in this way? In the end there is no answer to this question that is not speculative. One form of speculation proceeds from the view that he was simply a self-hating Jew and a fanatical misogynist whose very fanaticism drove him mad. 23 This view contradicts the picture of him that we have from his family and at least some of his friends. Indeed if Weininger had wanted to write a diatribe against Jews, it is very strange that he should have confined his remarks to one relatively brief chapter toward the end of the book. The case against his having had misogynist intentions is more complex but would run similarly: the whoie business could all be much more simple and straightforward if that was all that Weininger wanted to assert. Moreover, if derangement led him to conceive his book the way he did, why is it that the parts of the book that are not "tainted," to borrow a phrase from Krafft-Ebing, are so lucid? It does not add up. A more profitable line of inquiry would proceed from concentrating on what his theory of ideal types enables him to do. As soon as we pose this question, we find ourselves very much in Schorske's Vienna of. narcissism and demagoguery for the sense of his theory of bisexuality is to insist with Lombroso that the male is responsible for the degraded state of womanhood but that, ironically, it is the female, .~hat is, irrational element, in men, that creates this situation. The more that men try to live up to the conventional image of mas-

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

53

culinity as essentially being a "lady killer" or Don Juan the more they surrender their true masculinity. Indeed the closing chapters of Sex and Character contain a very primitive but nonetheless recognizable account of the social construction of conventional morality and its stereotypes of Lady Killer, Innocent Maid and the like through the interaction of the feminine elements in males and females. 24 This ironically provokes the masculine element in the woman to want to exercise the same sort of power that the conventional male does in society. In short the triumph of the female principle within the male is the triumph of an extremely complex sort of unreflective behavior in which cliches replace concepts. (The sheer number of words Weininger designated as cliches in Sex and Character by putting them between quotation marks is as astonishing as the fact that nobody since Karl Kraus seems to have noticed them.) This is what Weininger takes to be "Jewish" about culture generally. It remains to be shown that this attitude to things Jewish was paradoxically something that was as Jewish as it was Viennese. Weininger was very much a product of Viennese assimilated Jewry. From the days of Mendelssohn, assimilation meant turning away from Jewish traditions, that is, of the sort that had developed in the ghetto, and accepting Enlightenment, which amounted to adopting a "religious" attitude to science and culture. 25 In Vienna this was very much an assimilation to German culture. Thus Protestantism, idealism, and the German classics played an inordinately large role in assimilated Jewish life there. Weininger's attitudes and interests in Sex and Character mirror this entirely. His "anti-Semitism" can and should be seen as transferring the assimilated Jew's critique of pre-emancipated Jewish life to the aestheticized (i.e., "Viennese") form of "Jewish" culture that was replacing liberal idealism, i.e., the peculiarly Viennese form of "modernism." It is well known that the style associated with one prominent manifestation of Viennese aestheticism, the Secession, was known as "the Jewish style." 26 Bearing this in mind, as well as the fact that Weininger shared Jodi's antipathy to the aesthetic ideals of the Secession, and granting with Schorske that Viennese aestheticism reached its zenith with the Secession's 1902 Beethoven Exhibition, 27 that is, at just the time that Weininger was rewriting his dissertation for publication as Sex and Character, it becomes clear that Weininger's attack on his age as the most Jewish and feminine, as well as his insistence on the moral and intellectual character of true art as opposed the self-indul-

54

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

gence of Secessionist aestheticism, is an extension of the enlightened (i.e., assimilated liberal) Jew's self-criticism. Briefly what had been a critique of unreflective adherence to tradition in pre-emancipated Jewish life became a critique of an aesthetics divorced from ethics and science: for Weininger all of these things were onesomething his antiquated scientific opinions prevents us from seeing today. If all of this is true, Weininger is anything but the crackpot whom we encounter in discussions of decadence in fin de siecle Vienna but a figure worthy of the admiration of a Popper, a Wittgenstein, and a Kraus. Yet if this is so, why was this fact ever lost sight of? A full answer to that question would require a lengthy study in itself, but we can get a better handle on the question if we look to the reception of Weininger's ideas in the years immediately following the publication of Sex and Character late May 1903 and his suicide a scant three months later. From its publication Sex and Character was a controversial book. That was Weininger's intention. 28 He seems to have been well aware that, despite the liberal position the book in fact takes on social problems, it could well be misunderstood, and he took pains to distance himself from those who might see him as justifying less than humane treatment of the mentally or morally inferior (449-50; cf. ix). Sadly this part of his work has often been completely ignored-or even worse simply dismissed as inconsistent with the ravings of a maniac. In any case the attention that was drawn to his work by the praise of the likes of Kraus and Strindberg, 29 the plagiarism charges of Paul Moebius and Wilhelm Fliess 30 and the publication of his literary remains, along with a memoir of Weininger by his friend Moritz Rappaport that alleged that Weininger was mentally unbalanced, all soon made the dead youth into a cause Celebre. 31 However, the early reviews in Austria, Germany, and even New York were much more positive, and indeed insightful, than one might expect today. 32 For example one Viennese medical journal recommended Sex and Character enthusiastically to all doctors concerned with sexual matters on the basis of Weininger's complete mastery of the literature on sexual differentiation. Like a number of other reviews, it remarked pos.itively on the way in which Weininger put Tolstoy's argument for universal chastity in The Kreutzer Sonata (which was a well-known work in Wei'1inger's Vienna33 ) on a sound philos()phical footing. 14 A Jll.lmber of authors remark that one strong

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

55

point in Weininger's work is that the argument is well developed to the point that even readers, who do not agree with Weininger can read the book profitably. Weininger's moral earnestness was even praised as Jewish. One of the most interesting reviews insists that the book could well serve as enlightening for the general public were it not so difficult to understand. 35 The same reviewer was careful to praise Weininger's critique of politicians. He concluded with a remark whose poignancy has not been diminished in the least with the years, namely, that the book should be read without prejudice but self-critically and reflectively with courage. There were also from the start charges that the author was insane or schizophrenic. These charges troubled Weininger's father very much. When Rappaport added his voice to these in his very introduction to Weininger's posthumous writings charging that Weininger was mentally disturbed, Leopold Weininger turned to a Munich psychiatrist for an objective judgment in the hope of exonerating his son. The result was Ferdinand Probst's study, The Case of Otto Weininger, which judged Weininger ironically to be hysterical und degenerate (entartet) to his father's dismay. 36 What is interesting about this document is the hesitance with which Probst came to that judgment. His hesitance stemmed from nothing other than his respect for Leopold Weininger's intelligence and integrityY Probst found it difficult to accept the views of an "exquisite pathological 38 character" such as Rappaport over Leopold Weininger's insistence that there was indeed nothing whatsoever pathological about his brilliant son. Nevertheless, he did grudgingly accept Rappaport's position in a decision that was to have monumental importance for our understanding of Weininger. From that time on, readers could hardly approach Weininger with a critical spirit. Instead they were confronted with a debate in which they were expected to take a position: Was he a madman or a genius? Paradigm changes in all of the areas in which Weininger wrote, as well as the dogmatic assertion of the position that Probst in fact advanced with clear reluctance, have made it considerably easier over the years to assume that this is in fact the alternative with which Weininger and his work presents us. The result of concentrating on this question rather than examining Weininger's arguments in the context in which he advanced them is that the literature on Weininger has gotten worse and worse down to our own time: here, indeed, what occurred as tragedy has been repeated as farce, something

56

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Weininger's Critique of a Narcissistic Culture

which has had consequences, not only for our subsequent understanding of Weininger but also for fin de siecle Vienna as well. A crucial aspect of that farce has been the result that Weininger's work has been discussed on the basis of his assertions rather than on the basis of the arguments and principles upon which they rest in the context of the state of philosophy, science, and society circa 1903 as is necessary for the evaluation of any work in the history of science. 39 In short, it is not necessary to come to Probst's conclusion. But if that is true, the standard account of Weininger's thought-and with it our picture of Old Vienna-stands in drastic need of revision along the lines sketched here. As for Weininger's intentions, if the view presented here is correct, like Professor Ambronsius, the vampire hunter, played so magnificently by Jack McGowran in Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, in his efforts to be provocative, he ended up perpetuating the scourge he would have eliminated. Weininger, too, did not know that he carried with him the very evil he would have destroyed forever and that with his help it would spread itself across the whole of Europe.

*

*

*

Nothing separates our world from Weininger's more than the fact that the embattled idealism (in both the philosophical and the colloquial sense) to which he subscribed was completely routed in World War I. For the Platonist Weininger the problems with individuals and society arise on account of the ideas and ideals to which people subscribe. Geschlecht und Charakter was nothing more than an analysis of how problems as different as hysteria in women and demagoguery in politics are in fact rooted in the mind. The young man took it upon himself on the basis of wide reading to produce an idealist account of the genesis of irrationality in the realm of ideas which at the same time would be a critique of irrationality that would establish the sole account of rationality on basis consistent with the foundations of modern science but deeper than what he took to be facile positivism. Indeed, if Vienna was steeped in modernism, Weininger would create a philosophically grounded self-critical modernism at once capable of appreciating what was of value in modernity but at the same time emphasizing its limits. Otto Weininger himself grew to maturity in the heyday of Viennese nwdcr'nism as the son of /<1. prominent goldsmith. So he knew the

57

culture of grace that was Viennese modernism from within. To those who are only acquainted with his chef d'oeuvre, Geschlecht und Charakter, this is not always obvious. The Gnostic-Manichean tendencies in that book have a way of disguising how central the idea that we must be converted to rationality (as Plato himself insists in his famous seventh letter) by turning our desire for self-fulfillment from a narcissistic tendency to commitment to the common good. In fact, Weininger wanted nothing more than to criticize modernity by showing us it limits from within. This is the heritage that he bequeathed to Wittgenstein and Popper. (In anticipation of an objection: Popper nowhere claims to be influenced by Weininger in this respect. True, but Weininger is mentioned three times in Popper's autobiography without once being attacked by him. Since Popper never lost the opportunity to tear someone apart, it is safe to conclude that he did not want to in Weininger's case, which is tantamount to saying that he in some way admired him). This side of Weininger's work can be found in his much neglected essay on Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt of 1902, to which we now must turn.

3 Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism "... in this life people can never live in complete truth ... something always separates them from it... lies, errors, cowardice, obstinacy" -Otto Weininger, "Henrik Ibsen und seine Dichtung 'Peer Gynt"'

The importance of Henrik Ibsen for the philosophy of Otto Weininger cannot be overestimated. Consider briefly the close ol' Weininger's infamous chapter 13 of Geschlecht und Charakta: Humanity has the choice between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between female and male, between the species and the individual, hl'lWl'l'll value and valuelessness, between terrestrial and higher life, between nothingm~ss and divinity. These are the antipodes: there is no third realm (es gibt kein driUcs Reid!). (441)

/

Despite the explicit assertion that Weininger is referring to an ethical either/or here interpreters who have stressed Weininger's alleged misogynist, racist fanaticism as a key to understanding his oeuvre have tended to suggest, without directly asserting, that he somehow "really" longed nostalgically for a "drittes Reich." 1 Actually the allusion here is to Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean, a work about Julian the Apostate, wholly neglected today but nevertheless the play that Ibsen himself considered his most important achievement. Julian's tragedy turns on the impossibility of his finding a third way between the tree of knowledge (Nature symbolized by the mortal God, Pan) and the tree of the cross (the moral order). In fact, Weininger has cast the opposition between sensuality and spirituality that is central to Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy into the terms of Ibsen's play without mentioning his name. Naturally, casting this opposition in terms of Judaism and Christianity tends to confuse the matter hopelessly in our eyes. However, we forget at out peril that this contrast .::o

60

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

is typical for German Idealism, which took Protestant Christianity to be "absolute religion" because it placed the seat of moral authority in the human conscience, whereas the inferior forms of religion such as Judaism-or for that matter Catholicism-are considered to make 2 moral responsibility a matter of mere conformity to the Law. Our failure to see this immediately is typical of most of our problems interpreting Weininger: since we do not look deeply enough into the cultural context in which he posed his questions, which is so dramatically different from our own, we are continually tempted to misunderstand what he asserts. Readers of the authorized German edition of Ibsen's works in 1900 would have been familiar, as we are not today, with the problem of "das dritte Reich" from the editors' introductions to the plays 3 as well as from the writings of Hermann Bahr and his fellow Viennese modernists (see below). In fact by paraphrasing Ibsen here Weininger is rejecting Viennese modernism's project for the renewal of society through a new artistic synthesis of Is and Ought by literally presenting his reader with a Kierkegaardian "either/or." We shall return to this theme later, for it is central to our discussion. Furthermore, in a sense the appeal to universal bisexuality, which the dualism of the male and female principles serves to explain and in fact is the central claim in Weininger's chef d'oeuvre, Geschlecht und Charakter of 1903 (Sex and Character, 1906), could be viewed as an attempt to reconstruct the conditions of the possibility for the radical transformations in the inner lives of Ibsen's characters philosophically in a pre-Freudian context in which the existence of un4 conscious and preconscious motivation has not been recognized. Consider only the case of ex-Pastor John Rosmer and Rebekka West in Rosmersholm: after allegedly living together in idealistic pursuit of Enlightenment, which at the same time has proven fatal to Rosmer's mentally disturbed wife, the couple discover, significantly on the basis of Rebekka's confession to that effect, that their relationship has in fact been one of suppressed passion, which in turn prompts them to a suicide pact. In the very complexity of his characters' motivation, Ibsen counts as an important precursor of Freud, who, after all, never claimed to discover the unconscious but only to make it accessible to investigation. 5 How could a psychic tangle of unconscious passion and sober rationality of this order be explained in the pre-Freudian era? How could one and the same character us·sume several "roles'/fn his efforts to cope with realities that

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

61

overwhelm him? In order to make sense of Weininger we must pose this question. In Geschlecht und Charakter Weininger asks in the spirit of Immanuel Kant, how are these moral and psychological twists and turns at all possible? When Weininger asserts that his philosophical response is a conceptual analysis of what writers have already presented in symbolic form he is presupposing more knowledge of Ibsen on the part of his reader as crucial background to his philosophical study than his text would indicate despite its profuse documentation. However, it would take a book-length analysis to establish how that is so. · A close reading of the essay "On Henrik Ibsen and His Poem Peer Gynt," Weininger's tribute to Ibsen on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1903, in the posthumously published collection of Weininger's literary remains, On Death and the Hereafter, 6 is not only crucial to our understanding of Otto Weininger's philosophy but also significant to our understanding the roots of Viennese "critical modernism," 7 i.e., that critique of the values of modernity which emerges from within modernism itself in reaction to its own superficialities, of the sort that we find in the work of, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schoenberg, or Ferdinand Ebner. Last but not least, it may help us to understand better certain neglected philosophical aspects of Ibsen's art. Concerning Weininger's preoccupation's with Ibsen we know thut he had been contemplating completing a work on Peer Gynt, which seems to have occupied him as he wrote Geschlecht und Charakter, as early as August 1902-presumably after seeing the production that began in Vienna in May of that year. At this time the young Weininger, who had learned Norwegian, presumably to read Ibsen, had traveled to Christiania (today Oslo) to see Peer Gynt on the stage. We know that he was deeply disappointed in what he experienced there: "If the Viennese production was very bad and the audience repulsive, the production here is stupid, the audience idiotic." 8 We also know from his correspondence that he and his associate, Artur Gerber, had discussed the play intensely. 9 The essay itself refers to no less than fifteen of Ibsen's plays in addition to Peer Gynt itself. There can be no doubt that Weininger was both well-informed about and intensely preoccupied with Ibsen at the end of his short life. In any case, it is abundantly clear from the opening pages of Weininger's essay as well as from other passages that his paean to

62

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Ibsen and Peer Gynt takes its significance, at least in Weininger's own eyes, from a certain critical attitude with respect to what is "modem" and "in." Since Ibsen is modem but not "in" it is necessary to argue for a special place on the cultural spectrum for him. Further, Weininger attributes whatever popularity that Ibsen might have enjoyed among his contemporaries more to the irrational, subjective stylistic element in his work that certain of those contemporaries highly esteemed than to the intellectual substance of his plays (3). Weininger's essay is an attack on this superficial reading of Ibsen. It would appear to be directed especially against the superficialities of avant-garde intellectuals (who are not mentioned directly but certainly to be identified with lung Wien and the Wiener Moderne as we shall see): "Lately a new element has been added to that earlier obsequiousness [of the then-fashionable hero-worship]. The light footed dancing legs of Zarathustra ideals, the cool gracefulness of the south German waltz, of mindless student song and artsy-craftsy armchair effusion had to come together in order to evoke and assert it in the face of all German-Scandinavian seriousness. I mean the lie of the 'stylized life' of great men, which degrades those people to artists ..."(25). 10 It was against precisely that sort of unreflective preoccupation with oneself that Ibsen dedicated his lifelong campaign against sham and self-deception (die Lebensliige). Indeed, it was precisely this that made him the modern literary champion of true morality, i.e., of the Kantian Categorical Imperative, an ethics that recognizes nothing but an absolute duty to respect humanity both in oneself and in others. But that, too, is to run ahead. 11 Why have we in 1902 failed to see the profound philosophical dimension to Ibsen? Weininger offers three reasons for our misconceptions about Ibsen. The first concerns the popularization of Ibsen's work at the hands of that Danish journalist (read Georg Brandes 12 ) who made his career on the basis of his interviews with celebrated literati in opposition to the standard academic criticism of the age. The second is that Ibsen's works were co-opted by the champions of "woman's rights," who demanded entree to the middle-class professions for women. The third is a similar adoption at the hands of sentimental social Darwinists, socialists, and eugenicists, who read their own social criticism into works like Ghosts (which was largely responsible for Ibsen's reputation as the bete noire of the middle classes). The latter trivialize Ibsen as "a sign of the times" vaguely anticipating Nictzschc. 11 lnc~cd, Weininger is anxious to de-couple

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

63

Nietzsche from the ranks of the narcissists by emphasizing how deeply torn he was between his inclinations to everything that Richard Wagner represented in cultural matters and a certain self-critical skepticism which drove him almost schizophrenically to his scathing critique of Wagner (31ff). The author of Peer Gynt too, he insists, had to have been self-mistrusting (misautistisch), i.e., to have Peer's self-loving (philautistisch) spirit 14 in himself in order to have created such a character (34). In any case, nobody has done more, Weininger argues, to defuse Ibsen's explosive moral message than those who make of him a "timely" social critic. Such enthusiasts make Ibsen's masterpiece, Peer Gynt, absolutely incomprehensible on Weininger's view. Moreover, his Norwegian countrymen have done their share to distort Ibsen's message as well inasmuch as they have taken Peer Gynt to be a satire on Norwegian culture to which only Norwegians really have access. 15 As we have seen, Weininger found the Norwegian way of producing Peer Gynt simply silly as he did Norwegian views on literature in general: speaking of Ibsen and Bj!llrnson in the same breath, praising Arne Garborg 16 at the cost of the brilliant Knut Hamsun, whose Pan Weininger considered perhaps the most beau~ tiful novel that had ever been written, 17 and so on. Weininger was convinced that we have nothing to learn from Ibsen's Norwegian countrymen. A logical reaction to Weininger's view at this point would be to question the centrality of Peer Gynt in Ibsen's oeuvre. Does not Weininger lay too much weight on a work that cannot bear such a burden? It is almost necessary that it seem so to us, who are more accustomed to viewing Ibsen's colorful story of the misadventures of the braggart-prankster, Peer, as an entertaining vehicle for Edvard Grieg's incidental music than as a monumental play with profound moral dimensions. Weininger's answer to that question is that Ibsen has given us an allegorical account of his life as a writer in When We Dead Awaken, which he described as his "epilogue." 18 In that work he depicts his own career allegorically in terms of that of the sculptor, Arnold Rubek, who in his own eyes has failed to fulfill the monumental task that he-and Weininger later in Geschlecht und Charakter-had set for himself in the allegorical statue of a woman rising from the dead, "Resurrection Day": Irena: What poems have you written since? In marble, I mean. Since the day I left you?

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

64

Professor Rubek: I have made no poems since your day ... only trivial modellings. (Act l )'9

Doubtless the reference is in some sense autobiographical: abandoning verse after Peer Gynt, writing became increasingly difficult for him. As Ibsen's last work in verse Peer Gynt ought to represent the writer at the height of his powers, i.e., exactly what Weininger claims. Critics today generally consider that Peer Gynt is indeed a masterpiece of Norwegian poetry: "Ibsen's linguistic achievement with respect to nuances, ambiguity and changes of style, above all 2 in the demonic and surrealistic scenes, is scarcely surpassed." ° Furthermore, there is "its gay, galloping verse, with rhythms that are often double or triple, and as ingenious and outrageous as any that Robert Browning or W.S. Gilbert ever devised." 21 Whatever else one may reproach Weininger with he was certainly as familiar as anyone in his day with Ibsen's oeuvre and his poetic achievements if not more so, even if subsequent scholarship has shown his view of Ibsen's selfinterpretation to be less than entirely accurate. If we are to take When We Dead Awaken seriously as autobiography, Ibsen should have considered Peer Gynt the high point of his career as a writer. In any case, on Weininger's view all of these features together have prevented us from realizing that Ibsen's rollicking story of the adventures of a romantic braggart and ne'er-do-well is actually a drama of redemption, whose real hero is none other than humanity itself. 22 In Weininger's eyes Peer Gynt bears comparison with the great epics such as Goethe's Faust, Dante's Divine Comedy or Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde of Wagner. Should the close connection that Weininger finds between Ibsen and Wagner puzzle us, we need simply remind ourselves that it was precisely this constellation of culture heroes that Bernard Shaw defended as the vanguard of enlightened modernity in books like The Quintessence of Ibsenism and The Complete Wagnerite. 23 It remains an open question whether Weininger projects his central ideas from Geschlecht und Charakter onto Ibsen or that a certain interpretation of Ibsen is, in fact, the source of his view of "true love." The latter view would seem to be the more plausible even if Weininger's interpretation of Peer Gynt turns out to be less than definitive. However, it cannot be excluded that Weininger, in fact, does both. Be that as it may, in his essay he insists, paraphrasing Schiller, that people arc most human ;When they love. Presumably Weininger

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

65

wants to emphasize with this paraphrase that there is a certain gamelike character to love inasmuch as we immerse ourselves totally in the activity without "thinking" about what we are doing, i.e., we "lose ourselves" in it, as it were. 24 However, Weininger distinguishes in the classic Platonic vein sharply between appearance and reality throughout the essay, here between the act of "loving" (lieben) and the state of being "in love" (verliebt sein). 25 The act of loving provides Weininger with an important clue for understanding the nature of the self, which is the subject of Peer Gynt and the reason why it is of crucial importance to us. He takes the phenomenon of loving which involves respect for the other and therefore self-restraint as falsifying the Machist notion of the self as nothing but a bundle of perceptions, a mere "sea of sensations" (Empfindungsmeere, 7). Christianity demands that I love my neighbor as myself just as the Kantian philosophy demands that I respect personality in myself or the other as an end in itself and never merely as a means. In order to love in this sense I must act deliberately and that requires a spiritual center. Both Christianity and Kantian ethics reject mere conformity with established mores as ethically meaningless. However, Peer merely conforms to the superficial standards of the society around him. In that society Peer is taken to be a moral person merely because he is not obviously immoral. Thus superficial conventional values reinforce the superficialities of the morally shallow individual, who is not a genuine individual personality because he does not determine himself to be what he is. Peer's tragedy is paradoxically that he never rises above mediocrity because he is never bold enough to sacrifice himself in the Biblical manner in his search for his true self: Peer: I'm not as bad as you think; ... The worst you can call me is a bit of a fool, I'm certainly not an exceptional sinner.

Button Moulder: Ah, but, my friend that's exactly the point; in the strictest sense you're no sinner at all .... Sinning demands a strength of purpose ... 26

66

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Thus Peer's onion becomes emblematic of him: many layers without a center. Weininger thus takes the point of Peer Gynt to be, i.e., what Peer discovers in his last encounter with Solveig, that the self is not a thing or object within us, so to speak, but a moral project, so it is not something that we can search for or even identify, but a way of being that we incorporate in our actions. On Weininger's view, then, Peer Gynt is an idealistic work in two senses: first, because its moral is that human beings cannot attain the ideal in this world and, secondly, because the plot unfolds principally in the mind of the protagonist inasmuch as Solveig is really the projection of his higher self. For Weininger Peer Gynt is a tragedy of monumental proportions about modern man's confused search for his authentic self, which he confuses with the Gyntian self: "that world inside my vaulted skull which makes me Me and nobody else .... a host of appetites, desires and wishes ... of fancies, cravings and demands; what ... makes me live my life as Me." 27 Weininger's continual allusions to Goethe's Faust in the course of developing this idea indicates both that Weininger considers Peer Gynt in the context of classical literature and that he sees it as a kind of commentary on Goethe's aphorism: "A good man even in his dark urges is aware of the right way." 28 Our very failure to live up to the ideal is what we must learn from. It is important to emphasize Weininger's optimism with respect to our ability to do so, for this central notion is almost always overlooked. 29 We shall also have to return to this theme in another context. Weininger insists that Peer Gynt is a genuine classical tragedy like Oedipus or Lear, inasmuch as it is the "representation of an individual, who seeks and battles, errs and fails, who becomes conscious of his guilt and struggles for salvation"(36). 30 In true tragic fashion it is his very hedonistic search for happiness that systematically prevents him from discovering who he really is. Human beings actually assume a burden of pain, they sacrifice their genuine happiness inasmuch as they affirm their own humanity which must be an affirmation of their sexuality, i.e., something that is always at the cost of both one's own personhood or that of the other. So closely related are sham (die Lebensliige) and a conventional notion of happiness as being a matter of having "enough" that should we somehow .be relieved of that self-deception we would find ourselves in a state of complete c.:onstctnation.

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

67

In this context Weininger rightly emphasizes the importance of Peer's sojourn among the trolls and his meeting with the Boyg (the Great Crooked Thing) for clarifying what he takes to be the Kantian view of human nature. With Kant Weininger sees humans as torn between pleasure and duty to respect personality, between their lower "empirical" self and a higher "intelligible" or ethical self in Weininger's favored Kantian jargon. It is at this point that Weininger's idealism comes most clearly to the fore. With Plato and consonant with Kant he insists that all human striving is a will to self-fulfillment. However, self-fulfillment is only really possible inasmuch as we seek what is really worthwhile. However, our conventional disposition is to confuse what is really worthwhile with what only appears to be so. In this sense we can only attain the real fulfillment, the satisfaction that living rationally, i.e., on the basis of respect for humanity in all its manifestations, brings with it, that we seek by overcoming selfish motives. In Peer Gynt the trolls are ugly, ungainly sub-humans who embody unreflective egocentrism, the principle of short-term gratification and in fact the animal element in human natureY "Troll be unto yourscl f' self-sufficient!" 32 is their rallying cry. They only know "the will to power," the endless self-assertion which can take the form of smug self-sufficient complacency or a mad rush to possess. In short their identity is anchored in what they have and not what they are. Their obsession with themselves is a typically "modern" sickness on Weininger's view, namely, the confusion of egoism with individualism. In any case, Weininger places special emphasis upon Peer's meeting with the Boyg in this context. When asked who it is there the Boyg only answers to Peer's chagrin "myself' (Meg selv!). The repulsive, clammy, amorphous mass that cannot be challenged directly asserts that it conquers by gentleness inasmuch as it forces its opponent to circumvent it: "go round about, Peer" (ga utenom, Peer), it commands. 33 Weininger interprets this to mean that it represents the spirit of self-satisfaction and lack of aspiration, in a word, conformity to conventional values: "The Great Crooked Thing is the entire force of the empirical ego with which it revolts against the intelligible (rational) self.... before our death we shall never be rid of it"(35-6). 34 Thus the Boyg is at once vanity in the individual and conformism in society, the two forces that prevent the realization of our nature as moral and rational beings, i.e., as human persons, who

68

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

recognize the humanity of others and on that account do not use them to further selfish ends. However, it is central to Weininger, as it is peripheral to Kant, that the lack of a moral "center" to one's being, an "intelligible," selfsacrificing Self, drives one continually to project35 what one finds lacking in oneself onto an external object or persons who come to embody all that we are not but would be (9). There are many aspects of this complex phenomenon of projection including the moral antipodes self-sacrificing love and pure covetousness. Peer Gynt is thus a work that illuminates the meaning that the beloved woman has for the man: "Solveig is the virgo immaculata, the Madonna, the Beatrice who is loved without being desired"(7). 36 In this respect she is more reminiscent of Senta in The Flying Dutchman or Elsa in Tannhiiuser than she is of Isolde or Kundry. Thus the novelty in Weininger's interpretation consists in his insistence that it is not simply Solveig's love for him that redeems Peer Gynt but his ideal of Solveig, which turns out to have been the motive force in all of his wanderings and adventures in the land of the trolls and generally in all exotic encounters : "not the living corporeal Solveig, who could be any silly goose, but the Solveig in him, this possibility in himself that gives him the strength [to go on in pursuit of his higher Self]. .. he has neglected his whole life long"(7). 37 This is central to Weininger's abstruse analysis of Peer Gynt. 38 The Solveig in him is the eternal-feminine that draws the male onward as Goethe puts it at the end of Faust II. Weakness of character such as Peer's is at the root of our two most important moral problems: the problem of the lie and the problem of our salvation from it which is a matter of the relationship between the sexes. Unable to accept the world as it is, we fabricate our own version of it often in charming and amusing ways; unable to accept the other as she is, we endeavor to manipulate her into what we would have her be, often with her consent. Thus the "soulless" Anitra39 loves Peer in her way because he isor seems to be--everything that she is not. She is, of course sadly mistaken but in her confused state she reinforces Peer's sense that he is really somebody. Both are self-deceived. Before proceeding further to elucidate Weininger's account of Peer's odyssey we shall do well to consider more how it fits in with his Kantian position in ethics. We can begin by asking what would it be to overcome such self-deception. Strange as it may seem, for Weininger recognizing t!lat each of us has this inherent disposition

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

69

to selfishness, which Immanuel Kant termed the "radical evil" in human nature, 40 turns out to be the key to our salvation. Clearly enough we can overcome our own selfishness on to the extent that we recognize it as a failure to live up to our responsibilities as a human being. This is possible because there is something inherently laudable lurking within our most base urges. Selfishness, in fact, presents us with an opportunity for moral growth. Thus, loving someone turns out to be a matter of respecting the personality of the other by rejecting our own eroticism: "Every relationship of a man to a woman inasmuch as it is erotic is expropriation, deprivation of her rights"(40)_41 For that reason Weininger considers Rosmersholm the second most important work in Ibsen's oeuvre. The joint suicide of Rosmer and Rebekka is their recognition that such mutual respect (which they have momentarily attained) is not possible in this world: "Are you going with me or am I going with you? ... The question will remain unanswerable for eternity"(41). 42 Put differently, real selffulfillment entails recognition of the unpleasant truth about human nature that demands the impossible from us out of respect for humanity, namely, sexual abstinence. (We forget at our peril that Weininger's age was one of idealism: the key to social reform was taken to be every bit as much a matter of personal resolve as of legal reform as the temperance movement's campaign against alcoholism indicates.) Weininger's Kantian message is the uncompromising: if we are not guilty about our failure to live up to the demands of morality, we ought to be. The person who fails to strive to attain the moral ideal is, on the contrary, one who is subliminally driven demonically to possess what he finds wanting in himself. If we need a different example of such a character that is not taken from Ibsen or Weininger, we need merely consider the case of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, which was written in the year that Weininger began his university studies. We are not accustomed to mentioning the two in the same breath, but a close reading of Ibsen and Conrad will yield a remarkably similar picture when we delve beneath the surfaceafter all, Peer has been a slave trader, indeed, if we would believe him, "the Croesus of the Charlestown traders." 43 Consider only the following passage that characterizes the mentality of Kurtz and Co.: They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what could be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale and men going at it blind-as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness ... it is not a pretty sight when you look into it too

70

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea something you can set up and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to ... (My emphasis AJ)44

Both Kurtz and Peer are slaves to their own immense desire for selfrealization through possession which drives them to destruction and self-destruction. Both of them stand in a "functional" relationship to reality: what exists is there to be used as a means to their self-realization. Both have the power to exert fascination on the minds of the Marlowes of this world. The heart of darkness and Peer's onion are more closely related than superficial comparisons between the dismally destructive dynamism of Kurtz's greed and Peer's ebullient penchant for tall-tales would lead us to think, for neither Kurtz nor Peer has a rational center. Moral complacency and the demonic struggle to amass wealth or power are two sides of the contradictory character of modern man. The difference between Kurtz and Peer is that Peer, unlike Kurtz, gets a glimpse of his huge mistake and thus of what it would have been to be a real person. This is what Solveig is for Peer-and what Kurtz lacks-the full antithesis of everything that the trolls represent. In short, Weininger takes Peer Gynt to be an idealist account of the typically modern obsession with what Kant called the empirical ego, the "lower" self. But let us return to Weininger's account of the matter. It is crucial to Weininger's position that despite fathering a troll Peer never fully becomes an animal: although he consents to having a tail like them, he cannot submit to the operation on his eye that will give him the peculiar squint typical of trolls. Weininger interprets the fact that Peer never really consents to become a troll to imply that he has a vague awareness that what he is really after is not merely something that he can possess but something that he must be. Behind his "will to power" their lurks a "will to value" (9-10), which he has experienced as love, that in fact impels him onward in the spirit of the closing lines of Goethe's Faust: "the eternal feminine draws us upwards."45 Weininger's variation on that classical theme turns upon his insistence that the "eternal feminine" is nothing other than our vague presentiment of the idea of humanity as other within us that dimly and darkly moves us to do everything that we undertake. The fact that Peer only comes to be aware of this at the moment of his death corroborates the idealist view that the fulfillment he seeks is not attainable in this life. In the end Peer Gynt becomes a kind of Platonic myth like the "91yth of Gygcs" in the Republic or the myth

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

71

of love as the search for the missing other half in the Symposium, 46 which incorporate the central tenets of Weininger's reading of Kant's moral philosophy: as long as human beings strive they err and as such are culpable. With that notion, i.e., what another Kantian, Karl Jaspers, 47 has termed "metaphysical guilt," the guilt that human beings acquire simply by birth, what Christians sometime term "original sin," we arrive at the dead- center of Weiningerian philosophy: recognition that like Peer-and Arnold Rubek and Co.-we have been living in a dream world. Thus Peer exclaims, "I fear I was dead before I die" 48 -a theme that becomes fully explicit in When We Dead Awaken: Irene: We see the irreparable only whenProfessor Rubek: When-? Irena: When we dead wake. Professor Rubek: What do we really see then? Irena: We see that we have never lived.'9

Weininger's whole oeuvre is dedicated to awakening a sense of metaphysical guilt in his contemporaries. In Henrik Ibsen he sees a vitally important ally, in Peer Gynt an allegory of modern morality second only to Wagner's Parsifal. 50 Two questions pose themselves here: is this in any sense a real contribution to Kantian moral philosophy? What did it mean to take such a position in fin de siecle Vienna? Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy is first and foremost a rationalist enterprise. It is based on the idea that the human being is as Weininger put it, "something in the middle between the animal and something higher, made of filth and fire in Goethe's words, simultaneously clay and sculptor to cite Nietzsche"(l1). 51 As such, humans are torn between their self-love and their duty to act in accord with their rational nature. Kant's ethics is an effort to articulate the concept of duty as it applies to an imperfectly rational being. 52 He proceeds from the idea that only those actions performed for the sake of duty are genuinely moral. Those that are merely in conformity with duty have no moral standing. His main question with respect to overcoming our love of self is a rationalist question about

72

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

criteria, namely, how do I know when my actions are performed for the sake of duty and not merely in conformity with it? Kant's answer to this question is indicative of his extreme moral rationalism (so extreme that it has frequently been criticized as absolutely unreasonable and thus paradoxically irrational by, say, Aristotelians). For Kant it is only by a logical evaluation of the maxims or subjective principles upon which we act that we can determine if we are indeed acting out of duty and not merely in conformity with it. His main idea is that a rational being has a duty to be rational, i.e., to live with respect for law. His ethics is thus an a priori exercise in establishing decision procedures for testing whether our subjective principles or maxims can pass such scrutiny. The main burden of Kantian ethics is to spell out how we are to use formal logic to evaluate our maxims. It is important for Weininger's analysis of Peer Gynt, whose hero's proclivity for fabrication Ibsen emphasizes in the play's first words, that one of Immanuel Kant's most important examples of how his "Categorical Imperative," i.e., his criterion of rational action, functions bears upon the inconsistency of lying. 53 The liar acts according to the maxim: it is not necessary to tell the truth when it is to my advantage to speak falsely. Kant poses the question: is it possible that everybody in all circumstances should act upon this principle? Clearly not. However, we must distinguish between a superficial interpretation of the reason why this is not so and the deeper reasoning behind Kant's position. Superficially, it would seem that on the basis of the Categorical Imperative my acting on the principle that I may lie when it is to my advantage must be rejected as granting others a license to do so as well and thus creating the conditions of the possibility of my being lied to myself. This would clearly not be to my advantage. However, that is merely a practical matter and not a matter of principle as the rationalist, Kant, wants moral matters to be. In fact, Kant objects to accepting the principle that I am allowed to lie when it is to my advantage on the grounds that by creating the condition of the possibility of universal lying I am destroying the distinction between truth and falsity, which my very act of lying presupposes. Thus I contradict myself in wanting to raise the maxim that I may lie when it is to my advantage by first appealing to the distinction between truth and falsity and then ignoring it, to put the matter in a non-Kantian way. In fact I end up making my own behavior unintelligible, lycause self-contradictory, even to myself by

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

73

undermining the very meaning of the concept which I must employ in order to act at all. In the context of Peer Gynt Peer shows he that has condemned himself to be a troll inasmuch as he urges the captain of his ship to save the lives of the drowning sailors but shortly thereafter himself pushes the cook to his death in the rough seas rather than put himself in danger. 54 However, there lurks a very serious problem in the Kantian scenario, namely, how do we ever get ourselves into a position to want to consider our conduct from the moral point of view? Despite the "spark" of reason in us we are disposed by Nature to selfishness, 55 · how can we ever come to a position where we rise above our selfcenteredness, where we might even be vaguely interested in "enlightening" our self-interest on the basis of self-examination? Kant leaves us confronted with an alternative of choosing irrationally or rationally. However, if all I have to go on are strong prejudices and a weak intellect, how can I ever get to the point where I find it worthwhile to want to "enlighten" myself with respect to what it really means to pursue my own advantage in the deeper sense of sacrificing short-term gratification to my long-term well-being? I low do I come to choose duty over self-interest when it is "against my instincts" as it were? From Plato to Kant philosophers have pointl•d out that a commitment to pursuing my own self-interest at thl' l'Xpense of all else is self-contradictory and thus self-defeating. I lowever, those Platonist philosophers have had to admit grudgingly thul this argument is of little efficacy in the short term because pcopk do in fact often manage to get around in the world successfully without worrying much about consistency. For Plato, what we require is a "conversion" to rationality, 56 whereas Kant speaks of the need for a dramatic "change of heart," a radical alteration of our disposition that makes it possible to transform our self-centeredness into reverence for law. 57 But how are we to achieve that "change of heart"? Kant gives us precious little to go on by way of answer. The problem is that to live rationally and thus morally we must make a choice. However, as long as our lives are directed by subjective interests we can never be in a position to make an objective choice, since that involves weighing the relative merits of alternatives. Moreover, we have, in fact, no choice because it not possible knowingly to choose to live in a way in which we systematically frustrate ourselves in our pursuit of happiness-which is, of course, not to say that we cannot live that way.

74

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

So there is at once a situation in which choice must be made but where no choice is possible: subjectively on the part of the aesthete because he recognizes nothing other than his own gratification-"! smell a woman," declares Don Juan and he's off in a flash after her-objectively, because the sybaritic way of life as such systematically excludes deliberation. Thus duty according to law cannot be the object of a rational choice. Clearly we are in a very strange situation indeed. This is where S!llren Kierkegaard enters the picture. In fact it is Kierkegaard's great achievement as moral philosopher in the Kantian tradition to have provided the required dramatic answer to this dilemma58-something which the "existentialist" interpretation of Kierkegaard, i.e., the view that his philosophizing simply poured out of his tormented life, has obscured systematically. The very title of his most important work of moral philosophy, Either/Or, indicates his sensibility to the question under discussion. Kierkegaard's genius as moral philosopher (as he atypically is in Either/Or) has much to do with his understanding of the fact that the true Platonist cannot rely exclusively upon logos or formal reasoning in moral philosophy, that mythos or storytelling has an essential role to play in ethics at precisely that crucial point where the moral philosopher would affect the requisite change of heart or conversion to rationality which makes ethical conduct at all possible. However, this is something that he cannot say, he must show it, to speak with Wittgenstein. In order to show us what it means to live selfdefeatingly, Kierkegaard presents us with a series of examples drawn from literature with which we as moral sybarites can easily identify: Don Juan, Faust, the Wandering Jew, the seducer, into whose diary we are allowed to eavesdrop, and so on. With considerable philosophical acumen and extraordinary stylistic brilliance the Dane seduces the narcissistic pleasure seeker in his readers into the action only to bring them to a concrete realization of the actual inner emptiness of their lives when their "point of view" is pursued to its logical conclusion. Kierkegaard seduces the aesthete into identifying with the limits of aestheticism by drawing him (he is, of course, male as seducer of feminine innocence) into a series of scenarios in which he might (want to) find himself and through the subsequent identification with the narcissist creates by suggestion a "logical" myt~os in whose incoherence and self-destructive character he comes to p'articipatc. ln cffcct,)lc shows the man who lives self-centeredly

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

75

ends up either in a state of unfulfilled longing and anticipation or intolerable boredom. Thus Kierkegaard's conceptual analysis of narcissism runs as follows: either we get what we want or we do not: in both cases the result is the same, namely, frustration. 59 The life devoted to narcissism, the aesthetic life, is a life not worth living. However, to the Platonic philosopher's chagrin the aesthete discovers that only when it is too late. Kierkegaard offers him a vicarious experience of the emptiness of a life devoted to self-gratification and thus "edifies" the aesthete inasmuch as he constructs the possibility to make the self-sacrificing choice that leads him into the moral, i.e., rational life. In the language of psychoanalysis he learns to sublimate rather than repress his instincts and thus to master them rather than be mastered by them. But is this not exactly what Weininger would learn from Peer Gynt? There is little likelihood that Otto Weininger knew much directly about Kierkegaard. 60 However, is it entirely accidental that a disproportionate number of the thinkers who rediscovered Kierkegaard in Central Europe at the turn of the century knew Weininger? Think only of Georg Lukacs, Rudolf Kassner, and the Kierkegaardians of lnnsbruck's "Brenner Circle": Carl Dallago, Theodor Haecker, Ferdinand Ebner, and the young Hermann Broclt. It is highly doubtful that there is no connection here. Our claim is that it is precisely Weininger's reception of Ibsen in the essays undc1· discussion here that made the writers in question (with the exception perhaps of Kassner, whom Weininger knew, 61 and Lukacs) sensitive to Kierkegaard, for what Weininger considers to be of paramount importance in Ibsen corresponds to a great extent to what Kierkegaard had, unbeknownst to the philosophical public, indeed to nearly everybody, done for Kant, namely, to put precisely that element without which the whole of the Kantian moral philosophy loses its significance into the form of a Platonic myth, i.e., a gripping narrative with such rhetorical force as to transform the perspective of the sensualist frol)1 the unquestioned presupposition of a way of life characterized by conformity's comfortable certainties into an opportunity for moral growth in self-criticism. In the best Kantian-Kierkegaardian tradition Weininger claims that the most important truth that Ibsen has to teach is the idea that "in this life people can never live in complete truth, that something always separates them from it...[be it] lies, errors, cowardice, obstinacy"(36). 62 This is what Weininger takes to be the moral of Peer Gynt and, in-

76

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

deed, the central notion in the late works of Ibsen. In effect, Ibsen shows the relation between theory and practice in his plays but above all in Peer Gynt. However, the central theme in Ibsen's later work, guilt, is wholly foreign to the writers of "Young Vienna." It is precisely this "Christian" dimension (19) to Ibsen's work, easily overlooked today by those only familiar with works such as Hedda Gabler or A Doll's House, which makes him so important for Weininger. Perhaps we can best appreciate the true magnitude of Weininger's achievement here by considering the following disjunction and its implications. Either Weininger knew Kierkegaard or he did not. If he knew Kierkegaard, he was certainly among the first to see what has become a commonplace in the literature on Ibsen, namely, rec63 ognition that there is a huge affinity between Ibsen and Kierkegaard, even to the point that some commentators on Ibsen insist the Dane exerted a profound influence upon Ibsen, indeed, an influence that 64 is nowhere more strongly felt than in Peer Gynt. If this is true, Weininger's efforts to reconstruct Ibsen's poetic and moral vision as he does, i.e., as all of one piece (something that has also found a certain confirmation in the literature inasmuch as it is generally accepted that his plays including the early ones mutually illuminate 65 one another especially with respect to their characters and symbols ) around Peer Gynt as its center, is deeply insightful. However, if he did not know Kierkegaard, it is absolutely extraordinary that he should have intuited so many crucial connections which have taken nearly a century to come to light. In either case Weininger's approach to Ibsen evinces extraordinarily penetrating intellectual and philosophical acumen. But what of the significance of all of this for Vienna 1900? To appreciate Weininger's achievement in his Ibsen essay, we must examine the relationship of his view of Ibsen with that of his Viennese contemporaries. We can start with the question: what sort of reputation did Ibsen enjoy in Vienna at the tum of the century? Superficial observers have claimed that Ibsen was adulated in the City of Dreams · then. This is at once true and false. If we are to take the words of Adam Mtiller-Guttenbrunn, a central figure in contemporary Viennese theatrical life, seriously, despite critical acclaim on the part of the Viennese press, Ibsen was in fact widely ignored by the stodgy theatergoers of Old Vienna. Mi.iller-Gutenbrunn's tribute to Ibsen on the occasion of the dramatist's seventy-fifth birthday, lists

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

77

Ibsen's flops in Vienna one after the other from the Pillars of Society in 1878 to the Deutsches Volkstheater's production of The Wild Duck in 1891 right down to 1903. Thus by the time Weininger wrote his essay there was a long Viennese tradition of critics singing Ibsen's praises as the plays disappeared from the stage one by one. Indeed Mi.iller-Guttenbrunn reports that in the twenty-five years leading up to Ibsen's seventy-fifth birthday there had not been forty performances of his plays in toto in Vienna: "The Viennese public is far and away too immature for Ibsen and it is questionable whether it will ever be mature enough for him." 66 The premiere of the German version of Peer Gynt in Vienna in 1902 seems to have made no exception to that rule--even if it may have been the theatrical event of the year. 67 Something similar seems to have happened to Ibsen himself in Vienna. Ibsen had indeed been feted day and night in connection with the premiere of The Pretenders during his visit in 1890 but he himself remarked at the end of a week of celebration as he departed for Munich, "Now the fairy tale is over." 68 Indeed, it was, if OflL'. follows Mtiller-Gutenbrunn's-or Weininger's-view of the story. In a sense, Ibsen self-destructed in Vienna. The increasingly iltlportant role of mysterious images and allusions (to the sea, for example) in his later work provided grounds for Viennese literati such as Julius Kulka69 and, of course, the omnipresent Hermann Bahr, to speak of the way that his work "overcame" naturalism. In doing so they co-opted Ibsen for their variant of impressionism. In Bahr's celebrated essay "Overcoming Naturalism" of 1891 the phrase would become a rallying-cry of "Young Vienna" and synonymous with a tum inward to that narcissistic "romanticism of nerves" 70 which in its tum became synonymous with "die Wiener Moderne" and, in fact, in its glorification of subjective feelings the negation of the allimportant ethical dimension that distinguishes Ibsen as a dramatist. However, as much as four years earlier in the very essay which marked his turn from social and economic to literary concerns and was in a sense the beginning of the "Wiener Moderne," 71 Bahr anticipated his position of 1891 in insisting that Romanticism, the transcendence of individualism in Socialism, and Naturalism, overcoming the unempirical spirit through a spiritless empiricism, were completely opposed to each other. It is this antithesis that Bahr would "overcome." The essay that announced that project was simply entitled "Henrik Ibsen." 72 It is important for understanding the mean-

78

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

ing of Weininger's essay of 1903 because the young philosopher's view of Ibsen is almost point for point the negation of Bahr's view. Indeed, it seems that Weininger sought to undermine its self-legitimization in terms of its relation to Ibsen in the essay. Bahr's point of departure is that the artist and not the scientist should set the tone in cultural matters. Ibsen is rightly taken to be a poet who has transcended the limits of national literature, typical of his early work, to become a full-fledged "European" writer (presumably in Nietzsche's sense of a "Good European"). Bahr singles out Georg Brandes as the best introduction to Ibsen and Brand as the work in which Ibsen did most to pave the way for an entirely new form of literature that contained the first elements for transcending the antithesis between Romanticism and Naturalism. Once we manage to extricate it from its embeddedness in Norwegian folklore (which the nationalistic Bahr considers impenetrable for the nonNorwegian) we can apprerciate Peer Gynt as Ibsen's critique of the Romantic spirit and the failings of the bourgeois revolutionary. Bahr formulated the challenge to a genuinely "modern" literature as that of uniting these opposites, which he identifies with Nature and Intellect, life and the individual will. In Ibsen's terms (which he does not employ here but evokes frequently elsewhere) Bahr would strive to found a "drittes Reich" as a mode of mediation between them. Indeed, Bahr took precisely the program of surmounting that opposition to be Ibsen's achievement in Brand. Thus, as the herald of the mediation between life and intellect Ibsen was the John the Baptist making safe the way for the coming of the Lord, i.e., Bahr himself. Ibsen is, above all, a problem-posing dramatist rather than a mere scribbler of costume dramas. Ibsen is a pioneer spirit posing the challenge to writers to overcome the gap between the real world of the naturalists and the ideal world of the romantics, between experience and thought. Bahr's program for the "Wiener Moderne" so well-captured in his rallying cry "the Romanticism of nerves" is by implication the solution to the problem that Ibsen posed in Brand. Bahr's subsequent writings develop these notions into the irrationalist ideology of the peculiarly Viennese form of modernism. Thus in "The Unrescuable Ego" a subjectivist, narcissistic element enters the picture in a central way: "for me it is not what is true that counts 73 but what I need and the sun rises the earth is real and I am !." This has a. way of sounding suspiciously like, "troll be unto yourself selfsuflicicnt." Further. in the/essay entitled simply "Die Moderne" Bahr

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

79

reformulates with pathos the alternative between the ideal and the real before which he and his contemporaries stand as a matter of teetering between God and eternal night. 74 He formulates the belief of the "Moderne" as a glorious and blessed resurrection evoking salvation from suffering (presumably from their own nervousness or neurasthenia) as grace emerging from despair. In short, he summarized the faith of the aesthete avant-garde that the "new man" should emerge renewed in the intensity of his own feelings. Bahr identifies this teaching as a unity of science, religion, and art. Moreover, contemporaries like Marie Herzfeld and Ellen Key identified this commitment to aestheticism with the "dritte Reich": the empire of beauty that would be the synthesis of Greek intellectual culture and Christian sentiment "a kind of Elysium spiced with anarchy." 75 This dovetails perfectly with Bahr's concept of religion: "this is our religious idea: to breed men into artists." 76 In any case, there would seem to be little doubt that this way of thinking forms the target of Weininger's attack in his essay on Ibsen. It seems that Weininger, who never mentions Bahr, in one way or another set out to tear down the bridge that Bahr had built between Ibsen and himself. Unlike Bahr but like Ibsen himself, Weininger finds Brand overrated (35, n. 1).77 Similarly he does not take Georg Brandes to be a particularly reliable guide to Ibsen (presumably beM cause [1] Brandes insisted that it was the role of the instinctual in Ibsen that accounted for his importance and [2] because he insisted that he and Ibsen were "brothers" in this-something to which Ibsen did not react7 8 ). More importantly, the very point of his essay is to show that Peer Gynt, far from being a critique of a bourgeois revolutionary (i.e., Romantic) temperament as Bahr had insisted in his review of the 1902 Vienna production,7 9 i.e., essentially politicalor better post-political-in its meaning and implications, is in fact, an allegory about the pitfalls on the road to "authenticity"- again the term is not Weininger's but it certainly captures his theme: the unbridled pursuit of autonomy ends up by destroying integrity and with it any hope of genuine autonomy. Thus the theme of Peer Gynt is one of universal human significance and neither confined to being a critique of the Norwegian national character nor disillusionment with the politics of revolution as Bahr had empahsized in his volkish-tinged 80 review. The gap between the ideal and reality can never be overcome in this world: there is no "drittes Reich" and it is precisely the work of Ibsen, in particular Peer Gynt, that is perhaps

80

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

the most powerful testament to that truth. Humans are destined to strive to realize themselves and fail to do so. They must accept the guilt that follows from their misguided efforts as a mark of their finitude. Civilization will always have its discontents because human striving is always distorted by our selfish, sexual motivation. This is not something we can change, as Bahr would suggest, but something that we must accept in the penitential spirit. In this context Weininger cites Pascal's dictum, "le moi est ha'issable"(31-2). However, he does not believe that we can somehow get outside of ourselves; rather we have to transform ourselves from within. In the end we cannot change the world in a profound sense because we cannot change ourselves. It is the great delusion of modernity to think that we can. What we can do is change our attitude to ourselves, i.e., from one of self-sufficiency to one of self-criticism. The trick is to bring ourselves into a position to do so. It is not enough, Weininger insists in another posthumous essay that would seem to be thematically connected to (what I take to be) his critique of Bahr, to lay bare the nature of problems, as Bahr suggests; there is also the responsibility for doing something about solving them. Problems are always challenges to the rational person; they imply tasks to be accomplished: paraphrasing Kant he insists that problems without tasks are purposeless, whereas tasks without problems are groundless.81 The sense for problems must be concretized in terms of a sense for the concrete resolutions that those problems imply. Thus it is not for nothing that the endings of the last plays all involve radical transformations of their characters' ways of living such that they idealistically renounce what they have come to realize was merely pseudo-idealism: they awaken as from a dream to discover that they were never really alive. Furthermore all of this presupposes that we have a "center" to our personality, a Kantian self. 82 It is certainly not without significance that Weininger's defense of scientific knowledge here contrasts sharply with Bahr's irrationalist rejection of its importance for culture. In fact, Weininger's view that science is of definite, but limited, help in articulating the condition humaine provided it not lose sight of its philosophical moorings. Finally, one very basic point about Weininger's discussion of Ibsen should not go unnoticed, namely, the fact that Weininger offers a coherent interpretation of Ibsen, whereas Bahr for the most part simply extol~ what he takes to be important about him. Regardless of whether one ttgrecs with Weininger or not, it is possible to argue with his

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

81

position, whereas with Bahr, for the most part, it is a matter of take it or leave it. Weininger writes from within what he takes to be Ibsen's world, whereas Bahr writes about it. Whereas Bahr presses Ibsen into service as propaganda for Bahr's own program for the glorification of subjective feeling, Weininger develops a powerful moral critique of society on the basis of the deep-seated unity of logic and ethics in Kant and Ibsen. In doing so he thus brings substantial themes from Ibsen into fin de siecle Viennese cultural debates in aid of rehabilitating the universalistic ethical component in its flagging liberalism. Through Weininger, Ibsen became "grandfather" to the cultural opposition in fin de siecle Vienna, i.e., to the movement that we have termed "critical modernism," which refers to the attitude to culture of such figures as Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Arnold Schoenberg, who insisted with Weininger against Bahr that there could be no "drittes Reich." It would take us far afield here to pursue this topic at length. However, two manageable examples are in order: Georg Trakl 's aphorisms and Schoenberg's reference to Weininger in the Harmonielehre. In an oeuvre as small as it is important for twentieth-century German letters Trakl has left us two aphorisms: Knowledge comes only to someone who renounces happiness. 83 Feeling in moments of death-like being: all human beings are worthy of love. Awakening you feel the bitterness of the world, In it is all your unforgiven guilt; your poem an imperfect atonement. 114

Both of them can easily be taken as variations on Ibsen's "philosophy" as Weininger has presented it. The first aphorism is little more than the inversion of Reiling's observation from The Wild Duck, which Weininger quotes in a footnote: "take away the sham [Lebensliige] from the average person and you simultaneously take away his happiness with it"(l9). 85 It is certainly a central theme in Ibsen on any account. In the second, (which is clearly inspired by Dostoevsky as well) the idea that we live our lives, in a sense, in a death-like trance, from which we awaken with pain, is central both to Ibsen himselfl 6 and to Weininger's Ibsen, as is the idea that every person is worthy of love, and finally, that a guilt that we can at best partially expiate permeates our lives. Indeed, in a sense it is almost

82

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

as if Trakl wants to concentrate the whole of Weininger's essay into these four lines. So there is much to be said for the thesis that these "thoughts" originate with Weininger. In fact, as Trakl presented the second aphorism to Ludwig von Ficker he told him that it bore upon WeiningerY It, too, reflects Weininger's Kantian sentiment, "inasmuch as a human being affirms the humanity in his person, he takes pain upon himself and renounces happiness"(l9). 88 The Ibsen essay, perhaps more than Geschlecht und Charakter, tells us why. To the extent that the aphorisms express the "vision" that informs Trakl's poetry they form a crucial statement of his critique of the hedonist, self-indulgence characteristic of Bahr and Wiener Moderne. However, if the roots of the ideas they contain can be traced back to Weininger at all, it is clear that they are intimately related to the latter's way of reading Ibsen, whom we certainly can no longer ignore if we would understand the full cultural context from which Trakl emerged. 89 Let us turn to Schoenberg. It is well-known that he mentioned Weininger in the same breath as Strindberg and Maeterlinck as a serious thinker in criticizing what he took to be the decadence of an age obsessed with comfort: Our age seeks many things but it has found one thing above all: comfort. It imposes itself in its full breadth even in the world of ideas and makes us more comfortable than we ever should have been .... One solves problems in order to sweep our troubles away.... people of our age, who draw up new moral codes (or better cast aside old ones), cannot live with guilt! However, comfort does not consider self-discipline and thus guilt is rejected or elevated into a virtue....The thinker, who truly seeks something, does just the opposite. He shows that there are problems and that they are unsolved ... .like Weininger and all other serious thinkers 90

Schoenberg's interest in Weininger has for a long time been a bit of a mystery inasmuch as there is little in his oeuvre that has anything at all to do with Geschlecht und Charakter. This text, too, is not a pensee that has very much to do with Geschlecht und Charakter where there are no references to comfort. 91 However, the theme is absolutely central to Weininger's Ibsen essay. It seems that Schoenberg, too, was impressed by Weininger's interpretation of Peer's encounter with the Boyg. Here too there are grounds for making an essential connection between Ibsen and Schoenberg's critique of the Viennese version of modernity on the basis of Weininger's Ibsen essay. Such examples could be multiplied at great length. For example both ~he critical rationalism of Sir Karl Popper with its emphasis upon skepticism with rcsf)cct to our own ideas and the dialogical

Weininger, Ibsen, and the Origins of Viennese Critical Modernism

83

religious philosophy of Ferdinand Ebner with its emphasis upon our deep-seated tendency to lose ourselves in solipsistic, self-destructive daydreams (Traum vom Geist), which at first glance would seem to be totally opposed to one another, can be seen as rooted in Weininger's notion of self-mistrust and ultimately to Ibsen's dramatic analysis of our deep-seated tendencies to self-delusion. 92 Finally there is the case of Wittgenstein, whose deep respect for Weininger is as well-known as it is incomprehensible to most commentators. It would take a substantial analysis to articulate the impact of the ideas that ultimately originate in Weininger's Ibsen essay upon Wittgenstein's philosophy. It would be a crucial undertaking for understanding his philosophy because it would ultimately explain the origins of his preoccupation with the limits of thought and language, i.e., with precisely what separates him from logical positivism and the mainstream of analytical philosophy. In short, Weininger's encounter with Ibsen probably contributed more to the development of a profound critique of Viennese modernity-and of modernity itself-than any single fin de siecle work. Who would understand the "family resemblances" between Wittgenstein, Ebner, Trakl, Popper, and Schoenberg ignores Weininger at their peril. However, that is also to say that whoever would fathom the depths of that critical attitude to culture must be prepared to enter the moral world of Norway's greatest writer.

*

*

*

Weininger's legacy to fin de siecle critical modernists was to pose the problem of the limits of the self and a fortiori self-expression. He was the "theorist" of a critical modernism inasmuch as he laid the groundwork for the immanent critique of our tendencies to selfdeception in his essay on Ibsen. In Ferdinand Ebner's critique of the epistemology underpinning Richard Wagner's notion of artistic creativity we have one of the most important extensions of the critique of narcissism that Weininger developed with Ibsen's help. This is highly ironical for Weininger admired no work of art more than Wagner's Parsifal in which the idealist's "higher" love for the woman leads him to renounce sexuality entirely rather than debase her and himself in the sexual act. However, Wagner emphasizes that this is no mere self-castration but something mystical. Yet, the irony does not cease there, for Ebner would develop an equally powerful cri-

84

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

tique of Weininger himself from the point of view of Pascalian Christianity. These matters are as important for the cultural and intellectual history of Vienna 1900 as they are neglected. Among other things they help to show us how difficult it is to line up the "good guys" unequivocally on one side of a line with the "bad guys" on the other. If our culture is a "culture of narcissism" and if that culture is either in some way or other rooted in or anticipated by the developments of the Viennese fin de siecle, as is sometimes claimed, then it ought to be of paramount importance to understand the "philosophy" behind that fatal turn into ourselves that, in fact, cuts us off from our fellows. In Old Vienna the motor behind the development of a culture of narcissism was Hermann Bahr in his effort to transcend naturalism by espousing a "romanticism of nerves." For Bahr the important thing about my impressions of the world is not that they be accurate but that they be mine. Subjective intensity became the ultimate criterion of truth as it remains in pop culture today. Since my dreams and my ecstasies are more "mine" than the judgments I share with society around me, they are knowledge par excellence. They are the source of a "depth" that makes mere common sense seem banal. That was in essence the philosophy of symbolism. Nowhere was that Wagnerian influence upon fin de siecle Viennese culture more profound than at the Secession Beethoven Exposition of 1902. In the eyes of both the critics of contemporary culture and scholars writing about Viennese modernism Friedrich Nietzsche is often less than justly taken to be the source of the dubious irrationalism at the bottom of most of pop culture, then as now. That it was, in fact, Richard Wagner who provided the philosophical justification for this withdrawal into our own experience (among other things by helping to inspire Nietzsche to write the Birth of Tragedy) is almost a secret but even more of a secret is the fact that a Viennese thinker deeply influenced by Wagner-and Weininger-produced a profound critique of the solipsistic character of the Wagnerian form of Gnosticism. Thus our investigation of Viennese critical modernism turns to Ferdinand Ebner's critique of the notion that human fulfillment is to be identified with ecstasy and his effort to wake his countrymen from their narcissistic slumbers. /

4 Ebner Contra Wagner: Epistemology, Aesthetics, and Salvation in Vienna, 1900 Richard Wagner's role as the philosophical father of Viennese modernism 1 has been completely overlooked by cultural historians. In fact, it was Wagner and neither Ernst Mach nor Friedrich Nietzsche, who delivered the metaphysical and epistemological foundations for Viennese aestheticism. Furthermore, it was the service of the all but unknown philosopher of dialogue, Ferdinand Ebner, to have questioned the character of Wagner's contribution to Viennese modernism. Moreover, the very fact that all of this strikes us as completely new today is itself significant. There are many reasons why we have overlooked Wagner's contribution to Viennese modernism as well as for our ignoring Ebner. First, Wagner's "philosophy" is not particularly well-known today. That we have not paid much attention to Wagner's epistemology is not particularly surprising. We simply do not expect composers to be philosophers. Moreover, Wagner's theory of knowledge is to be found in a place where one would hardly expect to find it; namely, in his centennial essay on Beethoven in 1870. Second, its profound influence on Viennese modernism has largely been ignored. The fact that we have hardly noticed Wagner's importance in the development of Viennese modernism has much to do with the uncritical reception of Carl Schorske's views of Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession. Third, Wagner's most formidable opponent, Ferdinand Ebner, has largely been taken to be a mere "religious thinker" and not the rigorous social critic that he really was. We shall have to discuss all of these subjects in some detail. In order to put the picture right and thus to form an accurate estimate of Ebner's actual M5

86

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

contribution to fin de siecle Viennese culture in his critique of Wagner. To do so we must reexamine both the cultural situation in Vienna c.1900 as well as its historiography. Wagner's Beethoven essay of 1870 is typical of all of his theoretical writings inasmuch as it expresses as much his own idealized self-image as it provides an account of Beethoven's art. The subject of the Beethoven essay is the notion of the composer as the savior of his people. 2 Beethoven is important for Wagner as the Jesus Christ of music (with Josef Haydn playing the role of John the Baptist). 3 So it should be clear from the start that aesthetic achievement plays the role of legitimating a set of political and religious aspirations, which turn out to be Wagner's own. The aim of the essay is to provide metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings for his concept of cultural redemption. On Wagner's view, the artist, above all the composer, evokes form from the pure intuition of the unconscious forces of nature within him. 4 In order to articulate such an irrationalist, mechanistic view of aesthetic creativity Wagner borrows liberally from Arthur Schopenhauer, whom he frequently exploits for his own purposes. In Wagner's eyes, Schopenhauer delivered the philosophical foundations for a radically new German philosophy in precisely the same way that Beethoven delivered the foundations for a radically new German music. Wagner wants to demonstrate that culture is essentially musical on the basis of the idea that the musical genius stands in direct unmediated contact with reality in a way that is inaccessible to the puny average intellect be it of the scientist or of the metaphysician. 5 If Wagner is right, our concept of knowledge as well as our educational priorities are radically in need of revision along these "musical" lines. Schopenhauer's philosophy provided Wagner with an ideal point of departure inasmuch as Schopenhauer developed (1) a metaphysics that emphasized man's need for salvation; (2) an epistemology that purports to provide a foundation for the view that music could provide the requisite transformation of our dispositions to achieve salvation, because (3) the language of music is an entirely unmediated language and for that reason the highest form of art, since it conveys immediate insight into ultimate reality. Wagner employed all of these philosophical notions to establish Beethoven's preeminence among composers and, above all, the importance of his Ninth Symphony for the future of German culture. ,. /

Ebner Contra Wagner

87

Wagner's view of artistic creativity is, then, entirely Romantic and irrationalistic in nature. The artist creates his achievement out of the depths of his unfathomable intuition. 6 Despite the tensions between the mechanistic and non-mechanistic aspects of this conception of creativity and apparently under the influence of the materialistic monism that was fashionable during the fifties and sixties of the nineteenth century 7 Wagner emphasizes the physiological basis of these processes. Thus he arrives at a point where the artist is the instrument of his inner nature. In his unconscious mind thought emerges from nature while the "genius" sleeps. In order to understand the inner coherence of this curious position we shall have to spell out some of Schopenhauer's central hypotheses as Wagner interpreted them. It is well known that Schopenhauer considered music to be the highest form of art on account of the fact that music consisted exclusively of tone whereas all other forms of art require some form of pictures or images in order to represent an aspect of reality. Music on the contrary is direct expression of the will to live within us, the pulsating force of nature itself. That will, which strives to propagate itself through all biological phenomena, is essentially a vibrating substance. In everyday life we are unaware of this vibration because we are always concentrating on some object or other outside of ourselves. In order to concentrate upon an object we require an idea or inner image of it (eine Vorstellung), which thus stands between us and the intentional object. That image actually constitutes the object of thought and is an instrument in the biological struggle for reproductive success, a third hand, as it were. This subject-object relationship originates in the individual's desire for survival as it creates intellectual instruments in order to cope with life's challenges. On Schopenhauer's view, all order in the world, in fact, serves this purpose. Thus the world of conscious experience is merely appearance. In fact, it is an ontological illusion, inasmuch as we are ourselves inclined to seek some "deeper" reality "behind" them. However, the very nature of our mind is such that it prevents us from attaining knowledge of an extra-mental reality. Reality can only be intuited in the sense of being felt, i.e., as we feel that we are alive. In his exposition of Schopenhauer's philosophy, Wagner calls this world of pure appearance the Light World 8 for everything which we can see presupposes the subject-object dichotomy. Outside of the Light World of conscious experience there is also that .to which hearing

88

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

gives us exclusive access. In contrast to the Light World before us, it is the Sonic World in us, the reality that we ourselves are, that we feel reverberating in us. This primordial reality consists of matter in motion, but the matter is living matter and thus its movement is basically a pulsating or vibrating, which we experience as instinct. Since this vibrating will to live underlies everything that we consciously do, it cannot itself be the object of knowledge or scientific investigation. It can only be felt and, in a sense, heard but only in a paradoxical sense, not consciously. According to Wagner there is an essential difference between hearing and seeing inasmuch as hearing does not require that we represent its object. He considered that hearing unites subject and object directly, i.e., without mediation. The proof, Wagner thought, is that there cannot be illusions about the fact that I hear a tone. 9 In Schopenhauer's language the tone is an immediate expression of the will to live, which is always present. We fail to notice this because practical necessity requires that we suppress much that we perceive to prevail in the struggle for survival. Selective perception apart, in everyday life seeing and hearing are mixed. Only in sleep do we have access to pure tone in itself, i.e., to the pulsating of the will. 10 The pure psychological activity of the brain during sleep is nothing less than an immediate experience of the reality of the primordial will. We experience its reality directly in our dreams. In dreams a select few, the geniuses among us, experience the primordial reality of the vibrating will in their own brains. Thus Wagner terms the brain the dream organ. 11 The artist, on Wagner's view, is simultaneously sleepwalker and metaphysician, who transcends the Light World of representation, i.e., everything that can be said in words. Instead he lives, moves, and has his being in a pure Sonic World, i.e., in a purely musical realm. This enables Wagner to explain the brilliant musical productions of the old, deaf Beethoven12 : the genius experiences while sleeping the vibrating reality of the will to live in his own brain directly as the deepest existential affliction, as a dream full of anxiety, in which, according to Schopenhauer's metaphysics, he experiences his own annihilation as an individual, from which he consequently awakes with a scream. 13 Out of the depths of this terrifying dream, which is itself not directly describable, the genius creates a se~ond allegorical dream, which recapitulates and summarizes the first. His representation of those tones is, consequent!~, an allegorical repetition in leitmotif

Ebner Contra Wagner

89

forms with rhythmic structure of the reality he has heard in the dream. As such, music contains the essence of mute gesture, i.e., dance in itself. Now all of this is surely dubious as philosophy but this exposition is certainly interesting as an articulation and justification of Wagner's own compositional ideal. So we should not be surprised to find his further effort to legitimate himself on the basis of Goethe's view that music is essentially dramatic and thus every effort to compose music for a written text instead of forming a text in the music is degenerate. The concept of aesthetics that emerges from this discussion is entirely symbolist. The reality that the genius experiences can only be expressed in music because it can only be directly felt and not imagined. For that reason every effort to summarize that experience has to be an imageless imitation. Musical composition is thus a structural analogy to a reality that cannot be pictured. The intervals through which harmony comes into being are symbolic forms of what the genius experiences as immediate revelation of the inner laws of reality in his dreams. Thus the composer pronounces the most profound metaphysical truths, truths that the intellect cannot comprehend, in his music. Thus originates the magic power of the composer to induce rapture, and thus his capacity to redeem, on the basis of the art in his melodies. The musical genius repeats his experience of the inconceivable nature of reality in allegorical or symbolic form 14 and on the basis of the result facilitates our spiritual renewal in much the same way that Max Weber's charismatic politician transforms bureaucratic rationality through total transcendence of standard principles of order. (The similarities here are hardly incidental. 15 ) This was Beethoven's achievement in the Ninth Symphony and Wagner's own in Tristan und Isolde. Although there are no direct references to Wagner's own works in the Beethoven essay its self-referential character is beyond doubt, 16 it contains an important formulation of Wagner's aesthetic ideal, namely, creating an absolute unity of feeling, between singers and orchestra as well as between musicians and audience in which spiritual renewal is attained on the basis of the work of art. In order to produce this transformation all of the participants in the "happening" have to lose themselves in the music. Thus the music has to be so composed that it is dramatic to the point of being able to move us deeply with its power. Here two issues that should be kept apart are conflated by Wagner: the ideal

90

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

that the tension in the opera has to be based upon the music alone and not the text and the idea that musical order is irrational in nature. The consequences of the former lead ultimately to the mature Schoenberg and his twelve tone technique; whereas the latter lead to the aestheticism of the Secession and the early, more "expressionist" Schoenberg (as well as forming the aesthetic basis for the Salzburg Festival). 17 In any case, everybody involved in the production of the opera has to surrender their rational faculties of thought and reflection in order to experience renewal of their feelings on the basis of pure hearing. Pure hearing is a feeling of ecstasy that transports us far beyond the bounds of everyday experience to that psychic state of emotional intensity, which Robert Musil referred to as the "Other Condition." 18 This musical ideal is presented by Wagner as the aesthetic ideal pure and simple, supporting his view with the help of Goethe, who, as we have seen, insisted that all art aspired to the condition of music.19 In this context Wagner refers to Shakespeare as that dramatist whose works most fully incorporate musical magic. For Wagner, whose biggest flop, Love Prohibited (Das Liebesverbot) was an adaptation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure strongly influenced musically by Meyerbeer, Shakespeare is the poetic counterpart to Beethoven; for in his works theater attains musical qualities without music (a view that has certain merits 20 ). Be that as it may, in Wagner's eyes the essential element in the work of art is that striving for musical form that is simultaneously dramatic form. In contrast to his early writing where Wagner explicitly used the term Gesamtkunstwerk, albeit in another sense/ 1 the Beethoven essay offers us Wagner's own description of that ideal in its purest form. Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk is not merely a unification of the fine arts with the performing arts; rather it is an effort to transform all of the arts into something essentially musical. Thus the tendency to synasthesia, i.e., the endeavor to transfer experiences from one sense to another, typically from the eye to the ear or vice versa, is implicit in Wagner's view of art. It is perhaps most clearly attained in Tristan and Parsifal. 22 Certainly, if one needed a philosophical manifesto for Symbolism, there is scarcely a better one than Wagner's Beethoven essay. Here art is infinitely more than an impressionistic rendering of the artist's sensations; for the meaning of the work of art, regardless of the genre;' is always and evcl)'where essentially connected to allegori-

Ebner Contra Wagner

91

cal music theater. Consequently, the artist must always strive for the realization of the lyrical potential in his art, be it sculpture, poetry, or painting. As the somnambulistic artist, who shapes a second symbolic dream from the scream at wakening from the first dream, he effects a kind of salvation from the dream which is everyday life inasmuch as he transforms the latter thoroughly. 23 This also explains how it could be that Wagner could have identified this redeeming view of art expressly with Luther's reformation of Christianity. 24 It has less to do with the content of traditional Protestantism than with a reform of our ways of living along the aesthetic and ethical lines that Wagner ascribed to Schopenhauer. 25 At any rate, it is necessary to emphasize here how difficult it is to take seriously views such as Wagner's which are, in fact, deeply rooted in the tradition of nineteenth-century German liberal Protestantism as well as Romanticism. However, that too was a part of the heritage that Wagner bequeathed to fin de siecle Vienna. That heritage would play a particularly important role in the development of the peculiar form of aestheticism known as Viennese modernism as the example of the Beethoven Exhibition of the Secession in 1902 indicates. Seldom in the history of art has there ever been such a solipsistictic assemblage of artists as there was at this exhibition and nowhere were the values of Viennese Jugendstil so praised as the enfant.\' terribles of the Vienna art scene celebrated their collective brilliance. "If ever there was an example of collective narcissism," writes Carl Schorske, "this was it: artists (Secessionists) celebrating an artist (Max Klinger) celebrating a hero of art (Beethoven). The catalog of the show spoke of the Secession's 'longing for a great task' hence the idea of undertaking what our age challenges the artist to provide: the purposive development of inner space. The Beethoven show was indeed a Gesamtkunstwerk of aestheticized inwardness." 26 In spite of this entirely appropriate description of occasion, Schorske's views about the origins of that narcissism with its irrationalist foundations are in need of revision. Schorske explains the intellectual origins of that movement by tracing its origins back to Nietzsche thereby explicitly ignoring the art historian Peter Vergo's view ac· cording to which this celebration took shape around Wagner's interpretation of Schopenhauer. 27 In order to prove his allegation Schorske draws our attention to the fact that Viennese intellectuals at the time scarcely distinguished between Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche. However, that is no reason why we should not. In any

92

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

case, in explaining the values of the Secessionists he gives Nietzsche pride of place. Their intoxication had its source in Zarathustra's "Drunken Song." Schorske bases this view upon an iconographic analysis of the highly controversial allegorical picture, "Philosophy," that Gustav Klimt painted for the university aula in 1900, which he claims owes more to Nietzsche than Wagner. 28 But does it? To argue that it does, without further ado, is to argue highly anachronistically by ignoring that at the center of this exhibition was none other than Max Klinger, a well-known devotee of Schopenhauer. Furthermore, it ignores the considerable influence that Wagner exerted upon Klimt himself. Now the views of Schorske and Verga in fact scarcely rule one another out. Yet, for Schorske they somehow must. Otherwise his whole interpretation of Vienna 1900 must be called into question. Since that view of Vienna 1900 has become canonical it will be worthwhile to examine it at length. If Klimt had been directly inspired by Nietzsche it would be easy to draw a direct line from the painting of the Secession to Gustav Mahler's music, since it is more than clear that Mahler found his way to independence as a composer via precisely that Nietzsche text. 29 Moreover, if that was also correct with respect to Klimt, it would have been possible to consider Klimt-Nietzsche-Mahler as a fixed constellation and consequently as the founders of an irrational and illiberal movement, which rebelled against the moral-scientific culture of the liberal Grunder, which itself so thoroughly marked the fin de siecle. Since there were indeed such currents in Vienna around 1900 Schorske's scenario is thoroughly plausible. However, that very plausibility conceals two important problems with the thesis. First, Schorske applies the epithet irrationalist indiscriminately to Nietzsche, i.e., irrespective of the differences between his views in his various works, above all, irrespective of his profound critique of Wagner. Second, he interprets the Beethoven Exhibition exclusively on the basis of Klimt's iconography without taking the sense of the exhibition as a whole into consideration. If we consider these matters differently, we shall come to grasp why Wagner's interpretation of Schopenhauer is a superior account to Schorske's Nietzschean view of the philosophical roots of Viennese aestheticism. No historian of philosophy today would consider Nietzsche an irrationalist without further qualification. After the researches of Kaufmann, 30 Janz, 31 and any number of others it is hardly possi):>le to consider Nietzsche's distinction be-

Ebner Contra Wagner

93

tween the Apollonian and the Dionysian elements within culture a simple dualism or for that matter as Nietzsche's last word on art. The complex relationship between the two does not permit being reduced to a simple black-white opposition. Nietzsche's original point was that they are connected with one another in the context of ancient Greek tragedy. Thus Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian is compatible with a certain view of Enlightenment such as we find, for example, in Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, which is, for all its emphasis upon the limits of reason, anything but irrationalist. 32 That is not to say that Nietzsche is without significance for the fin de siecle; rather it seems that historians of philosophy have yet to explain his role in that joyous apocalypse adequately. In any case, Schorske' s interpretation is altogether too simple and for that reason out of the question with respect to adequacy. Here one might object: all well and good, but Schorskc SJX'aks about the way Nietzsche was construed at the turn of the century and not about the historical Nietzsche. However, precisely when Wl' consider the common view of Nietzsche in Vienna at the turn of till' century we discover that it was nothing other than the associ at ion with Schopenhauer and Wagner that marked the image of Nil'tzsl'lll' then. If Nietzsche was falsely interpreted, it was due to his havill).!. been identified with Schopenhauer, who was equally misundl·rstood then as well as with Wagner, whose views-and here he is utterly different from Nietzsche-were so crude that they were seldom misunderstood. Moreover, one important source of such misunderstandings is the fact that these thinkers were oflcn viewed through the eyes of their enemies, who had little interest in representing them correctly in the heated polemics of the era. Thus, should the image of Nietzsche that Schorske has offered us seem to fit the way he was viewed in Vienna at the turn of the century, it is because it is, in fact, an image that has been distorted by Wagner. Schorske's view of Nietzsche's reception in Vienna has to be questioned on these grounds. The dubious element in Schorske's view of Nietzsche is closely related to the American historian's view of the Secession's Beethoven Exhibition of 1902. Schorske's work on Vienna is characterized by a laudable concern for iconography. One can certainly learn a great deal about Vienna 1900 from his painstaking and penetrating iconographical analyses of literary images such as the Garden. However, Schorske exaggerates when he insists that the whole sig-

l II 94

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

nificance of the Beethoven Exhibition and thus the ideological foundation of fin de siecle aestheticism can be derived from the iconography of Klimt's Beethoven frieze. Schorske opposes the erotic representation of Klimt's Beethoven to Max Klinger's heroic depiction of the composer in his famous statue. Thus he writes, "The Beethoven frieze was his [Klimt's] fullest statement of the ideal of art as a refuge from modem life. In 'Beethoven,' the dreamer's utopia, wholly abstracted from that life's historical concreteness, is itself imprisonment in the womb, a fulfillment through regression. The Orphic inversion of the Promethian tradition is complete. The tomb that Klimt had opened in his 'Music' in the name of truth has claimed its own once more in the name of beauty." 33 A more exact description of Wagner's position-and a more dubious presentation of Nietzscheis scarcely possible. Moreover, in Schorske's narrative the focal point of the Secession's celebration, namely, Max Klinger himself, falls completely out of sight. Although it would be a mistake to identify Klinger's philosophi34 cal views entirely with those of the Secessionists, it is an error to fail to consider his deep indebtedness to Schopenhauer's philosophy as a source of his concept of art, so great a disciple of Schopenhauer's was Klinger. Indeed, seldom in the history of art has there been such a close dependence of an artist upon a philosopher, between philosophical ideas and artistic practice, as in the case of Klinger's inspiration from Schopenhauer. Thus Alexander Duckers 35 speaks of Klinger's strict adherence to the teachings of Schopenhauer. Duckers writes further, "With reference to Klinger we should elaborate upon this judgment [of Thomas Mann concerning the notion that Schopenhauer's dark realm of the Will is in fact identical with what Freud calls "the unconscious" or the Id]. His [Klinger's] understanding of the world is based upon Schopenhauer, not on Nietzsche, from whom he could find nothing that had not already been communicated to him by the former." 36 What Klinger got from Schopenhauer was closely related to what Wagner emphasized in his Beethoven essay. Thus Renate Hertleb writes, "The Symbolist turns away from the representation of the reality that surrounds him as trivial and repulsive and cultivates a dream world in which the 37 fantastic, the visionary and the demonic play an eminent role." The step from Klinger's Schopenhauerian reflections to Wagner's interpretation of Schopenhauer is really short indeed. Moreover, that view embraces everything that belongs to the narcissistic aesthetics

Ebner Contra Wagner

95

of the Secessionists. Consequently, the views of Peter Verga and Carl Schorske in fact compliment one another. Schorske creates a problem rather than solving one by focusing our attentions exclusively upon Nietzsche to the exclusion of Wagner. The justification of the ideal according to which creativity is "secreted" unconsciously from the brain of the genius, who is, of course, a musician, thus originates ideologically in the constellation Schopenhauer-Wagner. We lose nothing if we put Wagner ideologically at the center of this movement. On the contrary, we grasp everything that Schorske wants to call our attention to more clearly. Thus we have the advantage that the Nietzschean ideas that Schorske appeals to as absolutely belonging to the explanation of the aestheticism of the Beethoven Exhibition are now recognized as distortions of Nietzsche's actual position. If this account is correct, Wagner's ideas are intimately connected to the intellectual developments that transformed Vienna into the "cultural hothouse" that it was at the tum of the century. Thus Wagner cannot be omitted from the discussion if we are to evaluate these developments precisely. Schorske's evaluation of these developments is almost identical to that of Karl Kraus, although Kraus is only mentioned in passing in his book. Like Kraus, Schorske considers that the Secessionists simply made the typically Viennese tendency to confuse urns and chamber pots worse. Their dream world was nothing other than a refuge, wherein pressing problems, for example, concerning justice, were merely swept under the carpet. Secessionist ornamentation was a Dorian Gray face that camouflaged nature cosmetically. Schorske seems to emphasize this point of view when he discusses the aestheticization of politics at the hands of his celebrated triptych Schonerer-Lueger-Herzl. Surely, if a moral-scientific culture was replaced by a culture of fantasy as Schorske alleges, then Richard Wagner played an absolutely crucial role in that transition. Furthermore, since the all but unknown religious thinker Ferdinand Ebner insisted already then that the Wagnerian conception of creativity was essentially problematic, he should be considered along with Kraus as one of the most important critical modernists of the era. In addition, since Wagner, in fact, represented the values of the dawning media-dominated era-or, better, invented it, for there is much to be said for the thesis-Ebner's critique of the Wagnerian dream theory of artistic creativity ought to be considered among the most significant critical

I

II I

II

96

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

achievements of the fin de siecle. Perhaps a critic might want to question that claim with the riposte that Ebner produced his critique only in the course of World War. This is certainly true, but it fails to take into account that the Wagnerian view of art and creativity had not become any less important in the meantime. Further, it is precisely the "internal" character of Ebner's criticism of Wagner which makes him so important for Viennese cultural history. What are the main lines of Ebner's critique of Wagner's philosophical account of creativity? We can begin with an observation of Ebner's: "Wagner, Weininger, psychoanalysis and Karl Kraus are infantile diseases that one has to catch before one becomes immune to them." With respect to everything Wagnerian this remark seems very similar to the sort of objections that Nietzsche made to Wagner in The Case of Wagner, where he asserted that Wagner was modernity itself in all its problematic character: we have no recourse but to become Wagnerian if we want to transcend Wagner. 38 After the researches of Gerald Stieg, 39 Klaus Dethloff, 40 and others it is clear what Ebner means with respect to Kraus, psychoanalysis, and Weininger; however, in Ebner's own writings as well as in the literature on Ebner Wagner is scarcely mentioned and never in an important context. So the question emerges: why Wagner? The fact that Wagner is always mentioned in connection with Beethoven in the Kosel edition of Ebner's writings certainly gives us a clue to the answer. But we are sure of little more. What is certain is that Ebner identified Wagner with those cultural forces that tempt us to take ourselves too seriously and ultimately provoke us to self-delusion. Briefly, any attempt to ascertain with certainty why Ebner mentions Wagner next to Kraus, psychoanalysis, and Weininger must involve a certain amount of speculation, but that is not of itself a reason to ignore the topic. 41 Yet, after the aforementioned research we know at last that the point of departure for establishing Wagner's role in Ebner's thinking must proceed from the fact that Ebner took Wagner as seriously as the other three, otherwise he would not have mentioned him. Why did he take Wagner so seriously? Certainly Wagner's masterpiece Tristan und Isolde with its dream-like, seductive, rapture-inducing character as well as Wagner's German nationalism and his pantheistic fatalist version of Christianity made Wagner suspect in Ebner's eyes. Transformation of our feelings on the basis of music so composed as to p;oduce the effect of the audience becoming

Ebner Contra Wagner

97

one with the musicians in the same way that the orchestra and the human voice, as well as the music and the action, melt into one another-the sort that Wagner strove for-was entirely foreign to the mature Ebner-although he well understood its temptations. We know as well that everything that the mature Ebner expressed in his book The Word and the Spiritual Realities was rooted in a profound self-criticism. All of the things that the mature Ebner despised were things that the young Ebner had found irresistible. For that reason it is an error to consider Ebner's total rejection of Wagner's notion of salvation through rapture as a mere delusional dream of spiritual reality as mere fideism or fundamentalism as is often done. In fact Ebner understood Wagner on the basis of a fascination with salvation through ecstatic experience, from within as it were, and was thus all the more aware of the dangerous temptation to solipsism that Wagner presented, to which Austrians, especially, Viennese intellectuals were so deeply prone (today the pattern would seem 11Hll'l' typical of Parisian philosophers). How did Ebner find his way from Wagner and German nationulism to Kierkegaard and personalistic Christianity? That is u Inn~ story. At the risk of oversimplification one might say the followin~. His aphorism about childhood diseases is a crucial clue ..He sturtl·d from Wagner's dream theory of creativity, which he came to cl'iticize on the basis of Weininger's interpretation of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Freud then showed him how abstract philosophy was a kind of daydreaming. Kraus, in his turn, showed him how psychoanalysis just put the problem on another level without ever really solving it. In Christianity alone does it become clear that the Other we seek is a person, who can only be reached in direct dialogue and not in any abstract way be it theoretical or therapeutic. For our purposes here the early part of the story is crucial. Ebner's first philosophical position in the period around 1907 was strong) y influenced by Otto Weininger's (Kantian) view of ethics, i.e., that we become human only inasmuch as we recognize the humanity of others. 42 He distanced himself from Weininger's abstract view of ethics only with the utmost difficulty. His notion of "spiritual fantasizing" (Traum vom Geist), i.e., the solipsistic preoccupation with ourselves that systematically prevents us from reaching the Other, originated in a similarly critical-and painful-confrontation with Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in which the distinction be-

98

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

tween dreaming and day-dreaming was called into question. Distancing himself from his fascination with Kraus's morally motivated satirical social critique was the most difficult task of all. However, it was Kraus who gave him the ultimate weapon that he would use against our tendency to "spiritual fantasizing"-and Kraus himselfthe Word. For Ebner the Word would facilitate breaking out of the self-imposed solipsism of our day-dreams and reaching the Other in dialogue. The self-critical character of Ebner's confrontations with Weininger, Freud, and Kraus would seem to indicate that any confrontation with Wagner would have the same character. Thus it is safe to assume that Wagner, too, left a profound mark upon Ebner's major work, The Word and the Spiritual Realities. So much for the relation of Ebner to Wagner, in general, but what can we say about the role of Wagner's Beethoven essay in the formation of Ebner's thought? Since there is no explicit discussion of Wagner in Ebner's works, we must pose the question: did Ebner know the work at all? There is nothing to prove conclusively that he did and it is indeed possible that he did not read it, however, it is scarcely possible that he never discussed it with his close friend the notorious critic of both Beethoven and Wagner and inventor of composition with twelve tones, Josef Matthias Hauer, in the course of their frequent conversations at Cafe Uhn's "Hauer table" in Wiener Neustadt, 43 for Ebner's confrontation with Hauer was as intensive as Hauer's with Wagner. 44 Moreover, significant aspects of Ebner's own view of how we awaken to the true spiritiual reality in the Other, our "Thou," exactly parallels Wagner's epistemological scenario for creativity but with reversed polarities, as it were. What is positive for Wagner is negative for Ebner. Thus Ebner's importance attaches to his being a "hedgehog" in Isaiah Berlin's terms, a thinker with one powerful central insight - one that was intimately linked to a grasp of the dangerously seductive power in Wagner's art. Be that as it may, if the structural similarities that we have been stressing between Wagner and Ebner are, in fact, present, then an encounter between Ebner and Wagner should be easy to reconstruct. In the face of Wagner's dream theory of artistic creativity Ebner raises the Socratic question, is an unconscious life, even a creative one, really worth living. He draws a sharp distinction between conscious and unconscious life, which is structurally parallel to Wagner's distinction between dreall}(ng and wakefulness while not entirely

Ebner Contra Wagner

99

identical with it. For Ebner there will be a solipsistic form of wakeful dreaming characteristic of the monological ego as it remains encapsulated in itself. Be that as it may, for Wagner the gap between conscious and unconscious life is, in the last analysis, that between conformity and creativity. For Ebner this gap corresponds to the opposition between an uncritical preoccupation within one's self, which he terms "Ego-encapsulation" (lch-Einsamkeit), and a selfcritical confrontation with the Other as Other. Ebner's analysis of the human condition places before us a choice between remaining slaves to our biological inclinations to indulge in dangerous, if pleasant, forms of daydreaming or actively taking up the challenge and risks of engaging the Other in dialogue. The crucial point is that we must do something, not merely think about it. Thus, he presses the question upon us what is really at stake here? What is the human value of creativity and cultural achievement? Is there one at all? He poses this question in the form of a penetrating analysis of the state of dreaming, which emphasizes the continuity between dream while sleeping and self-induced daydreams. In order to elucidate the "internal" relationship between Wagner's epistemology and Ebner's "pneumatology" or the view that spiritual45 reality first emerges in dialogue we must identify the similarities in their thinking in order to establish their true differences. Were we to ask Ebner about the source of the discontents of our civilization, he would respond by attributing the modern malaise, i.e., the obsession with the self typical of Viennese modernist aesthetes, to "spiritual fantasizing" (Traum vom Geist). Spiritual fantasizing is a sort of dreaming in wakefulness according to which we give free play to all of our egocentric tendencies and thereby encapsulate ourselves in a pleasant dream world of our own making where all our wishes are fulfilled rather than face the risks and conflicts in the real world and the efforts we need to make if we are in fact to attain the fulfillment that we all seek be it in politics, science, philosophy, art, or love itself. 46 In relation to Wagner's epistemology the interesting point here is that Ebner's notion of "spiritual fantasizing" in fact presupposes Wagner's view of the origin of the work of art. To the extent that there is an internal link between Ebner and Wagner there will also be an internal link to the aesthetics of the Secession that will make Ebner's critique of Wagner highly relevant to evaluating that movement. The difference between them is that everything that Wagner praises as having absolute value is taken to have

100

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

only a relative value by Ebner. For the most part Ebner accepts Wagner's dream scenario but reverses his value judgments. Above all Ebner emphasizes a Christian notion of salvation that is only possible on the basis of conscious hearing the Word of God. Like Kierkegaard, by whom he was profoundly influenced, Ebner distinguishes strictly between the aesthetic sort of hearing involved in the experience of music and the religious sort of hearing of the Word of God, i.e., the logos of St. John. 47 The cry of pain plays an important role in the transition to redeeming hearing. 48 Third, both Wagner and Ebner emphasize how all cultural creativity is ultimately rooted in the unconscious mind of a somnambulist. In fact such artists live in a state of dreaming. 49 Moreover, the conventional view of high culture simply prolongs the dream. We can consider Ebner's reversal of the Wagnerian positmn nothing less than a transvaluation of values. The same phenomenon is viewed from two utterly different ethico-religious perspectives. For Wagner the whole story begins and ends in our biological nature. He never attains the saving word whose pronouncing is the very confrontation with the Other. He never finds a way out of our solipsistic somnambulism. 50 Similar to Wagner, but with a completely different set of priorities Ebner describes how cultural phenomena arise in the dreams of the genius. But his dreams are mankind's "spiritual fantasies." For that very reason all the products of genius are essentially suspect in Ebner's eyes. Moreover, at this point Ebner is especially rigorous: all creativity originates from an intellectual point of view which is in essence solipsistic and thus anti-social. For that reason Ebner had to consider the sort of collective celebration of artistic creativity that the Secessionists perpetrated in the name of Beethoven, which in fact further mythologized the artistic ego, as the zenith of self-delusion, i.e., the very sort of egocentric encapsulation which turns the world into a dream that is really a nightmare. In reality, Wagner locks himself into his lonely ego and confines himself in a dream world from which Ebner would seek escape. The results of this sort of loneliness and isolation might be bewitching in everything that concerns form but from a human point of view they are nothing other than neurotic or perhaps even psychotic in nature. Spiritual fantasy originates when human individuals are tormented by their very incompleteness (an idea as old as Plato with reverberatio,ns in Schopenhauer and Weininger). Those very torments press the individual to try tcr overcome the Thou-less situation of the iso-

Ebner Contra Wagner

101

lated individual in thought or reflection. Thus the thoughts of the frustrated because partnerless individuals move them to project everything that they miss in the world onto a daydream. They then proceed to proclaim the resultant dream world an ideal reality. In the end they attempt to flee into the more perfect world, which is, in fact, but a figment of their imaginations. In the end, the loneliness that our somnambulistic condition entails becomes unbearable. Despite the consolations of the ideal reality that we have fashioned for ourselves as a refuge from frustrating reality we find no fulfillment there. That, Ebner insists, is only possible in intercourse with the other. Only then is the human spirit born in the dialogue between two persons. Thus Ebner will speak of spiritual reality only in the plural. So we wake, exactly like Wagner's creative somnambul.ist, from our spiritual fantasizing with a cry of pain: "I am and I suffer."51 Nothing that I can do alone will help me here. I simply need the Other, my Thou, whose recognition in dialogue alone makes me into a real person as I recognize the personality of the Other. Thus the cry remains at the center of Ebner's elucidation of the condition humaine. It is no less significant that this cry remains essentially musical. The song, whose primitive ancestor is the cry is nothing other than the longing of the Thou-less person (Ebner speaks of lch-Einsamkeit as a state of Du-losikeit) for the redeeming Word that establishes a relationship with the Thou and thus anchors the pair in concrete objectivity. The song is thus the personification as it were of a Thou-less interiority, which is also a counterfeit of genuine spirituality. At this point Ebner appeals directly to Kierkegaard in establishing the view that music presents the strongest temptation to abide in the dreaming state of spiritual fantasizing. 52 Of itself, music seduces the seeker after truth into a state of ecstasy, i.e., a Thou-less mysticism, which is, in fact, a kind of pseudo-redemption. Thus originates Ebner's view of Wagner as a kind of childhood disease against which one must become immune before one can recognize the spiritual reality of the other. 53 Ebner's own philosophizing in Das Wort und die geistigen Realitiiten thus takes the form inter alia of meditation directed at bringing the reader to recognize the deep frustrations of the monological form of life that is aestheticism. To conclude: Schorske's thesis with respect to the Secession Exhibition of 1902 and its crucial importance for Viennese aestheticism at the turn of the century is correct inasmuch as Schorske in-

102

Ebner Contra Wagner

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

sists that the culture vultures of Viennese modernism rejected the values of rationality and self-sacrifice. It is false inasmuch as it emphasizes that the exclusive philosophical source of Viennese symbolism was Nietzsche. Wagner's general irrationalism as well as his concept of genius as developed in the Beethoven essay formed the basis for that exhibition around which the values of Viennese modernism coalesced. To be sure, Nietzsche played an important role, but it was a secondary one. Schorske is surely right again with respect to the Secession as source for the dissemination of irrationalism in Vienna. Nevertheless, we must take Ebner's cultural criticism generally and especially his "pneumatological" account of intellectual life (Geist) if one were to give a complete account of the problem of artistic creativity in fin de siecle Vienna. Here again Schorske's view that Viennese aestheticism helped pave the road to a politics of fantasy in Vienna 1900 that is ultimately of tremendous significance for understanding the origins of National Socialism and thus for European politics in the twentieth century generally can only be deepened by bringing Wagner into the picture. The very idea of a cultural ideal or world-view (Weltanschauung) with a privileged access to knowledge, which the Vienna Circle so adamantly opposed, the promise of a transformation of our inner nature on the basis of ecstatic experience in the encounter with a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), which could renew the spirit of a downtrodden people are all central ideas to Wagner that are at best peripheral to Nietzsche. Of course, we should guard against monocausal oversimplifications here. Nevertheless, Wagnerism generally and Viennese Wagnerism specifically played a crucial role in the cultural background to National Socialism that we ignore at our periP4 What is crucial here is that there is an internal relationship between Wagner's epistemology and the National Socialists' exploitation of the then newly developed mass media. Were it necessary to give an account of the effect that Hitler's speeches had upon their hearers, one could find it in Wagner's philosophy and nowhere more clearly articulated than in the Beethoven essay. There we find precisely that emphasis upon the irrational revitalization of the people through the experience of loudly resonating sounds that characterized the speeches in which Hitler created the very unity of the people that he provided them. His speeches are in a sense Wagnerian operas with their leitmotifs, repetitions, and monumental length. Like Kraus, Ebner' had already under,Stood the problematic, solipsistic dimen-

103

sion to the cultural crisis they faced with crystal clarity and they attacked it vehemently each in his own fashion as excluding all forms of genuine reflection and criticism. Ebner's pneumatology itself may contain strong elements of what Fritz Stem has called "cultural despair,"55 but it also contains in its confrontation with Wagner's philosophy a moment of immeasurable importance for the understanding and evaluation of Viennese modernism and its cultural heritage.

*

*

*

One of the critical modernist paths (the term should not be construed as applying to something monolithic) beyond the modernism of Young Vienna and the Secession as we conventionally have come to understand it was a religious one whose character and importance has scarcely been recognized in international discussions of Vienna 1900. Like Weininger, but in a considerably less confusing and controversial way, Ebner sought a means to wake the Viennese from their narcissistic slumbers. Unlike Weininger, Ebner considered that Wagner's conception of art and culture bears with it deep problems and a tendency to self-encapsulation that ultimately prevents rather than furthers human self-realization: Indeed, for all their similarities, Ebner came to see Weininger's Kantian ethical stance, too, as a form of "spiritual fantasizing." On Ebner's Jansenist view only dialogue between an I and a Thou could save us from our deep-seated tendencies to self-deception concerning transcendence. Neither philosophy nor art could be of the slightest help. Yet, was Ebner not throwing out the baby with the bathwater? Surely there is much that is problematic in modem art and culture but it seems that there ought to be room even on a Jansenist view of culture-think only of Racine-for a form of art that is inducive to self-criticism. It is precisely doubt with respect to this that leads scholars to find Ebner guilty of "cultural despair" (Kulturpessimismus). Yet, his master Karl Kraus (who was also not spared Ebner's wrath), remained convinced that there was a possibility for a satirical art to tum the tables on the power of spiritual fantasy. For Kraus it was the opera buffa of Jacques Offenbach that represented the zenith of satirical social critique. There is more to that opinion than meets the eye and that not only justifies but demands that we inject a "vertical" axis to Offenbach's Paris into our discussion of Vienna 1900. Be that as it may, should one find the fact that Kraus so venerated a French sati-

104

Wittperstein's Vienna Revisited

rist strange, one should merely consider the French origins of Kraus's undertaking in the Fackel, which was ultimately modeled on the Parisian anti-Bonapartist satirical review La Lanterne, that appeared in the French capital between 1868 and 1870. The history of culture, unlike political and legal history, is anything but a simple matter of "before and after."

5 Offenbach: Art between Monologue and Dialogue

/

Concern for dialogue as the establishment of genuine communication between I and Thou is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Surely, it is not the case that philosophers from Plato to Diderot, Hegel, and Feuerbach, or playwrights from Sophocles to Ibsen and Strindberg, were not concerned with dialogue, and its cognate dialectics before that. However, it is only in the twentieth century that the problem of distinguishing genuinely interpersonal communication from its counterfeits has had a way of pressing itself upon reflective human beings as the central ethical and philosophical problem. It is possible to be more precise about this. The centrality of dialogue in human life and in philosophy that we have come to recognize, is, at least in part, a consequence of World War I. In the wake of the destruction of the secure and stable "world of yesterday," as Stefan Zweig called it in the title of a book better read as autobiography than as history, came an awareness that the splendid art nouveau fa~ade of prewar culture was constructed, as it were, of papier mache. Its certainties, above all, the liberal vision of progress, crumbled. Thus, The Great Illusion, originally the title of Norman Angell's alleged proof that protracted war was self-destructive and, hence, impossible, is today wholly identified with Jean Renoir's magnificent film depicting the war as a colossal folly marking the tragic end of an era. In works as different as Karl Kraus's Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Erich Maria Remarque's lm Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That we are reminded that not the least of the disillusionments which the war brought with it was a sense that a chasm separated the jingoIIIC:

106

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

istic rhetoric of the politicians and the generals from the realities of life and death in the trenches. Thus, after being thwarted in 1789 and 1848, the common man stepped to the forefront of the European historical stage as the Marechals and Rosenthals displaced the Boildieus and Rauffensteins, less in triumph than by default, with a demand for a radical simplification of the style of everyday living, whose expression ranged from an aversion to the beards prewar liberals sported so proudly to a taste for a new kind of music, jazz, at once easily accessible and expressive of a new explicit attitude to sexuality. To be sure, this demand for a simplification of life was a Janus-faced phenomenon, for it also stipulated a demand for a simplified account of the "meaning of life." In its search for simple political solutions to enormously complex phenomena this generation was the breeding ground for fascism. However, that quest for simple ideals, at once lofty and realistic, that search for authenticity and integrity, also formed the social context for the renewal of religious faith, the rise of existentialism, and. the philosophy of dialogue.1 It is hardly accidental that the "philosophy of dialogue" developed in the chaos that was Central Europe after the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain in the hands of the likes of Ferdinand Ebner, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen RosenstockHtissey.2 Nor is it accidental that the first philosopher of dialogue, Ferdinand Ebner, was a Viennese intellectual thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Karl Kraus. 3 If anybody ever identified the source of corruption in the modern world with the rhetoric of the double standard, it was Kraus. Long before the war Kraus had begun to take the world around him "at its word" in order to identify the links between language and human decency-or, more precisely, the ways in which abuse of language provided the crucial clue for identifying the morally bankrupt. In all of his writing Kraus identified real immorality with the use and perpetuation of cliches. Moreover, he believed that immorality manifested itself as bad grammar. He could not bring himself to believe that half a man could write a whole sentence. For Kraus there was no evil in the world, as it were, except that speaking made it so. (Wittgenstein, as a young man an enthusiastic Krausian, would later insist that, morally speaking, it would not matter what a person did, but how he spoke about it.) Kraus took it to be a "divine mission" of a Socratic sort to unmask immorality in a marfner that was literall)V grammatical. Thus, without having fore-

Offenbach

107

seen its specific nature or scope, Kraus was better prepared than most Central Europeans for the shocks that the war and its aftermath presented. First in the pages of his periodical, Die Fackel, and later in his mammoth "Martian" drama, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, he showed, by quoting the verba ipsissima of Kaiser Wilhelm and the like, how our unwillingness to imagine the destructive power of the cliche was linked to the unimaginable horrors of war. Such is the prologue to the dialogical thinking of Ferdinand Ebner, whence the specific problem we shall address arises. "There is a diagnostician for the sickness of our age; it is Karl Kraus," wrote Ebner, "but there is also a physician for it: S!Ziren Kierkegaard." 4 Ebner developed our century's first "philosophy of dialogue"-a term he would not like for reasons that shall soon become clear-as a response to Kraus's critique of language. If language was inextricably bound to spiritual pathology, as it was for Kraus, by parity of reasoning, it had to be the case that language was no less inextricably linked to spiritual regeneration. If the abuse of language brutalized and depersonalized people, the fulfillment of personal existence must somehow be a matter of authentic use of language, of genuine communication between an I and a Thou, in the act of speaking to one another. Briefly, Ebner came to see the mission embodied in the Krausian critique of language as radically incomplete without the logos of St. John's Gospel, through which the spiritual realities, I and Thou, came into existence. In the very title of his book, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitiiten (The Word and the Spiritual Realities), which was published in 1919 in Innsbruck by Ludwig von Ficker, who had rejected Wittgenstein's Tractatus to publish it,5 the village schoolmaster Ebner emphasized his central thought: the idea that spiritual reality only exists in the plural as an I speaks to a Thou. Since this could never be the result of a logical inference, but had to be the result of a conscious choice, dialogue could only be religious in nature. 6 Its foundation lay not in knowledge or proof but in belief or trust. It is debated among Ebnerians whether the encounter of the I with the Divine Thou is fundamental with respect to all dialogue or the logos is that which comes into existence as two finite egos transcend mere animal existence in speaking to one another. Different points in Ebner's text support both readings. What is clear is that the need for a choice to transcend the bounds of egoism is the point at which Kierkegaard's "leap into the absurd" comes to complement Kraus's critique of Ian-

108

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

guage. It should also be clear why Ebner would object to terming his work philosophy. For him it was an "account of spirit," a pneumatology; it was not an explanatory theory, but a set of fragmentary reflections about what it is to become a person by recognizing personality in the other in the act of speaking. 7 The most serious problem in all of this is that Ebner's own account of the substance of dialogue is all-too fideistic. He tended to think that all sorts of questions about criteria were not only irrelevant to entering into dialogue, but positively hindered one from doing so. Thus, he never paused to ask how we might know that we are genuinely in dialogue with one another. In this he was "more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard" as he put dialogue wholly outside the sphere of dialectics, criteria and the like. Put differently, the notion of criteria for dialogue smacked too much of rationalistic epistemology to find a place in his dialogical thinking. But there was surely more abstractness and ideology, albeit the negative ideology of anti-rationalism, than Ebner himself saw there. After all, it is not altogether strange to discover that we do not actually see eye to eye with someone with whom we have largely felt comfortable with precisely because we were superficially in agreement with one another. Dialogue in the homely, everyday sense of the term is not the same as agreement, let alone rambling conversation; for agreement and rambling conversation are possible without taking the Other as other, i.e., as different from ourselves, seriously. Indeed, we can only speak of dialogue to the extent that there is mutual recognition of two points of view in a discussion. 8 Here Ebner might have learned a bit more from Plato, for whom dialogue was embedded in the dialectical procedure of assaying beliefs critically. In the absence of some sort of mystical intuition, I can only be sure that I am in dialogue with somebody to the extent that I take that person's criticisms of my views seriously enough at least to question my own assumptions. In short, there is no dialogue where modest skepticism is lacking in the interchange. A corollary of this is that dialogue is not only compatible with disagreement, it presupposes it. Indeed, in ordinary discourse coming to the point where we have enough mutual understanding to agree on the sources of our disagreement is one recognized fruit of dialogue. This is something that the father of the philosophy of dialogue simply did not see except obscurely. But Eb'~cr's inability to fo,C(us upon the structure of mutual recognition

Offenbach

109

was hardly accidental. It is in part rooted in his fideism, in part in his concentration upon the obstacles to dialogue. One of Ebner's main achievements was his articulation of a concept of monological existence. He termed this state Ich-Einsamkeit. It is perhaps best rendered as self-encapsulation in the dual sense of (1) an encapsulation within the self, (2) which is self-imposed in the course of our misguided efforts to escape being alone. 9 The mode of existence of the self-encapsulation typical of the Viennese aesthetes entails speaking without communicating. There are no better illustrations of the condition Ebner diagnosed as self-isolation than the films of Ingmar Bergman, in which exactly this sort of lonely self-torment is graphically and grippingly presented as the central theme. Perhaps Ebner's deepest insight bears upon the way in which self-isolation is bound up with what Ebner termed Traum vom Geist, intellectual fantasies or spiritual fantasies by analogy with the notion of sexual fantasies, those self-imposed delusions, which systematically cut us off from the other and lock us within the confines of monologue. Ebner wus so preoccupied with this self-induced solipsism, that he would huvc nppeared to neglect the positive aspects of the characterization or diulogue. The problem, which we address-for which Jacques Offcnbuch has special significance-is tied to the question of how we cun overcome spiritual fantasizing. The problem arises on account of Ebner's total rejection of any and all spiritual significance for art. My aim is to establish that, even on Ebner's own terms, art-to be sure, of n very special kind--can play a role overcoming our natural tendency to fantasize spiritually, and, therefore, in the process of moving from monologue to dialogue. This is the problem. To appreciate my solution it is necessary to understand how it arises in Ebner's thought. The notion of intellectual or spiritual fantasizing, Traum vom Geist 10 (the exact sense of Geist is notoriously difficult to catch in English making this crucial term all but impossible to translate except inadequately or awkwardlyl 1 ) is rooted in Ebner's intensive intellectual confrontation with Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. 12 Like Freud, and Nietzsche before him, Ebner proceeds from the assumption that there is no hard and fast distinction between wakeful mental life and dreaming. 13 Thus, if dreaming is continuous with our conscious hopes and anxieties, joys and sorrows, then consciousness is shot through with the sort of wishful thinking that occurs when we allow our imagination free rein during sleep. If the one can be the source of misery, the other can too. The thesis is certainly an

110

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

interesting suggestion about the relation between dreams and daydreams. However, that is only the point of departure for Ebner's speculations about the role of fantasizing in conscious existence. Again, taking his cues from Freud, Ebner attributed our failures to come to grips with human problems to our incapacity to extricate ourselves from our own fantasies. Living in a fantasy world is easier than facing harsh reality. It protects us from a threatening reality, but at the cost of cutting us off from other people. Thus, we concoct a picture of the world as we would have it and replace the world as it actually is with this picture in our efforts to escape unhappiness. But this very effort to escape unhappiness becomes, paradoxically, the source of our real misery as we cut ourselves off from other people as they really are. To this point Ebner's account of Traum vom Geist is orthodox Freudianism's view of neurosis. Ebner's original way of construing the continuity between sleep and wakefulness, dreaming and consciousness, consisted in suggesting that all efforts to characterize the world other than as it is, i.e., as constituted by persons who are genuinely other, be they artistic, literary, ethical, scientific, or political-or even psychoanalytical-partake more of the spiritual malaise, to which we are continually tempted, than its cure. Plato's "flight" from this world to the World of Ideas, the Marxist vision of a classless society and the positivist dream of a purely formal language were all escapist fantasies for Ebner. Were he alive today, no doubt the strong claims made on behalf of artificial intelligence would be his prime example of Traum vom Geist, so intense was his fear that there was a direct link between a mathematical picture of the world and the fatal confusion between persons and things. 14 Put simply, all ideologies were escape routes from an unpleasant reality. And it was just this that made them dangerous; for this fantasizing represented the retreat from dialogue to a monologue, which systematically cuts us off from authentic personal fulfillment. Thus the spiritual/intellectual fantasizing, through which we seek to relieve that pain which is part and parcel being human, ironically, results in self-frustration and de-personalization. August Strindberg described this state of mind magnificently at the very close of his Dream Play: This is what it is to be a human beingever to miss what one never prized and feel remorse at what one never did to want W go, yet want to stay. 15

Offenbach

111

The similarity between Ebner and Strindberg here is hardly accidental; Ebner's Das Wort und die geistigen Realitiiten is the result, among other things, of long years of meditation upon, and critique of the work of Otto Weininger, Viennese philosopher of sex and character, who convinced Ebner that all philosophy must be intellectual fantasy, and the philosopher whom Strindberg admired above all others. 16 It is important to emphasize here that the point of this exercise is less to endorse Ebner's views as he states them than to recognize the suggestive value of the uncompromising scenario he presents us with and to take it up as a challenge to our own beliefs. For Ebner there is only one solution to the problem of becoming human; metanoia, conversion, a radical change of heart. His "pneumatological fragments," which constitute the chapters of Das Wort und die geistigen Realitiiten are, in fact, meditations on the alternative between monological self-encapsulation and dialogical encounter with the other. They aim at leading us to the point of making a choice, explicitly conceived along the lines of the Kierkegaardian "leap of faith," by forcing us to concentrate upon that alternative. Here, we finally arrive at our problem. Ebner was absolutely uncompromising in his insistence that all art, the art of the biting social criticism of a Schnitzler or a Kraus as much as the aestheticism of a George or a Hofmannsthal, like science, politics and philosophy, is spiritual fantasizing; for, even the critic, say, Kraus, posits an ideal over against the existing corrupt state of affairs. Indeed, it should be remembered that the practice of Krausian satire required that Kraus assume an Olympian persona that often helped to transform his admirers into a cult. Moreover, Kraus was not always right about the figures he attacked. So, there was some point in Ebner's view, inasmuch as it is a critique of Kraus, as well as aestheticism. It is this uncompromising denial of any spiritual significance for art within Ebner's "philosophy of dialogue" that I wish to call into question. I want to suggest that, even on the basis of Ebner's own assumptions, there is a role for art in Ebner's dialogical thought. But there is a danger that I present Ebner as all too philistine here. His ideas about the anti-dialogical nature of art as such were by no means those of an ignoramus. In the early years of the century, when he was strongly under the influence of Fichte's idealism, he counted Josef Matthias Hauer among his closest friends. Hauer claimed to be "the originator and only genuine practitioner of twelve tone com-

112

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

position," as he put it on the rubber stamp he used. Ebner's concept of aesthetics was to a great extent a reaction against Hauer's. The latter's deployment of twelve tone composition was very different from that of Arnold Schoenberg-although the latter was more interested in it, even in collaboration in the early days, than he would later admit. For Hauer the twelve tones were a cipher for the mathematical structure of the universe. This Pythagoreanism he com17 bined with the Taoist mystical dualism of yin and yang. Thus, it was his principle to divide the twelve tones - arbitrarily from the point of view of musical composition-into two groups of six. Furthermore, inspired by the color theory of Johannes Itten of the Bauhaus and ultimately by the Goethe of the Farbenlehre, Hauer developed his Klangfarblehre, a theory that assigns a musical value to each color and, conversely, a color value to each interval. Thus, he was able to produce music, which, with the exception of certain superb pieces as his Holderlin Lieder, is often a greater pleasure to look at than to hear. "Formless" is the word that unsympathetic critics tend to use when referring to Hauer's work-a term that nobody would use to describe Schoenberg. It is "music for Danish ears" inasmuch as understanding it requires the same sorts of subtle discriminations between sounds that are necessary to understand Danish. It is not altogether accidental that one of the few genuine Hauer scholars, JjZirgen Jensen, is Danish. 18 Be that as it may, Hauer's aim was to produce music in the context of the Gesamtkunstwerk. His music should be so suffused with cosmic moral significance that it transfigure the listener's very existence. However it might be evaluated from the point of view of music theory, it is difficult not to characterize the cultural significance of his project, as such, as a sort of spiritual fantasizing. And, indeed, in the end Ebner had to break with Hauer over it. For all that, it would be rash to consider that all art must have such a character. The opera buffa of Jacques Offenbach is a powerful counter-example. It will doubtless strike many people as bizarre, if not downright absurd, to mention Offenbach in this context. However, this has more to do with the widespread misapprehensions surrounding him and his works than it does with his intentions and achievements. We tend to associate his works with the sugary sentimentality and general superficiality of Viennese operetta. The tradition of performance has 'a good deal to do ~ith this. Yet, we forget at our peril that Offenbach's satire on sexual mores, for example, was explicit enough

Offenbach

113

to keep works such as Oifee aux Enfers and, especially, La belle Helene banned in prurient localities well into the twentieth century. It was for this, as much as his Jewishness, that he was forbidden in the Third Reich-something, along with the enthusiasm of Karl Kraus, which made him a hero to the Frankfurt School: witness Siegfried Kracauer's Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit 19 of 1938. Nevertheless, the reaction "why Offenbach?" is not wholly unjustified and deserves a response. That response goes as follows: the opera buffa of Jacques Offenbach-there are good reasons for avoiding the term operetta here-in its fullest and finest form is explicitly conceived as an antidote to what Ebner termed Traum vom Geist; it is explicitly directed to destroy spiritual fantasizing from within, to wrest us from monological existence. Thus, we have characterized Offenbach's art as between monologue and dialogue. Little wonder that Kraus would have termed him the greatest satirist of all time. For Offenbach-and his collaborators: "Offenbach" is like "Mozart" when discussing musical theater-the point of musical theater is satirically to expose fantasies, sexual and intellectual, for what they are-even when they are fantasies about art itself. This puts him at the end of a tradition of European culture which runs from Cervantes to Flaubert and Kierkegaard. Offenbach's contribution to that tradition, like Kierkegaard's, is distinguished by the central role that irony plays in his works. Moreover, like the Kierkegaard of Either/Or, the point was to bring us through a phase in our development, call it the aesthetic, the phase of spiritual fantasizing or whatever, rather than to berate or ridicule us. Self-awareness for the sake of self-realization is the goal. Thus, Offenbach's aesthetics runs exactly counter to that of Hauer and, for that matter, Richard Wagner, for whom Offenbach was a typical "Jew in music"; while, nevertheless, incorporating a very different notion of Gesamtkunstwerk from theirs. How did Offenbach do this? The answer must be formulated in terms of what Claude Debussy rightly designated as Offenbach's "transcendental irony." 2° From the start, Offenbach's works, in the early days his songs, were imbued with an irony which was often responsible for getting him into trouble with the censor, the critics, and even his public. Thus, as early as 1837 (at age 16!) Offenbach outraged the Parisian public by incorporating music from a Jewish prayer into the waltz "Rebecca." 21 The plot of his first great success in 1858, Oifee aux Enfers, turns upon a double

114

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

ironic reversal of signification: a reversal of the sense of the Orpheus myth, the loving husband who follows his wife beyond the grave and uses his art, vainly as it turns out, to cheat the grave, and a reversal of the bourgeois concept of marriage. 22 Taken together the two produced a powerful satire of Napoleon III's Second Empire, whose symbolic representation was intimately linked to classical antiquity. In the collaborative effort of Offenbach, Cremieux, and Halevy death is preferable to continuing to live with Orpheus and his detestable music; while Orpheus, for his part, could not be more delighted than to learn of his wife's death. Imagine, then, his frustration when all-powerful and uncompromising Public Opinion tells him that he must follow his wife into Hades. Offenbach's gods are, if anything, morally worse than his mortals: their main concerns are sleep and sex. Offenbach's satirical technique for unmasking hypocrisy and self-delusion increasingly took the form of presenting his audience with something that they might find delightful, but could not believe. His way of dealing with the double standard was to make it into a principle set in a fantasy world and thereby raise the question of distinguishing appearance and reality from within the fantasy world. His technique for doing so typically involved deliberately introducing ambiguity into the action in the form of setting a text describing something horrible, such as a woman's descent into prostitution, to music which is wholly charming, very often to a lilting waltz melody. As with his beloved Mozart, and unlike the practices of either Johann Strauss or Richard Wagner, the "meaning" of what we see and hear is constituted in the ambiguous relationship between libretto and music as they are in the works of "the little Mozart of the Champs Elysees" as Rossini is supposed to have called Offenbach. 23 Perichole's famous letter and Mettella's rondo in the fourth act of La vie parisienne are two cases in point. He introduced a similar ambiguity into humorous scenes, such as that in which Orpheus plays his new concerto for a Eurydice, who simply detests it, the violin solo is borrowed from one of the masterpieces of French grand opera, Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. This caricature of Meyerbeer turns the sequence into more than just a slapstick satire upon marriage and a musician who takes himself too seriously, for it is carried through with a parody of the most respected composer of the era. Meyerbeer, incidentally, was among Offenbach's most loyal fans. 24 If the function of ambiguity was to introduce a skeptical note into the proceedings, repetition was a tool that Offenbach employed to

Offenbach

115

reverse the sense of what was transpiring the stage. In a scene in the second act of La belle Helene, which was among his greatest successes in his own mind, he tackled the Ebnerian question of the dream-like character of fantasizing in a duet in which the very repetition of the phrase "it's only a dream" makes it clear, not simply that it's not a dream, for the audience knows that, but that the dream is a convenient pretext. 25 The situation is such that Helen of Troy wants, she keeps insisting, to be faithful to Menelaus, but, having heard that Venus has promised the most beautiful woman in the world (who else but Helen herself?) to Paris, she is more than curious about him. Thus, she asks the priest, Calchas, to send Paris to her in a dream-after all, what harm can there be if it's only a dream? She "falls asleep" and Paris actually enters. She has her wish. The repetition of the phrase "it's only a dream," ironically links dreaming, fantasizing, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. The success of the scene revolves upon the seductive charm Offenbach injects into it with his music. It is not merely that he represents fantasy as blurring the linl~ between imagination and reality, but that he manages to present us with the will to self-delusion-even outright hypocrisy of the VlWY sort that Kraus most detested in Viennese public life-in all its sensual immediacy. The sensual charm of the music presents us wilh the titillating joys of marital infidelity but ambiguously and without the slightest trace of moralizing. In the end the spectator has to decide what is really being depicted. This is Offenbach's way of drawing him into the action. One interesting parallel to this satirical method is the handling of the question did they or didn't they commit adultery in Ernst Lubitsch's superb One Hour With You. In both cases the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk is more fully realized than it ever is in Wagner or Strauss/Hofmannsthal-something that passed unobserved in Old Vienna except by Karl Kraus in Offenbach's case. 26 To "understand" Offenbach, then, is to enter a world where things at once do and do not mean what they appear to mean. Karl Kraus, who proclaimed Offenbach the greatest satirist of all time and proved the seriousness of his allegation in some 124 solo performances of Offenbach's works, "singing" all roles himself with only piano accompaniment, in the years between 1929 and 1935, described Offenbach's world as "chaos without causality," which, nevertheless, was more logical than the real world. The idea of creating an "illogical" logic to show how ours works has a curious parallel in Wittgenstein's method of inventing imaginary natural history for us

Offenbach 116

117

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

in order to show us something that he took to be remarkably difficult to grasp, namely, how words and action are "interwoven" to form the logical grammar of human action. Offenbach's "illogical" logic is perhaps most clearly evident in one of Kraus's favorite pieces: La Perichole.Z 1 Consider the plot. A starving street singer must paradoxically marry the man she loves in order to become the viceroy's mistress and thus avoid starvation. The choice she faces is effectively starvation or prostitution. After many misbegotten efforts to escape their fates, the lovers find themselves in the hands of the viceroy. The latter suddenly and unaccountably has a change of heart and allows the young lovers to go free. The total arbitrariness of the "happy ending" reminds us vividly that this is romance, not real life where such things simply do not happen. Offenbach's artistry, then, is directed to the dual end of disabusing us of the tendency to fantasize about love and about art itself. The former is not so strange in European literature; the latter is virtually unique. It is hardly accidental that this became the dual theme upon which Offenbach, after a quarter century's reflection, chose for his "fantastic" opera, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, for the sake of whose completion he raced vainly against death. There are only two operas about drunks: Leos Janacek's The Excursions of Mr. Broucek and Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann. However, whereas Mr. Broucek is a comic figure from start to finish, Hoffmann, whom we encounter querulous and somber and leave dead drunk, is, for all the charm that he might exude, a pathetically deluded figure throughout. 28 His first aria, "Klein Zack" reveals his schizophrenic character as his amusing story about the comic figure cut by the dwarf, Klein Zack, abruptly and without reason turns into a hymn in praise of the radiance of his true love's face. The subsequent stories of his three loves, often mistaken for the subject of the opera on account of their Romantic content, are, in fact, contained within the Klein Zack aria which is only completed in the epilogue. To see this is to see that it is questionable whether Hoffmann's three loves exist outside of his imagination. His self-delusion is apparent from the fact that the very qualities which draw him to Olympia, the doll (today she might be a computer), Antonia, the vain singer, and Guilietta, the courtesan, are those which he condemns in the girlfriends of his student acquaintances. Hoffmann's life is ruined both by his Apollonian dream of perfect love and his Dionysian revel as inspired artist. In the enc(Romantic love and Romantic art combine

to prevent him from attaining the real woman-Stella, the opera star, who, ironically does not sing at all in the piece. As for his muse, a not too carefully disguised version of Public Opinion from Orfee aux Enfers, she is only concerned with his stories, like the students who are only interested in him as long as he is amusing and, thus, does her best to frustrate his yearnings. For the public, consummation of his love only means the end of amusement. This is what the muse has to prevent. So, the drunken figure passed out on the table is not the Werther that he thinks he is; in reality he is John Belushi. There could hardly be a more perfect picture of Ebner's Traum vom Geist. The brilliance of Offenbach's presentation is not merely that he tells such a story, but how he tells it. It is his way of uniting opposites, haunting beauty and complete depravity, that is best exemplified in the famous Barcarole. Its lilting strains have more to do with murder than with love in Offenbach's original setting as in the Swedish director, Hans Alfredson's superb film Falsk som Vatten (False as Water), but in Offenbach it is explicitly a matter of murder which is the result of fantasizing. The strategy is just the opposite of, say, Brecht and Weill. For the latter evil is grotesque and Other; for Offenbach it is seductively charming and rooted in us. For Offenbach, as for Ebner, it is precisely the strength of the powers that dehumanize that they lie within us. For this reason Offenbach must tum the power to charm, to fantasize, against itself. But to do that he has had to create a work of art which terminates, not on the stage before us, but in our minds as we wrestle with its ambiguity. Thus, grasping the point of the piece is, in the end, to see oneself differently for having had to re-examine one's own assumptions about matters that we "think" a lot about in our fantasies, but rarely ever reflect upon. To understand Offenbach is to see oneself as continually tempted to flee the world of the concrete and the imperfect, to want to rest secure in the dream world of monologue; but also to realize that the price of that self-encapsulation is self-delusion and dehumanization. To be sure, this is not yet dialogue, but the point where it becomes clear that we desperately need the Other as Other. August Strindberg's "Note" to his Dream Play makes it clear that he saw himself as affecting a reconciliation with reality in awakening us from the tormenting disjointedness of the logical disorder, which is the dream. Strindberg's greatness consists in the power and elegance of expression through which he constitutes this reconcilia-

118

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

tion. For Offenbach, like Ebner, it is less the tormenting character of our fantasies than the delight we take in them that presents the problem. Offenbach's greatness rests upon his exploitation of refined wit as the supremely humane technique for relativizing, what fantasiz-ing has made absolute in a transvaluation of values that is the indispensable prelude to dialogue. *

*

6

*

Offenbach's opera buffa is (when appropriately performed; unfortunately, run of the mill performances of Offenbach more or less systematically obliterate his potential for devastating social critique by playing his works as though they were sentimental operettas or mere amusements) a way of awakening us from our intellectual daydreams. In fact, Offenbach's oeuvre provides us with a striking example of the role that art can play in furthering Socratic self-knowledge by deflating our typically modem inflated imaginations. If there is anything at all to that claim and if the picture we have already presented of sex-ridden Secessionist Vienna is accurate, we ought to be in a position to demonstrate yet further the importance of Offenbach for the immanent critique of modernism that began in Weininger's Vienna, i.e., it ought to be possible to demonstrate how Offenbach's art is the polar opposite of those Wagnerian tendencies, which we have seen to be at the center of the Secessionist ideology. Now it was precisely those tendencies in Wagner and in his own early thought that Nietzsche in Der Fall Wagner vehemently attacked in the name of self-criticism, which he significantly identified with a critique of modernism. A close examination of that assault with a view to what we have already established about Offenbach-and Wagner-will extend and deepen our understanding the importance of both the former and the latter for critical modernism then and now.

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism Offenbach's opera buffa had few admirers in the nineteenth century to equal and none to surpass Friedrich Nietzsche in their enthuSiasm: Offenbach: French music with a Voltairean spirit, free, frolicsome, with a little sardonic smirk, but bright, clever almost to the point of banality (-no cosmetics-) and without the mignardise of sickly or blond-Viennese sensuality. Offenbach: franzosische Musik, mit einem Voltaireschen Geist, frei, i.ibermOthig, mit einem klein en sardonischen Grinsen, aber hell, geistreich bis zur Banalitiit (-er schminkt nicht-) und ohne die mignardise kranker oder blond-wienerischer Sinnlichkcit. 1 (KSA 12, 344)

How, indeed, could it have been otherwise for someone like Nietzsche, whose first principle in aesthetics was light-footedness (KSA, 6, 13-4)? In Offenbach's music Nietzsche found an alternative, as he put it, to the decadence of German Romanticism. Like Heine, Offenbach was a prime example of the way Jews attained the heights of intellectual achievement in that "brilliant buffoonery" (genialen Buffonerie, KSA 13, 532) for which Nietzsche had virtually boundless admiration: Offenbach's texts have something magical about them and are probably the sole contribution of the opera to poetry_ Die Texte Offenbachs haben etwas Bezauberndes und sind wahrscheinlich das Einzige, was die Oper zu Gunsten der Poesie bisher gewirkt hat. (KSB 8, 275)

This was the exemplary work of a paradigmatic Good European. Thus, Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Offenbach extended to the point of suggesting that the great musical satirist was the true antipode to Richard Wagner: / 119

120

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

If under artistic genius we understand the fullness of freedom under law, divine levity, ease in the most difficult matters Offenbach has more right to the title "genius" than Wagner. Wagner is heavy, ponderous, nothing is more foreign to him than moments of the most high-frolicsome perfection of the sort that this Punch, Offenbach, achieves five or six times in each of his comedies. Wenn man unter Genie eines Kiinstlers die hochste Freiheit unter dem Gesetz, die gottlche Leichtigkeit, Leichtfertigkeit im Schwersten versteht, so hat Offenbach noch mehr Anrecht auf den Namen 'Genie' als Wagner. Wagner ist schwer, schwerfallig: nichts ist ihm fremder alsAugenblicke iibermiithigster Vollkommenheit, wie sie dieser Hanswurst Offenbach fiinf, sechs Mal fast injeder seiner bouffonneries erreicht. (KSA 13, 497)

Indeed, Nietzsche closes his "Afterword" to The Case of Wagner and thus his final settling of accounts with Wagner with an allusion to Offenbach's La Belle Helene: "-annually the whole Europe intones 'off to Crete! off to Crete!'" ("alljahrlich intoniert ganz Europa 'auf nach Kreta! auf nach Kreta!"' W; KSA 6, 45). The reference is to the concluding chorus in which the seducer, Paris, disguised as the High Priest, and Helen are urged to go off to Crete to perform sacrifices to assuage the wrath of Venus but which, in fact, is the completion of Helen's abduction and, thus, the commencement of the Trojan War. The implication is that the mania of the Perfect Wagnerites is carrying another sort of seduction to fruition. Wagner, the sanctimonious seducer, Offenbach, the laughing liberator, the image is fitting, far more so than Nietzsche himself seems to have realized, for Offenbach was certainly the complete antithesis of everything Wagner represented. If it was Nietzsche's intention in The Case of Wagner to identify the polar opposite of Wagner's art as he claimed, there is much to be said for the case that he erred in selecting Bizet rather than Offenbach as his foil to Wagner. If this is right, he should have known better? To see why this should be so it is necessary to examine Nietzsche's critique of Wagner, the latter's main views about composition, as well as the role of the Jew in music and, Nietzsche's point in contrasting Bizet with Wagner in the first place, to see how Offenbach would better have served his purpose. To answer these questions is at once to understand a great deal about Nietzsche's critique of "modernity," to grasp its depth as an ironic, 'critical' modernism and the place that Offenbach's "postmodernism" deserves in our culture. It is, of course, also to contribute to the much-deserved rehabilitation of Offenbach begun by Karl Kraus sixty years ago. 3 It is also to draw attention to the significance of Nietzsche's criticisms of Wagner for debates about postmodernism currently in fashion.

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

121

Most defenses of Wagner's art after Nietzsche's The Case ofWagner have been as beside the point as they take Nietzsche to have been. They have tended to present the latter as churlish, hysterical, or simply fanatical in his attacks on Wagner. Nietzsche's critics emphasize that the contrast Wagner/Bizet is musically absurd; while his reading of Parsifal as a work of life-denying Christian theology is simply ill-founded. In short, they tend to see his polemic against the maestro as a matter of personal, "disappointment with his fallen idol," 4 jealousy at Wagner's successes and disgust with his antiSemitism.5 All of this led him to misjudge Parsifal on the basis of its text alone. The strength of the argument of Wagner's champions, then, rests upon Nietzsche's failure to form an accurate judgment of Wagner's brilliance as a composer. However, the matter is more complex. Without endorsing Nietzsche's barbed polemic point by point, it is, nevertheless, possible-indeed, necessary-to insist that Wagner's champions rest their arguments much too much upon the surfacr or Nietzsche's ironic argumentation, rather than delving beneath it to inquire into the point of his polemics. Thus, they emphasize isolutt•d words and mocking phrases without proceeding from any understanding of Nietzsche's aims and goals in attacking his crstwhill• friend. Indeed, the very opening sentence of his foreword to '/'ltc• Case of Wagner warns the reader against such facile readin~. This admonition takes the form of suggesting that it is not pure malice which leads Nietzsche to praise Bizet at Wagner's expense; its conceptual justification rests upon the distinction between Wagner the life-negating moralist, who is at the same time the epitome of modernity, and the philosopher's search, not for self-mastery, but for self-knowledge. However, there is much that is less than clear here. The problems start with the ironic nature of the charge that Wagner's art is little more than life-destroying moralism; for there is little about Wagner's own works or his self-presentation that would lead one to that conclusion. To assume that Nietzsche is writing out of jealousy or disappointment, as most of the critics of this work have, is to read The Case of Wagner as mere histrionic gesturing and, thus, as churlish, hysterical, or fanatical. However, it is also to contradict the mainstream of current Nietzsche scholarship. Irony, not hysteria, subtlety, not crassness, is the dominant element here us throughout Nietzsche's oeuvre. This part of the problem entails understanding how his ironic tone is tied to ironic aims. It is a staple of modern Nietzsche scholarship and not especially difficult to estuh-

122

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

lish. What is less difficult to establish, because it rests upon philosophical rather than philological assessment, is precisely that association of fatality with "life," which leads him to praise Bizet in the 6 first place. But this is to run ahead. The thrust of Nietzsche's polemic against Wagner is that the latter represents a temptation, variously described as sickness, decadence, or modernity, by which we are all beset. Nietzsche repeatedly and unequivocally refuses to identify this temptation as something intrinsically evil. The point is not simply to reject Wagner as a cancerous growth; it is something like adolescence to be experienced and mastered. It is a stage in our growth, which we are tempted to absolutize, when the point is to overcome it: I understand it completely if a musician today would say "I hate Wagner, but I find all other music unbearable." And I would also understand a philosopher who would state: "Wagner is the resume of modernity. It is no use, you have to be a Wagnerian first..." lch verstehe es vollkommen, wenn heut ein Musiker sagt, 'ich hasse Wagner, aber ich halte keine andre Musik mehr aus'. Ich wiirde aber auch einen Philosophen verstehen, der erkHirte: 'Wagner resumiert die Modernitiit. Es hilft nichts, man muss erst Wagnerianer sein .. .'(KSA 6, 12)

For Nietzsche this temptation is a test. It is the temptation to absolutize a state of mind or an attitude: rapture. Moreover its reprehensible characteristics stem from Wagner's insistence that redemption is essentially to be identified with ecstasy. The danger Nietzsche sees in Wagner's art is the danger that emotivism, the identification of reality with the ''frisson," presents to the intellectualist. It is, then, the danger of selling reflective intelligence short that moves Nietzsche to demand redemption from the redeemer. His main complaint against Wagner, and modern art generally, is that it does not treat its audience as intelligent. For Nietzsche, as for Arnold Schoenberg later, this means to treat the listener as himself a musician. To be sure, Schoenberg sees his problems as arising from the fact that the listener today is no longer a musician, when he should be. However, the point is not far removed from Nietzsche's: the composer should write for audiences who ought to be capable of understanding why composers have written what they have the way they have. Put differently, musical composition should be a matter of educating the listener rather than edifying him. Music should be less a matter of exprf?ssion than of inducing reflection upon how artistic accomplishment is produced. /

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

123

Since this, the crucial core of Nietzsche's concept of art, is not obvious from a cursory reading of his text, it will be worthwhile to spell out how the idea of assuming that the listener is intelligent is central both to Nietzsche's evaluation of Wagner and to his own mode of presenting his views. First off, we will do well to remember that Nietzsche himself was a gifted, perhaps great, classical scholar.7 Thus when he subtitled The Case of Wagner "a musician's problem," and throughout we do well to remember that he thinks of music in the Greek sense of that which pertains to the Muse, i.e., the arts generally. Thus, the crucial clue to appreciating the perspective from which his criticisms of Wagner is written, as well as to grasping his own mode of composition, comes in the form of a philological footnote: It has been a real calamity for aesthetics that the word drama has always been translated as "action." It is not only Wagner who is mistaken here. The error is universal. It even extends to philologists, who should know better. Ancient drama focused upon scenes of great emotional intensity and for that reason excluded action (transposing it before the beginning or beind the scenes). The word drama is of Doric extraction and accord in~ to Doric usage it means "event," "story" both words in their hieratic sense. The oldl'SI drama presents the myth of the locality, the "holy story" upon which worship wus linmdt:d (not a doing but a happening: dran in the Doric dialect does not mean "do" nl all. Es ist ein wahres Ungliick fiir die Aesthetik gewesen, dass man das Worllhnlllll immer mit 'Handlung' iibersetzt hat. Nicht Wagner allein irrt hierin; aile Welt istnodl i 111 Irrthum; die Philologen sogar, die es besser wissen sollten. Das antike l>nuna hnlll' grosse Pathosscenen im Au ge--es schloss gerade die Handlung aus (vcrlcgtc sic vor den An fang oder hinter die Scene). Das Wort Drama ist dorischer Herkun ft: und nurh dorischem Sprachgebrauch bedeutet es "Ereigniss", "Geschichtc", beide Wortc in hieratischem Sinne. Das alteste Drama stellte die Ortslegende dar, die "heilige Geschichte", auf der die Griindung des Cultus ruhte (-also kcin Thun, sondcm cin Geschehen: dran heisst im Dorischen gar nicht 'thun').(KSA 6, 32(notc])

Here Nietzsche alludes to the fact that the plots of ancient dramas were well-known to their audience. For that reason, what was presented on the stage could never be a new, surprising turn of events (i.e., a frisson). The point of the play was to express the inexorability of the happening in the most eloquent terms. Ancient dramas, we should remember, were performed during festivals in competition with one another. Since everyone knew the mythos or story from the start, excellence attached to how the story was told. The pathos and the celebrated catharsis were in the very order of the words. This sort of play, with an audience entirely consisting of critics (as Oscar Wilde was wont to point out) had to treat its audience as intelligent (it is noteworthy that the ancient spectator was, therefore, in crucial respects more like a judge than a modern spectator).

124

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

If these classical standards are normative (as the author of The Birth of Tragedy took them to be), then Wagner fails to meet them for just those reasons which perfect Wagnerites take to be the zenith of his artistic achievement: for creating dreams of redemption. Nietzsche's disappointment with Wagner was rooted in his early enthusiasm for the idea that, "dramatic art consists in a kind of transformation of the self, the merging of the self with the souls and bodies of other characters," 8 in the words of one commentator. The problem was that Wagner increasingly came to construe this transformation as mere theatricality. Thus, the danger that Nietzsche saw in Wagner, his decadence, his "modernism," his sickness, is the danger of the empty gesture, of style for its own sake. Nietzsche presents this as a loss of unity: "The whole is no longer living at all. It is aggregate, calculated, artificial, artifact" ("Das Ganze lebt tiberhaupt nicht mehr: es ist zusammengesetzt, gerechnet, ktinstlich, ein Artefakt," KSA 6, 27). On a superficial reading one sees Nietzsche lamenting a kind of loss, but on closer examination he is really complaining about just that lack of proportion that the ancient Greeks, above all Aristotle, revered as the source of all beauty, form: "The word becomes sovereign and jumps right out of the sentence" ("Das Wort wird souverain und springt aus dem Satz hinaus"), he wrote in a mood resembling Karl Kraus, 9 "the sentence encroaches upon and obscures the sense of the page, the page lives at the expense of the whole" ("der Satz greift tiber und verdunkelt den Sinn der Seite, die Seite gewinnt Leben auf Unkosten des Ganzen," KSA 6, 27). This is the temptation which Wagner and modernity represent. But, to reiterate, for Nietzsche the problem is less one of eradicating an "unworthy" ideal then it is of monitoring these tendencies in ourselves-and perhaps in that very act overcoming them. However, it is quite possible to object here that this loss of a sense of context is, indeed, a "modernist" trait, but that it is by no means a fault in Wagner's work. Indeed the lack of unity that Nietzsche bewails in Wagner's oeuvre would seem to be more characteristic of his own works than it is of those of his former friend. But this is precisely Nietzsche's point. What presents itself as organic in Wagner, i.e., the unity of music and drama, is hardly that; whereas what presents itself as arbitrary and disjointed in his work has a strict logical coherence when one obtains the proper perspective upon it, i.e., when we come to see his philosophizing as just the sort of "selfknowledge" in the sense/()f self-criticism that he finds at once char-

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

125

acteristic of true philosophizing and wanting in Wagner. Here again, it might be objected that Nietzsche puts too much stock in Wagner's "theories" and self-descriptions and too little on his actual achievements as a composer. Perfect Wagnerites suggest, to the contrary, that Wagner's "theories" are at best misleading and at worst bombastic misrepresentations of his compositional practice-and ultimately a "bore." 10 Doubtless, this is true. Unfortunately, Wagner himself is responsible for their misapprehensions inasmuch as he always did his level best to present his writings, his music, and himself as all of a piece. Little wonder that his compositional achievements have been so difficult to extricate from his pedantry and bigotry. In short, Nietzsche rightly portrays him as a Cagliostro insofar as he did his best to make himself into a cause, i.e., in his personal conduct as in his writing he forced people to take a stand for or against him (which even the unmusical Marx could not avoid). The Case of Wagner is all about the deleterious effects of Wagner's self-mythologizing, i.e., with everything that today's Pcrfl'cl Wagnerites, can with some justification, write off as irrelevant IU forming an estimate of Wagner's true brilliance. But we should hear in mind that they can do this because World War II did as much to discredit Wagner's "idea" that we now have the luxury of evalunt· ing him on those purely musical criteria according to which certain gifts simply must be recognized. Nietzsche was among the few to have intimations of this during the nineteenth century. Moreover, it is important to recognize that the two sides in this debate have incommensurable and incompatible concepts of just what constitutes Wagner's life work. Thus, the debate over Wagner's stature must be interminable. The hard truth is that the greatest composer of operas between Mozart and Janacek (excepting Mussorgsky) was a pomp~ ous anti-Semitic mystagogue-and that the relationship between Wagner's life and work is such that it permits both identification and separation.'' And it is precisely because Nietzsche recognized that you can ignore neither the one nor the other that he insisted that Wagner was a phenomenon that you have to encounter in order to master. There can be little doubt that Nietzsche did less than full justice to Wagner's supreme achievements as a composer in his efforts to come to grips with Wagner the Cause. His ironic exaltation of Bizet at Wagner's expense was a strategic error in this effort. He knew this. Had he chosen Offenbach as his foil for Wagner, as he should have, both the ensuing debate and Offenbach's current repu-

126

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

tation would be very different. What follows is an attempt to redress that misdemeanor. Why oppose Bizet to Wagner? If there is a logic to that choice, it would seem to be linked to Nietzsche's (highly ironic) allegation that Wagner is an elaborately disguised Parisian decadent: Would you believe it? Wagner's heroines, as soon as you brush against their heroic skin, are all similar to the point of being confused with Madame Bovary. Conversely, Haubert could have translated his heroine into Scandinavian or Carthaginian and then offered her to Wagner as a libretto. Indeed, Wagner does not seem to have been interested in anything other than the preoccupation's of the little Parisian decadents, except that the scale was different. Always five steps away from the hospital! Doubtless, entirely modem, entirely metropolitan problems one and all! Wiirden Sie es glauben, dass die Wagnerischen Hero!nen sammt und sonders, sobald man nur erst den heroischen Balg abgestreift hat, zum Verwechseln Madame Bovary ahnlich sehn!-wie man umgekehrt auch begreift, es Haubert freistand, seine Heldin in's Skandinavische oder Karthagische zu iibersetzen und sie dann, mythologisirt, Wagnem als Textbuch anzubieten. Ja, in's Grosse gerechnet, scheint Wagner sich fiir keine andem Probleme interessiert zu haben, als die, welche heute die kleinen Pariser decadents interessiren. Immer fiinf Schritte weit vom Hospital! Lauter ganz mod erne, Iauter ganz grosssUidtische Probleme! zweifeln Sie nicht daran! (KSA 6, 34)

It is all too easy to overlook both the irony and the complexity of Nietzsche's claims here. First of all, there is the sting of identifying the Bard of the Teutonic Urwald as fundamentally French and urban in his thinking. Secondly, there is a rejection of the confusion between realism and romanticism that he finds in French letters. Thirdly, he takes this confusion to be linked to the narcissism and "neurasthenia" of the French decadents. Fourthly, he identifies this with Wagner's art. But, if it is all too easy to overlook the complexity of these claims, it is equally easy to overlook the fact that it is the very brilliance of Wagner's music that obscures their truth. Had Nietzsche been a bit more generous in his recognition of Wagner the composer, he might have been more successful in convincing people of the seductive dangers of Wagner the Cause. Be that as it may, in his very last work, the little anthology from his own earlier works, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, which he assembled in order to prove that, for all his earlier enthusiasm, he had also expressed reservations about Wagner for some time; in short, to show that his attack in The Case of Wagner was not merely a matter of an abrupt, arbitrary change of heart, he clarified his concept of dectJdence in terms of ~contrast between Flaubert and Goethe:

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

127

With reference to artists of all kinds this is my chief distinction: is hatred of life or abundance oflife the well-spring of creativity here? In Goethe, for example, abundance became creative, in Haubert hatred: Haubert a new edition of Pascal, but as artist with the following instinctual basis for his judgments: "Haubert is always hateable, the person is nothing, the work of art is everything ..." He tortured himself when he wrote entirely as Pascal tortured himself when he thought-they experienced both unselfishly.. .'selflessness' the principle of decadence, the will to an ending in art as in ethics. In Hinsicht auf Artisten jeder Art bediene ich mich jetzt dieser Hauptunterscheidung: ist hier der Hass gegen das Leben oder der Oberfluss an Leben schopferisch geworden? In Goethe zum Beispiel wurde der Uberfluss schopferisch, in Haubert der Hass: Haubert, eine Neuausgabe Pascal's, aber als Artist, mit dem Instinkt-Urtheil aus dem Grunde: 'Haubert est toujours ha!ssable, l'homme n'est rien, !'oeuvre est tout.' Er torturirte sich, wenn er dichtete, ganz wie Pascal sich torturirte, wenn er dachte-sic empfanden beide un-egoistisch .. .' Selbstlosigkeit'- das decadence-Princip, der Wille zum Ende in der Kunst sowohl wie in der Moral. (KSA 6, 426f.)

Previously in the same surprising passage he identified the opposite of decadence as that tragic knowledge, which attained philosophical expression in Hume, Kant, and Hegel, only to be perverted in the world-denying pessimism of Schopenhauer and Wagner. Whatever the merits of Nietzsche's view of Flaubert and Pascal, or even Parisian decadence, he is here, in fact, contrasting the genuinely tragic, because heroic, pessimism of the Greek tragedians: humuns learn only through suffering, with the Manichean's response to the imperfection of a "fallen" world: the flip-flop between abject submission and the yearning for transcendence. In fact he is taking the latter to task for wanting to abolish struggle and conflict from life through creating the illusion that we can "explain" its incvitability-"heiligste Mione, hochste Not"-philosophically and represent that inevitability in art. Moralism-and here there can be little doubt about the Hegelian origins of the distinction between moralist and philosopher in The Case of Wagner-and decadence seek an ending to or a solution for, indeed, a redemption from, the sadness that the conflicts of an Antigone or a Hamlet carry with them. But this would be nothing less than a redemption from being human. In the end, the moralist, who tries to fathom the meaning-or meaninglessness-of life, and the decadent, who presents that scenario on the stage, confuse sadness with the irresolubility of a choice that is no less inevitable, and, what is worse, in doing so create just the kind of illusion that they would abolish. It is important to grasp here that Nietzsche's problem is less the result of disappointment with Wagner than of the kinds of surface confusions that can easily be

128

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

made between these very different views. This also helps to explain why his descriptions of Wagner come so close to self-descriptions. He is suggesting that the reader will only get clear about these matters by making some subtle discriminations. Such is the tantalizing pathos of modernism. We neglect at our peril the contrast with Goethe that figures so centrally in this discussion; for Nietzsche is well-known for his reverence for the old Goethe of Eckermann's Conversations (the greatest German book in Nietzsche's eyes). Indeed, his reference to Goethe provides us with a crucial clue to his enthusiasm for Bizet but also with a hint as to why he should have been yet more enthusiastic for Offenbach than he was. Wagner's defenders in the controversy aroused by Nietzsche have often pointed to the fact that his attacks on Wagner have less to do with his music than with the plots of his libretti, especially that of Parsifal, for which his music was composed. Indeed, some Perfect Wagnerites think that Nietzsche's argument is on that account beside the point, since Wagner's libretti are little more than "excuses" for musical setting. They take Tristan as a good case in point: singing is of the essence, what is sung, the specific words themselves (often wholly unintelligible as they are sung on the stage) are secondary.12 The argument advanced here is that, while this objection is wholly correct in principle, it misses Nietzsche's point, namely that Wagner himself put the debate on the footing that Nietzsche found it in what he presented as his efforts to develop a genuinely German opera. This brings us, finally, to Bizet; for the point of the contrast is at least in part to emphasize that Bizet in fact accomplished what Wagner set out to do without either Wagner's histrionics or his sentimentality. In selecting Bizet as a foil to Wagner at least three considerations played a role. First, Bizet was, of course, French. So Nietzsche's preference for him over Wagner was yet another clear-and clearly ironic-indication of his preference for things French at the expense of things German: "I believe exclusively in French education and consider everything else that passes for education in Europe misconceived not to mention German education" (ich glaube nur an franzosische Bildung und halte Alles, was sich sonst in Europa 'Bildung' nennt, fiir Missverstiindniss, nicht zu reden von der deuts,chen Bildung, KSA 6, 285). Secondly, and most significantly, on Nietzsche's view, in
Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

129

as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel and on that account nature!" (Fatum, als Fatalitiit, cynisch, unschuldig, grausam-und ebendarin Natur! (W; KSA 6,15), Wagner's "holiest love, highest misery" (heiligste Minne, hochste Not), to music without, as he put it, any "Senta-sentimentality" (Senta-Sentimentalitat,). For Nietzsche this was not Mediterranean but African cheerfulness. Nietzsche, then, chose to contrast love as elemental passion in Bizet with love as salvation in Wagner. Thus, for Nietzsche Bizet is important precisely because he succeeded in a way that Wagner should envy, if he were serious about his own ideas, in setting "the logic of passion" to music. In effect, without stating it explicitly, Nietzsche accuses Wagner of fatally confounding passion and redemption. In any case, his preference for Bizet is neither entirely arbitrary nor beside the point. The third factor which played a role in his choice of Bizet as the antithesis to Wagner turns on the fact that in Carmen Bizet set a play by an especial favorite of Goethe's to music. Indeed, alongside Lord Byron, the young Merimee was a figure for whom the old Goethe had only praise in his conversations with Eckermann: Merimee treated these things [the ultra-Romantic fascination with the macabre I com pletely differently from his colleagues. All of the usual sorts of gruesome themes sul'll as graveyards, nocturnal stations [of the Cross], ghosts and vampires arc present Iin Guzla], but these loathsome things do not affect the core of his literary artistry. lie handles them with a certain objective distance and at the same time ironically.... Mcrim~c is quite a fellow! How much more power and genius belongs to the objccti vc treatment ofthem than we think?

Merimee hat diese Dinge ganz anders traktiert als seine Mitgesellen. Es fehlt frcilich diesen Gedichten nicht an allerlei schauerlichen Motiven von Kirchhi:ifen, nachtlichcn Kreuzwegen, Gespenstem und Vampiren [in Guzla ]; allein aile diese Widerwartigkcitcn beriihren nicht das Innere des Dichters, er behandelt sie vielmehr aus einer gcwisscn objekti ven Feme und gleichsam mit Irani e ... Merimee ist freilich ein ganzer Kerl, wic denn tiberhaupt zum objektiven Behan de in eines Gegenstandes mehr Kraft und Genic gehbrt, als man denkt. 13

Given Nietzsche's reverence for the old Goethe it is hardly accidental that he should have chosen an opera with a libretto after Merimee as the healthy counterpart to the Wagnerian sickness. It is all the more significant when you consider that in the page immediately preceding the one just cited Goethe speaks of ultra-romanticism as a kind of fever which, once passed, leaves us in better health than we were to start with nor should the fact that Ferdinand Ebner considered Wagner, along with Karl Kraus, Otto Weininger, and psy-

130

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

choanalysis, as childhood diseases that we all have to suffer. 14 Be that as it may, odd as it may seem, the way from Goethe to Bizet via Merimee passes curiously close to Offenbach. When Bizet set Carmen to music in 1875 it was to a version of Merimee which had been adapted for him by two men already famous for their collaboration with Offenbach, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy. By 1875 the former had worked with Offenbach for twelve years, the latter for twenty. The Holy Trinity collaborated to produce Offenbach's greatest successes: La Belle Helene, La Grand-Duchesse de Gerolstein, La Vie Parisienne and La Perichole .15 La Perichole is significant for our discussion, for it, too, is an adaptation from Merimee, which the same team had made for Offenbach some seven years earlier. Indeed, Perichole has been termed Carmen's little sister. 16 Offenbach was very much a part of the world to which Bizet gave Carmen. If such circumstantial evidence has any bearing upon the case, there is plenty more to link Offenbach with him personally and professionally. Bizet's public recognition might well be described as beginning in 1856 when he shared first place (interestingly with Offenbach's rival to be, Charles Lecocq) in a competition for composers arranged by Offenbach.'7 The young Bizet not only married the niece of Fromental Halevy, composer of La Juive and uncle of Ludovic, but became a regular guest at Offenbach's Villa Orfee in Normandy. There he enthusiastically took part in the hi-jinks-such as the parody of Il Trovatore-that Offenbach so enjoyed arranging. On one occasion Bizet even dressed as a baby. 18 More importantly, he became tutor and confidant of Offenbach's son and heir, Auguste, who almost certainly would have asked him to complete the orchestration of Les Contes d'Hoffmnnn had Bizet lived longer. Furthermore, influences from Offenbach have been observed in his masterpiece, Carmen. 19 On the basis of these links it should be clear that it is not altogether preposterous to suggest that Offenbach has a place in the Nietzsche/Wagner controversy. That claim is by no means intended to slight Bizet as a composer; for there can be no doubt that his purely musical achievements transcend Offenbach's and pave the way for, say, Maurice Ravel's remarkable experiments in orchestral coloration. The point here turns less upon musical composition per se than it does upon the concept of music drama. Ho~, then, is it that Offenbach better fills the role that Nietzsche allotted to Bizet in his polemic against Wagner? In what sense is

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

131

Offenbach's opera buffa the complete antithesis of Wagner's music drama? The answer to this question, stated most simply, is that Offenbach explicitly sought to develop a form of music drama that would combat precisely the sort of self-deception that Nietzsche found so "modem" in Wagner. Moreover, Offenbach was unabashedly a "Jew in music," whose work turned to its advantage all the musical elements Wagner found reprehensibly "Jewish." Furthermore, since Offenbach's life work was at once based upon everything which Wagner condemned he had to be everything Nietzsche admired. What did Wagner understand by a "Jew in music"? How does his description fit Offenbach's accomplishments? These are the first questions which have to be answered. The simplest answer to the first question is that the Jew in music is everything that Wagner does not want to be. Wagner presented this farrago of cliches, bombast, and conceptual confusion in his essay of that name in 1850. 20 The Jew is the outsider who presents himself as an insider. His most prominent features are the contradictory properties of being unable to master the language of his host nation, while, nevertheless, successfully incorporating himself into it. Thus, the Jew is a babbling parrot. There is nothing of simplicity, purity, or unity about him. His culture is always borrowed, affected, artificially elaborate-in a word inorganic. His own music is that and only that of the synagogue, a nonsensical concatenation of gurgling, yodeling, and babbling which is little better than animal noise. The worst Jews in music would seem to be those critics who rejected the Maestro's "music of the future." It is a noteworthy feature of Wagner's concept of the Jew that it can refer to the Jewish "race" just as easily as to a certain kind of bourgeois philistinism. Wagner invented neither this usage nor the confusion which it incorporates-we find them in, say, Marx 21 but he certainly contributed enormously to the confusion as an often legitimate type of cultural complaint and a cretinous racial theory became hopelessly and inextricably entangled with one another. 22 Be that as it may, Wagner left no doubt that Offenbach was a prime example of everything that he took to be degenerate in modem culture-above all, because all of this made him enormously successful (Offenbach was invited to compose a "serious" opera for the Vienna Hofoper in 1863, at a time when it rejected Wagner23 ). What must strike us as strange today is that Offenbach was all of the things Wagner objected to as a composer without deserving any of the opprobrium that Wagner cast upon the "Jewishness" of his music.

132

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

All of the things that Wagner so hated were, indeed, present in Offenbach's opera buffa and it is precisely by virtue of their presence that Offenbach is Wagner's true peer, because genuine counterpart, in the Pantheon of modem music theater. If Wagner needed an example of the way "Jews" could adopt the music of the Synagogue to the theater there was hardly a better case in point. Offenbach, a Rhineland Jew like Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine, was the son and grandson of temple musicians. It was a grand tradition in the synagogues of the day to mix traditional sacred music with adaptations of current secular "hit tunes." So Offenbach's father enthusiastically incorporated music from Carl Maria von Weber's Freischiitz in the music he wrote for synagogue services-just as his son would make ample borrowings from it in his masterpiece Les Contes d'Hoffmann (and elsewhere). Already at age sixteen Offenbach was raising eyebrows in Paris with his "Rebecca, Valse sur des Motifs Israelites du XV siecle."24 From first to last Offenbach's works were constructed around such "borrowings," parodies, and citations (in a way that invites comparison with Karl Kraus). His music was intentionally parasitic without being any the less creative for all that. For Offenbach the ideal way to deflate pomposity was by setting a comic figure or situation to "serious" music borrowed, say, from Giacomo Meyerbeer (an especial favorite of Offenbach'sand a devoted fan of his). It was not simply a means of an assured laugh on the basis of the resulting incongruity but also a way of poking fun at the sanctimoniousness of grand opera. Indeed, this is what sets him apart from Wagner in a way that is crucial for evaluating the latter's aesthetics, as Nietzsche would, for Offenbach was not aiming to produce musical effects in the sense of "moving" his audience. Quite the contrary, he was "showing" much that Wagner's arch-enemy, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, was simultaneously "saying"; namely that music has no intrinsic extramusical meaning: what can be used to express sadness can equally well be used to express joy-or ridicule. For Offenbach this was a way of deflating the inflated notion that music was something "deep," i.e., just what Wagner wished to cultivate. For Wagner nothing was more reprehensible than introducing animal sounds or onomatopoeia on the musical stage. Imagine, then, the chagrin that he must have felt when he and Offenbach were put i,nto the same boat by an indignant Hector Berlioz when he attacked all German perversity itVopera; for his rage was provoked by Offenbach's

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

.133

Barkouf, an opera-comique (with a libretto by Scribe [!] and Boiseaux whose protagonist was a dog [a shaggy dog opera!?]). 25 For all that, what Wagner termed "parrotings" 26 were an essential part of Offenbach's art. Onomatopoeia is ubiquitous in Offenbach. Thus, Hoffmann opens with the "Glou, glou, glou" of the Spirits of Wine and Beer, Klein Zach's legs go, "clic clac," his head, "eric crac," and when drunk his coattails go "flic flac"; the proper Parisienne's dress goes "frou, frou, frou," her little feet go "toe, toe, toe," while the decadent Orestes expresses his joie de vivre with the words "Tsing lala, tsing lala, oya Kephale, Kephale, oh lala"; whereas General Bourn goes "piff, paff, pouf, et tara, papa poum," and Jupiter und Euridyce flirt outrageously with one another buzzing likt• fliesY However, these devices are anything but nonsensical in the way Offenbach employs them; indeed, few philosopiH.•rs have' brooded more profoundly about what does and does not makl• s~'llSL' than he. For Wagner they were taboo (traijl.) because they wen.~ neither music nor words; for Offenbach this is just what makes them interesting. Such terms were obviously lower-class vulgarisms in the ears of his contemporaries. In Offenbach's works they serve, as do his citations from popular lyrics, to produce a comic contrast between the bourgeois pretensions of the parvenu and his lower class origins, i.e., precisely the distinction that his affected manners would obliterate. 28 It is yet another way of opening up the cleft between social appearance and reality so dear to Offenbach, but, as such, it is no less a way of establishing an intermediate sphere be~ tween the conscious and the unconscious. Thus, the "glou, glou, glou" of the Spirits of Wine and Beer at the beginning of Hoffmann is one of the clues that despite all the magnificent music that follows it is not, in fact, grand opera; whereas the "flic flac" of Klein Zach's coattails is the equally besotted Hoffmann's way of unconsciously ridiculing himself, a way of emphasizing his own lack of self-uwurcness. Briefly, it is a device for ironic evocation, which is very precisely tailored to social satire in the form of music drama. Since Wagner rejects this satirical concept of music drama it never occurs to him that such tactics might serve to create form on the musical stage. Indeed, the closer we look at the Offenbachian wedding of words and music to create meaning it might well be described as a kind of midpoint between Wagner, where the words arc all but superfluous, and the dazzling unity they reach in the work of Leos Janacek. Consider the evocative power of "cas-ca-der" in the

134

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

phrase "Dis-moi, Venus, quel plaisir trouves-tu, a faire ainsi cascader la vertu" (Tell me, Venus, do you get a kick out of cas-cad-ing virtue?)29 This brings us to the very core of the difference between Offenbach and Wagner. In Offenbach words and music amplify one another to evoke hidden meanings or to call into question obvious ones. Offenbach's art lives on just that distance-at once grammatical, moral, and epistemological, as Karl Kraus knew-between the external form of expression and its meaning, which is only established in use, a distance that Wagner's art would eliminate at the same time that he would abolish the distance between the performers and the audience. For Nietzsche it is precisely this "modern" abolition of the distinction between life and theater which is opprobrious in Wagner's work. The problem is not that Wagner failed technically in achieving the absolute unity he sought but that it arises precisely because he came so close to attaining it. Perfect Wagnerites rightly consider Tristan the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century opera because the drama is in the music and the attentive listener cannot possibly escape being drawn into it (this is what makes Wagnerian opera at once absurd and, for all that, irresistible for imperfect Wagnerites). The drama unfolds from the opening chords with the inexorability of a logical deduction-and, as in logic, there is no room for ambiguity. The human voice that Beethoven had already utilized as an orchestral instrument by now is fully integrated into the orchestra. Contrary to Wagner's own dramatic ideology, what is being said by the singers is in its detail unimportant; what is of paramount importance is the musical evocation of seamless unity not only in the musical score but in the opera house. When Wagner is successful his audience becomes wholly one with his music. Thus, from his perspective his greatest achievements: Tristan, Parsifal, the Ring, wholly deserve the appellation he reserved for Parsifal, "sacred festival music" for in their efforts musically to evoke earthshattering, primal emotions that are nothing less than religious. What Nietzsche understood much earlier than anyone else-and here his critique of Wagner is more subtle than Hanslick's-is that the problems with Wagner's work arise precisely on account of his success at musically evoking ecstasy. Nietzsche's point was that this was dubious theology. Unfortunately, his own puerile assaults upon Christianity have further complicated the matter. The point of his attack on Christianity was that it dehumanized human life in this

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

135

world with its emphasis upon the "reality" of life in the next (the point had been made before by Feuerbach and in both cases rests upon a wrongheaded, Gnostic understanding of Christianity). The danger of Wagner was that he simply would substitute theaters for churches. Thus in his success he managed to create performatively an alternative to life as it is lived. Nietzsche's difficulties with this theology, its theater-become-church and its all-too-warm reception by a public only too willing to be seduced were wholly justified. The real problem with Nietzsche, wholly unobserved by Perfect Wagnerites, lay in the fact that his own elitist fear of mass culture, democracy, and the like, as well as his tendency to identify a healthy attitude to culture exclusively with a healthy attitude to the body and a fortiori sexuality (admittedly as difficult to come by then as now) continually wrenched him away from, not only politics, as artsy-craftsy Marxists often lament, but from the actual world of mundane human practices. Without painting the so-called "real world" rosier than he ought to (something Offenbach avoided, tu Karl Kraus's delight, by not depicting the real world at all) Offcnhnch took it as his task to dispel the illusion that we could find refuge in some other condition from the one in which we actually lived. If Wagner aimed at unifying the experience of producing nnd hearing music, at eliminating all distance between performer und observer, Offenbach sought just the opposite. Briefly, his artistry was based not simply upon his remarkable capacity for producing cheerful, catchy tunes (something that seems to have come to him almost automatically-everybody who listens to music at all knows more of them than he is aware of), but also upon the assumption so central to Nietzsche's aesthetics that his listener is an intelligent human being. His opera buffa is first and foremost a mode of exploiting his musical talents to present us with problems that we do not especially want to confront. True to Nietzsche's notion of classical drama, Offenbach does not try to tell us a story but by producing an "event" (Ereignis) by drawing the meaning of what we see and hear on the stage into question. In Wittgenstein's terms (which are wholly appropriate here), he aims at showing rather than saying something. To be sure, this element does not always come to the fore in his work. It is much harder to see in the lilting, lyrical La Vie Parisienne than, say, in La Perichole or Barbe Bleu where the convention of the happy ending is made into the criterion for distinguishing between art and life precisely by showing us how artificial happy endings

136

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

actually are. However, it is important to emphasize, as Kracauer does, that from the start, from his first hit Ba- Ta-Clan, the public tended to appreciate Offenbach's work more for its cheerfulness than for its satire. 30 Yet that should not obscure the fact that his satirical intentions were recognized by part of his public from the outset. Offenbach could not make a religion out of art because he believed that art was "show business," mere entertainment, and not the representation of some "higher truth." Indeed, the highest truth that art could aim at was to show that it was entertainment rather than metaphysics. It was the "message" of Hoffmann. In his eyes what art does best is to delight the senses. His task was to show (in Wittgenstein's sense) that this is not the same as presenting us with a profound truth. Indeed, Offenbach believed not only that the senses were deceptive but that we were inclined to thrill and delight most in just those aspects of sensation which are most deceptive. In this respect Hoffmann may well be taken as a treatise on skepticism with regard to the eye and the ear in the sense that Hoffmann's delusions (e.g., falling in love with a doll) are predicated upon his naive attitude to what he sees and hears. To Offenbach the challenge was to create a work of art that could capture and expose our infatuation with the sensual. However difficult that might be and however successful his efforts might be, it ought to be obvious from the outset that such a work of art-or, if you like, an anti-work of art-had to be wholly antithetical to Wagner's practices. If Wagner sought a purely "natural" musical language, we can agree with Kracauer that Offenbach's musical language was a kind of EsperantoY Its aim was not to communicate itself in all its immediacy to the audience but to induce reflection upon what we see and hear on the stage. Since it was to be a staged reality, whose purpose it was to show us the absurdly theatrical character of so much of social life, it had to be ironic. But this meant that its principle had to be a kind of unityin-duality inasmuch as its task was to present an enticing image, whose very veracity was simultaneously called into question. Thus, Offenbach had simultaneously to evoke and debunk the image of the inspired artist in giving Hoffmann musical embodiment. It is difficult to conceive a musical task more different from Wagner's in creating, say, Tristan. Offenbach's mode of composition reflects his extraordinary ability to meet this dem~d. The unit around which his opera buffa is

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

137

organized is the situationY In his collaboration with Meilhac and Halevy it was the former who, all too slowly and lazily for Offenbach's taste, devised the situations. Offenbach would then set them to music. Finally, Halevy would produce polished lyrics with an alacrity and sureness that paralleled Meilhac's slow work pace. The success or failure of these satirical episodes depended principally upon the ways in which parody and ambiguity could be built into them. There was no reason whatsoever to banish dialogue as Wagner would; indeed, there were good reasons for retaining it. Moreover, Offenbach is surely the true antithesis to Wagner inasmuch as he sought to tum whatever limitations were imposed upon him into advantages to exploit. Thus, in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, in small theaters, such as the one where he was then working, only small-scale works, i.e., one act pieces, with no more than three actors could be performed. In his parody of the medieval 1'0mance, Croquefer ou le Dernier des Paladins, he would bewildc:r the censor and wildly delight his audience by introducing a fourth mute character onto the stage, who, nevertheless, managed to "c:unverse" by holding up cards upon which the appropriate responses to questions were written. This is a good example of something in his work that we still find funny, but for different reasons than the original audience did. Wagner's demand for monumentality seems to have offended this aspect of his professional character. In the words of one commentator, the normally fun-loving Offenbach (he never ceased to try to make his own home as cheerful as his productions) "was utmost vitriolic in his dislike of Wagner.'' 33 Surely, all sorts of factors, such as the belief that Wagner confused young composers, 34 played u role in forming this judgment. Unfortunately knowledge of Wagner's music was not one of them; for, like Giuseppe Verdi, Offenbach's first-hand knowledge of Wagner was limited to the opening of 35 Lohengrin. No, it was not Wagner the musician but the pretensions of Wagner (by 1869) the Cause that was the basis of Offenbach's resentment. Offenbach was content to work within the restrictions that Mozart had; Wagner was not. This was enough to rouse Offenbach's ire. On that account, Offenbach was ever ready to poke fun at Wagner. For example, he ridiculed the pretentiousness of' Wagner's claim to be writing the "music of the future" in his Tirolienne del Avenir of 1860 and a few years later inserted a parody of the singing contest from Tannhiiuser into La Belle fleli!ne (ul-

138

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited 36

though not in the direct fashion that he had originally intended ). In any case, the conflict of sensibilities could hardly have run deeper than it did on the question of working within imposed limitations. Offenbach's attempt to produce an operatic work on the Wagnerian scale, Die Rheinnixen of 1864, was an abject failure (with the interesting exception of the theme music for the river Rhine, which he later incorporated into Hoffmann as the epitome of Venice, the barcarole), while Wagner's plans to parody an Offenbach opera buffa went without realization. 37 Instead, he responded publicly to Offenbach's scorn with the doggerel verse: Oh how pleasant and sweet, And so easy on the feet! Crack, Crack, crackeracrack! Oh, splendid Jack from Offenbach 0 wie siiB und angenehm, Und fiir die FiiBe so recht bequem! Krak, Krak, Krackerakrak! 38 0, herrlicher Jack von Offenbach.

Privately, however, Wagner would write upon hearing of Offenbach's 39 death: "Look at Offenbach, he writes like the divine Mozart." Thus was Wagner's grudging admission of his antagonist's gifts. Sadly, the part of Mozart's work which is in fact closest to Offenbachand from the point of view of its musical unity paradoxically to Wagner himself-Cosi fan tutte, was inaccessibly strange to Wagner. 40 (Is it entirely accidental that the same Jules Barbier and Michel Carre who wrote the play Les Contes d' Hoffmann in 1851 produced the only version of Mozart's opera performed in Paris 41 during Offenbach's lifetime in 1863? ) Offenbach was certainly consciously and proudly anti-Wagnerite. He seems to have regarded Wagner as perverting the concept of musical culture by equating quality with size, "depth," and controversy. In championing a musical culture in which gaiety, glitter, and craftsmanship combined in unpretentious, yet profoundly reflective, works, he paved the way for the distinctively French response to Wagner in Chabrier (albeit an awe-struck admirer of Wagner's), Faure, Satie, and Ravel. He championed the miniature as an explicit means of criticizing the "modern" tendency to monumentalism in art. Perhaps the most conspicuously "modern" element in Wagner's selfpre.sentation was his defense of his often unspeakable conduct on /

139

the grounds that he was a genius. If this murky term has any meaning at all, it must signify that Wagner was dazzlingly "creative" or brilliantly "original." This no one would dream of denying him. What can be contested is the extent to which originality is a basic value in musical aesthetics. It was certainly possible for someone like Offenbach, who saw the composer more as a craftsman than as an "artist." By his very compositional practice Offenbach was contesting Wagnerian aesthetics. Thus, there is hardly a work of Offenbach's that does not contain liberal "borrowings" from the works of other composers as well as from his own works. It was his curious way of showing his appreciation of the music of others to refer to it by quoting or parodying it. Hence, his works are full of the finest tunes of Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Rossini, Weber, Gluck, and, of course, his beloved Mozart. It is music written upon or from music, just as his greatest admirer Karl Kraus would make literature out of what oth· ers had written. 42 Thus, Hoffmann abounds in references to /)n Freischiitz and Don Giovanni, while La Perichole ironically dtrs themes from Donizetti's La Favorita in which a similar situation to Piquillo's, i.e., discovering that his wife was in fact the mistress ol' the monarch, is the basis of a tragedy. 43 Indeed, La fi'ille du 'IConhour Major, that rarity in Offenbach's oeuvre, a purely sentimrnlul, patriotic work, is nothing less than his re-write of an old favorite of his, Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment. If Offenbach could quote others, he could also quote himself as he did, excessively in the eyes of critical opinion then, in the case of Barbe-Bleu. He could equally adopt what he had written elsewhere to a different situation, as we have already had occasion to notice in the case of the barcarole. And, for someone like Nietzsche, who admired the, "African" character of Carmen, there was his Algerian can-can. 44 Such quotations are, of course, the stock-in-trade of the satirist. They were certainly immensely amusing to his nineteenth-century audiences, who were familiar with the originals. What is unusual-and certainly a testament to Offenbach's enormous compositional skill-is that his satire survives, when much that he satirized is long forgotten. l.t certainly says a great deal about his competence as a composer. So, it was less a matter of a pastiche technique than of Offenbach's ability to think and write innovatively in an idiom which took its point of departure from the music of other composers, which was at the very center of his concept of music drama and most fully antithetical to Wagner.

140

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Yet another point of antithesis between Wagner and Offenbach is the latter's use of repetition to transform the meaning of what is being pronounced by the singers. Wagner is well-known for the view that repetition diminishes dramatic effect on the musical stage. However, for Offenbach it is precisely that effect which is exploited as a form of "overkill" to achieve the ironic reversal of signification ubiquitous in his work. This is nowhere more skillfully exploited than in the second act of La Belle Helime. The repetition of the phrase, "ce n'est que un reve, un reve d'amour" (its only a dream, a dream of love), creates a remarkable blurring of the distinction between expectation and consummation, dream and reality, while curiously intensifying the eroticism of the self-induced dream that is not a dream. Here the marriage of words and music is all but complete but in exactly the opposite way that Wagner achieves unity in, say, Tristan; for both what is being said and how it is set to music matters very much, since the audience knows that, much to the delight of both Helen and Paris, she is kidding herself. She cannot wait to let her fantasy and her vain curiosity ("suis-je aussi belle, aussi belle que Venus? "Am I really so beautiful, so beautiful as Venus?) run riot. Offenbach was rightly proud of his achievement here; for rarely has lyricism, musical or otherwise, so completely succeeded in mocking itself as in this wholly un-Wagnerian passage. In terms of form, content, the notion of meaning, moral values, and even metaphysics we have the full antithesis to, say, the meeting of Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of Die Walkiire. The ideologically purist aesthetic on the basis of which Wagner rejects Offenbach's "Jewish" music is curiously reminiscent of that with which Voltaire dismissed Shakespeare. Voltaire could not abide the intrusion of a "comic" interlude such as that with the gravediggers in Hamlet in a tragic play. For all his Teutonic dismissal of classical French aesthetics, despite his detestation of "rules" and his great admiration for Shakespeare, Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk ideal was a new "classicism" that was essentially foreign to Shakespeare's art. If we require proof of that we need merely turn to Wagner's early effort to go Shakespearean, Das Liebesverbot. Even in the eyes of a not unsympathetic critic, Wagner's setting of Measure for Measure to music has to be described as "extraordinarily vapid and amateurish."45 The reason for this is that an essential part of Shakespeare's heritage stemmed from the Italian commedia dell'arte tradition with its slapstick, streetwise hifmor, its rudeness, mockery, and love of

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

141

disguise. This tradition was as foreign to Wagner as it was congenial to Offenbach. With Lessing, Wagner sought to free German theater from French influence, but like the elitist Lessing, and unlike Shakespeare, Wagner wholly rejected popular burlesque as suitable for the musical stage. (The efforts of Strauss and Hofmannsthal to redress this failure in their superb Ariadne auf Naxos are beside the point inasmuch as they present a romanticized, almost bowdlerized, high culture parody of this art.) All of this was not only wholly acceptable to Offenbach; it was the very basis of his art. We forget at our peril that Offenbach's links to eighteenth-century Italian music were many and varied. His musical education at the Paris Conservatory, for example, was supervised by its Italian director, Luigi Cherubini. Much more importantly, however, was the fact that his acknowledged masters and avowed models were Mozart and Cimarosa. 46 Both Mozart and Cimarosa were, in turn, deeply influenced by Goldoni's concept of theater. For example, Mozart's classification of Don Giovanni as a dramma giocoso, so odd-sounding today, is simply according to the description that Goldoni routinely used for his "comedies." The great Venetian pinywright is often taken to be the great enemy of commedia dell 'ar/t' on the basis of his professed views, but some theater historiuns ul least take him to have transformed rather than abolished it. Be that as it may, the suburbs of Mozart's Vienna were places where commedia dell' arte thrived 47 and continued to thrive uninterruptedly up to Offenbach's day, when the great Viennese representative of that art was that great Offenbach fan, Vienna's first Jupiter (in Orfee aux Enfers), Johann Nestroy. 48 So great was the hold of this popular theater that the "enlightened" Emperor Joseph II commissioned the first German opera from Mozart in the hope of swaying popular taste to a more "refined" art form. Nevertheless, despite these efforts in the spirit of Lessing, Mozart still contributed Die Zauberflote as his "Zauberposse" to the distinctively Viennese tradition of commedia dell'arte. In the absence of some understanding of that tradition, Papageno, say, is scarcely intelligible. The world of street mime to which Papageno belonged-precisely what Wagner wanted to eliminate from the stage-was Offenbach's musical home. The supreme achievement in Offenbach's musical art was its transformation into a mode of social criticism as humane as it was powerful in the wit of La Perichole, La Belle Helene, Oifee, Les Brigands, and Hoffmann to mention but a few of his most powerful works.

142

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

The whole project, which struck Wagner as perverse, would for all his friendship with Offenbach never have occurred to Bizet-and it is precisely for that reason that Offenbach must be considered the most complete antipode to Wagner in nineteenth-century musical life. "To tell the hard truth by laughing" (ridendo dicere severum)this motto, which Nietzsche adapted from Horace49 for The Case of Wagner, surely fits no musician more aptly than Offenbach. Yet, if Nietzsche understood this, why did he, nevertheless, choose Bizet as his foil for Wagner. On his own account, as we have seen, it was because Bizet's Carmen depicted love as "fatum, fatality, cynical, innocent cruel-and just on that account natural!" ("Fatum, als Fatalitat, cynisch, unschuldig, grausam - und eben darin Natur!" KSA 6,15). But both in Bizet's opera and in Nietzsche's philosophy this concept of love is every bit as problematic as the Wagnerian one that he would use to criticize. A hundred years later in a more brutalized world than Nietzsche might have been able to imagine, what Nietzsche took to be a realistic alternative to Wagner looks every bit as romantic, absurd, or cliched as Wagner's did to him. Yet, this is something that Offenbach seems to have realized, for it is the very absurdity of love as fatality that he chose to mock in La Belle Helene. But this implies that his work is as much an implicit critique of Nietzsche as it is of Wagner. It remains to see why this should be so. Nietzsche needed Bizet as a foil for Wagner precisely because his concept of the "Dionysian" was so close to Wagner's "heiligste Minne, hochster Not" that he would have falsified his own position to contrast it sharply with Wagner's. This reading, which sees Nietzsche's development as moving from a confused enthusiasm for Wagner to a distance, albeit one less great than the tone of his polemic would indicate, is consistent with both his virtually boundless enthusiasm for Wagner's music, which is reiterated throughout The Case of Wagner, and his concept of philosophy as relentless self-criticism. If there is a problem with Nietzsche's case against Wagner, it is that he inadvertently confounds self-criticism with criticism of Wagner. He could not have rejected Wagner outright because that would have been dishonest. His own views were, at least on the surface, not easily distinguished from Wagner's. There can be little doubt from the tone of the essay that he took it to be a great triumph to have been abl~ to overcome the Wagnerian in himself.

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

143

Indeed, there is much to be said for reading Nietzsche contra Wagner as the story of a painful extrication from Wagnerianism as a kind of conceptual scheme-there is no question that he ever endorsed the vulgar anti-Semitic side of Wagner's "ideology." No, this was a matter of transcending, in Nietzsche's eyes, the sentimental "need" for redemption, which the latter took to be so life destroying in Christian morality. The problem is that, in the crucial passage just cited, Nietzsche's "life, fate, that love which is hate, that nature which is cynical, innocent, cruel and, on that account, the only conception of love worthy of a philosopher," presents us not with life as it is lived (in its "everydayness") but with a none-too-well disguised version of Schopenhauer's Will. In the last analysis, he gives us metaphysics at just that point where he would liberate us from it. How else could he defend the murderer, Don Jose? In real life, passion may make a course of action psychologically possible, but it by no means just i~ fies legally or morally as Nietzsche would lead us to believe. Indeed, to perform such an action might be "authentic"; but after Auschwitz we have become rightly suspect of that sort of authenticity: it would seem to be to lack just that sort of self mastery which Nietzsche and Goethe endorsed. Nietzsche could not see this because he never once considered the possibility that the sort of heroic action which he identified wil.h "master morality" could be compatible with the banalities of everyday life. That the Over Man could be a normal tax collector was simply inconceivable to him. Master morality had to be "dramatic" albeit in a sense different from Wagner's. However, as all logicians know, contraries belong to the same genus. Thus, Nietzsche seems to have been unable to bring himself to face the consequences of his own idea that to be redeemed from the desire for redemption was to acquiesce in living in an often tedious, unheroic world. We forget at our peril that it was only with Heidegger's Being and Time and more clearly in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations that the metaphysical significance of the everyday was established-to the extent that it has been at all. The importance of Offenbach consists precisely in the way his buffooneries deflate the pretensions of the romantic attitude to life and love, whose residues are clearly visible in Nietzsche's characterization of the alternative to Wagner. But Offenbach's Helene was explicitly conceived as an antidote to that illness.

144

Saint Offenbach's Postmodernism

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Without exhibiting the extreme morbid symptoms of a Hoffmann, Offenbach's Helen is at the very least neurotic. She prays at once for love ("Amour divins! Ardentes flammes!": Divine love! Burning flames!) and complains that it drives us insane despite ourselves ("dis moi Venus, quel plaisir trouves-tu": Tell me Venus what pleasure do you get...). She knows that she is fated to be the lover of Paris and she can consciously neither accept nor reject this fate. Despite protesting her loyalty, her vain fantasy craves and feeds upon the gossip that Venus has decreed that Paris shall have her love. Titillated by gossip and fantasizing wildly about the shepherd, whom she knows to be Paris, she is all too ready in practice to blur the line between fantasy and reality. The decadent but honest Orestes knows, as does the corrupt priest, Calchas, that fatality is just an excuse. In effect, the whole piece is directed at showing how the concept of fatality is little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy rooted in our vanity and sexual fantasizing. Thus, for Offenbach, fate, far from being the only conception of love worthy of the philosopher, is rather the royal road to self-deception. It seems that the smiling Offenbach has dared to tell a truth so hard that even Nietzsche did not want to hear it in exposing fate as a cliche-and, as Menelaus discovers, a swindle. In short, if superficiality can be profound, as Nietzsche suggests, Offenbach has a mighty strong claim to genuine depth. If Nietzsche's comment upon the Brahms-Wagner controversy then raging is correct, if, "everything that claims to be 'grand style' in music today either deceives us or itself' ("Alles, was heute in der Musik auf 'grossen Stil' Anspruch macht, ist damit entweder falsch oder falsch gegen sich," KSA 6, 48). Offenbach proved his mettle precisely by not laying claim to "grand style." To set Offenbach into the context of Nietzsche's critique of modernity, sickness, and decadence is to discover that in the musical satirist's works there is a more profound, because less pathos-imbued cultural criticism than Nietzsche's. The idea seems silly, if not absurd. Yet, for all its strangeness, if we know how to look we do in fact find most of Nietzsche's central notions-eternal return as living without looking forward or back, transvaluation of values as transforming morality from conformism to self-overcoming, the idea that "God is dead" as the notion that religion no longer plays a genuine role in life and can be a mode of self-deception-in the opera buffa of Offenbach. Indeed, the premise of Hoffmann, the idea that romantic love (Traum)~nd art itself (Rausch) are both sources of

145

illusion would seem to take issue with the most fundamental distinction in Nietzsche's thinking, that between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. If this is right, the thirty years Offenbach contemplated setting Barbier's and Carres' Hoffmann to music were no less devoted, without his knowing it, to a critique of Nietzschean philosophy avant la lettre. Is this an accident? Hardly. In fact, Offenbach was the product of, what for want of a better term can be called the "dialectical culture" which emerged from the Enlightenment's own critique of Enlightenment and found its fullest expression in Diderot's Rameau 's Nephew and in the in the critique of idealism it inspired, ironically, in the work of Hegel himself and later in the works of Heine and Marx (two Rhineland Jews like Offenbach) and Kierkegaard. But that is another story. 50

*

*

*

Whatever the ultimate value of the extravagant claims that Wl' have made on behalf of Offenbach might turn out to be one thing is clear: Offenbach's oeuvre stands or falls on the merits of whul is produced on the stage. He does state what he means but shows tlw emptiness of the cliche and the arbitrariness of absolutism on tlw basis of ironic reversal of meaning in his music dramas. And lhl' philosophical dimension of what is shown will either be half true or one and a half times true, as Kraus put it in another context. Briefly, if we need proof that there is insight in Wittgenstein's infamous distinction between what can only be shown in the moral sphere Offenbach offers it in abundance (in this, of course, he is no different from, say, Anton Chekhov, whom he entranced at the tender age of fourteen, or any other great playwright). And two generations of critical modernists knew it. Thus his must be a prominent role in our second visit to Wittgenstein's Vienna. Having arrived at the concepts of saying and showing in the contexts of the arts, we must now turn to the genesis of Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy as showing the limits of discourse. In doing so our aim is to redress a serious misreading of Wittgenstein 's Vinma that is as disastrous as it is frequent: the idea that sociocultural conditions there were such that Wittgenstein somehow had to emerge there. Nothing could have been further from the minds of its authors than such crude reductionist sociology. In fact Wittgenstein 's Viemw was an exercise in perspectivism. Just as, say, a red square against a

146

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

black background is perceived differently from a red square of the same dimensions seen against a white background, Wittgenstein's Tractatus looks very different in the context of Weininger's Vienna 1900 than it does in the context of Russell's Cambridge. The point is a matter of cultural hermeneutics, not of social causality. Moreover, "Vienna" in the title was intended at least in part to cover German-speaking Central Europe as opposed to England. Thus, figures like Schopenhauer and Heinrich Hertz figure centrally in our story. True, Hertz's ideas had an impact in Vienna through their continuation in the work of physicists like Ludwig Boltzmann and Ernst Lecher (a friend of the Wittgenstein family and continuer of Hertz's work in electronics). However, it was not Hertz's axiomatization of mechanics, which impressed Rudolf Carnap, that would be decisive in Wittgenstein's philosophical development, marking his whole approach to philosophy in all its phases perhaps more profoundly than any other, but the notion of the dissolution of metaphysical problems on the basis of alternative modes of representing problems. That forms the subject of the next chapter.

/

7 Saying and Showing: Hertz and Wittgenstein "I don't believe that I have ever invented a way of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straight-away seized upon it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification ... Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Laos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me." -Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 19e "It was an awful thought to go and sit there among logical positivists ... " -Wittgenstein to Rush Rhees, 13.VII.38

From the very beginning, the seemingly unscientific, virtually anti-scientific, "everyday," character of Wittgenstein's mature conception of philosophy struck many of his contemporaries as either absurdly trivial or perversely false. Thus Bertrand Russell could accuse Wittgenstein of becoming lazy, no longer possessing the intellectual rigor that real philosophizing demands, and of making a doctrine out of his laziness, 1 whereas Ernest Gellner railed against "the authoritarian, capricious, messianic and elusive characteristics of Wittgenstein's practice" and its odious influence upon a generation of philosophers transformed into sophists. 2 The ideas that description should replace explanation, that it is not possible to advance theses in philosophy, that clarity is a matter of understanding language, rather than rigorous logical analysis, and that philosophy leaves everything as it is, implied for many philosophers and others as well that the later Wittgenstein had rejected the critical values of the Enlightenment associated with his early logical positivism for an irrationalist obscurantism. On Gellner's view the situation was even worse; for Gellner directed his efforts at demonstrating that these perfidious tendencies were already present in the mystical silence with which the Tractatus concludes. Despite major alterations in our picture of Wittgenstein in the intervening

'""'

148

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Saying and Showing

years a shocking number of philosophers (and others) have retained Gellner's image to this day. Moreover, Wittgenstein's own statements about science seemed to confirm the views of Russell and Gellner. In discussing the nature of philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations he remarks, "our considerations could not be scientific ones" (PI, I, 109) whereas in Culture and Value he would write, "I may find scientific questions interesting, but they never really grip me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that. At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not the other sort" (79e). On Certainty provided yet more evidence for the thesis that Wittgenstein had become unhinged in the form of the claim that the questions of traditional philosophers such as Moore and Russell about knowledge bore significant similarities with those of a madman. 3 For Russell and Gellner the perverse character of Wittgenstein's mature conception of philosophy was confirmed by his rejection of the positivist idea that philosophy is essentially linked to science in one way or another, i.e., either as substantively continuous with it as Dewey, Quine, and Popper maintained, or methodologically as Russell and the Vienna Circle believed. So an account of Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy which stresses its debt to a prominent physicist's philosophy of physics can help to dispel at least some of the confusions surrounding his view of the philosophical enterprise and its relation to sci ence. The view that the later Wittgenstein is fundamentally anti-scientific turns out to be profoundly inaccurate; for Wittgenstein's mature concept of philosophy is in fact heavily indebted to the concept of philosophy of science developed by Heinrich Hertz in the long introduction to his Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form of 1894. 4 The fact that this is the case has long been recognized by Wittgenstein scholarship; its implications, however, have hardly been explored. In his efforts to show graphically that alternative modes of presentation of the principles of mechanics could eliminate the difficulties surrounding such problematic notions as "force" in mechanics that tormented scientists and philosophers alike, Hertz de livered to Wittgenstein a highly original hermeneutic technique that would influence all his thinking and in fact become the cornerstone of his mature philosophical method. Thus we shall see that all of the main features of Wittgenstein's mature conception of philosophy, in fact, emerge from his earltscientific background only to be comple-

149

mented and embellished, but in no sense fundamentally altered, by his later encounters with thinkers of different molds. We forget at our peril that Wittgenstein was not only a lifelong reader of Hertz, who gave Hertz's Introduction to the Principles to his students as the paradigm for doing good philosophy, 5 but also actually contemplated taking his motto for the Philosophical Investigations from its pages 6 : "when these painful contradictions are removed, the question about the essence [of force] is not answered, but the mind is no longer tormented and ceases to pose illegitimate questions" (PM, 9). Moreover, it was his mature method for dealing with philosophical problems, i.e., his techniques for "discovering or inventing intermediate cases" (PI, I, 122), for drawing our attention away from the "one-sided diet" of examples (PI, I, 593) in terms of which traditional philosophers posed their problems, that Wittgenstein took to be his major contribution to philosophy. Bringing out the links between Hertz's technique of presenting alternative representations of mechanics to clarify its conceptual problems and Wittgenstein's mature method for dissolving philosophical problems will thus be a way of dismissing the charges of irrationalism and obscurantism that have been leveled against him, and replacing them with an account of the scientific origins of his mature view of the nature of philosophy. Further, looking at Hertz will help us to see the continuity within Wittgenstein's philosophical odyssey. Moreover, it will contribute to the rehabilitation of an important neglected philosopher of science. In any case, the crucial point about the concept of philosophy that the physicist Hertz developed for handling metaphysical problems in science and bequeathed to Wittgenstein is the insistence on the immanent character of the philosophical enterprise: if philosophical problems arise in physics, then they must be handled in physics itself rather than in some theory about physics. Physics must take care of itself, as it were. What, then, did Hertz maintain to be the proper mode of procedure in the philosophy of physics? The first thing that we must remind ourselves of with respect to Hertz is that he wrote in the days before Einstein, i.e., before relativity theory and quantum mechanics. So, although he anticipated all of the conceptual difficulties these startling innovations in physics would bring, his problems belonged most definitely to a physics that we hardly recognize one hundred years later. In any case, Hertz's new strategy for dealing with metaphysical problems in science was

Saying and Showing 150

151

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

first and foremost a contribution to the resolution of debates about the role of concepts, in particular the concept of force, in Newton's physics. In order to understand the importance of Hertz's contribution to the philosophy of science we must begin by taking a look at the problems that bothered Ernst Mach, the founder of the (then) new discipline of philosophy of science.7 Therefore it is necessary to begin our story with a brief recapitulation of the problems that led Mach to formulate his Principle of Economy with respect to scientific modeling and Hertz to want to emend the Machian view thereof. It should be emphasized from the outset that the aspects of Hertz's philosophy of science that most interest us are the points at which he departs from Mach. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Newton's physics was unquestionably the basis of all investigation into the nature of physical reality and the ideal against which claims to the status of "scientific knowledge" were measured. However, the critical spirit of nineteenthcentury positivism increasingly came to question the form of Newton's presentation of his physical theory. Scientists with an empiricist philosophical bent like Ernst Mach became increasingly discontented with the conceptual framework upon which Newton's Platonic mathematical synthesis rested. Why, for example, should Newton base his system upon notions of "absolute space, time, and motion" which could neither be perceived nor measured? In this context Newton's notion of "force" came under particular scrutiny. Like the "absolutes," "force" is unobservable (but, of course, not immeasurable); however, it is absolutely essential to Newton's development of dynamics. Thus scientists and philosophers were permanently tempted to raise the question what sort of thing is this unobservable cause of 8 motion, the "force of gravity"? From Mach's positivist perspective the confusion arising from the continual temptation to reify the concept of force was disastrous. Such confusing, i.e., metaphysical, elements in science offend against its essential characteristic, its "economy": "It is the object of science to replace, or save, experi9 ences, by the reproduction and anticipation of facts in thought." Mach considered scientific theories, even those that had to be considered among the greatest achievements of mankind, to be, nevertheless, embedded in-and limited by-the culture of their epoch. Therefore, the language in which scientists expressed themselves was in continual need of purification from contingent cultural accretions·: Since Newton'~ge was an age whose typical cultural idiom

or mode of expression was theological speculation, his central concepts are not entirely free of the rhetoric of theology. His employment of a word such as force highly suggestive of a causal agency to express what is in fact a mathematical relationship between mass and acceleration reflects this sociological fact and is thus an indication of our need for a critique of scientific language. By inviting us to ask what the force is that works upon the mass in question the word force only obscures that exact mathematical description of physical reality which is the goal of physics. Therefore it must be eliminated from the vocabulary of science in a more enlightened era. Henceforth the goal of science should be the representation of observable phenomena in terms of the simplest mathematical relationships (functions) between observations. Observations were to be represented as points on a graph and the most adequate mathematical model of the situation would be the function that corresponded to the shortest line connecting the points. That in essence is Mach's Principle of Economy. The most important of Hertz's questions to Mach is: what is simplicity? "Here it is not certain what is simple and permissible and what is not," Hertz writes (PM, xxv). In fact, Hertz's query about the nature of simplicity turns out to be a series of questions about the role of what Kant termed "regulative ideas" with respect to scientific theory: what sorts of considerations have guided us as we shaped our models of physical reality in the past? What sorts of considerations should guide us as we shape our representation now? What sorts of considerations with respect to shaping our models of physical reality help us to understand how we confuse ourselves in the interpretation of models? To be sure Hertz's questions about the nature of simplicity are inspired by Mach's reflections and hardly hostile to them, (PM, xxviii) but they, in fact, reveal a very different perspective on the question of how to eliminate metaphysical problems from science (even if it should sometimes seem that there is little or no difference between their positions). Like Mach, Hertz believes that the aim of physical theory is the simplest representation of observed phenomena. However, Hertz, rather in the Pragmatist manner of C.S. Peirce 10 than the positivist manner of Mach, poses a question that Mach had not at all mentioned: simple-for whom? Mach had drawn attention to the importance of the rhetoric of science, but he had not considered all of its implications. For Mach the rhetorical element of science is always distorting and never useful.

152

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

For Hertz, who is well-aware of the distorting possibilities of scientific rhetoric, it is nevertheless something useful and necessary in the development of physical theory. For Mach the question "for whom" does not arise because he simply presupposes that our representations are always made for the same audience of scientific experts, and one of these will always be the simplest mathematically for them. Hertz proceeds from the view that even within science it is necessary to construct different representations of the same data depending upon whom you want to talk to. He offers us the analogy with presentations of grammar: pupils learning to master their mother tongue require an altogether different presentation of the rules of grammar than philologists do (PM, 7). The more we consider the analogy the more complex it becomes; for it will soon become clear that students in the course of mastering their mother tongue will require a very different grammar from those foreigners who struggle with the same language, whereas different groups of foreigners will find different presentations of grammar more or less helpful depending upon the characteristic modes of expression in their own language, and so on. For these different purposes we need different "pictures" or models of the rules of grammar. The same is true in physics: a representation that is suitable for theorists is hardly suitable, say, for engineers or for chemists working with the same subject, let alone introductory students. Thus Hertz differs from Mach at the very outset by emphasizing how it is that the normal development of science requires a plurality of representations. For Mach, as for the early Wittgenstein, the underlying similarities between different presentations of the same theory, i.e., the common mathematical structure in its simplest expression, provided the key to understanding the nature of scientific concepts. Hertz in no way denies this. In fact, he insists just as much as they do that it is only by means of a consideration of the mathematical structure of physical theories that we come to grasp their actual structures and actual ontological commitments. However, unlike them, he does not stop there. He goes on to stress how close reflection upon the differences between these presentations would provide the key to eliminating philosophical perplexities concerning the nature of scientific concepts inasmuch as the rhetorical reasons why they arose in the first place would become crystal clear. In Mach's account of physical theory there are two questions which must be handled; in Hertz's /

Saying and Showing

153

there are three. For Mach our representation must be physically correct and logically coherent; for Hertz they must be rhetorically apposite as well, i.e., they must be constructed with a view to the communication situation in which the scientist finds himself. In other words the physicist's models must be fittingly constructed so as to be in a position to convey the sort of information that the audience wants to learn about in a form it can assimilate. The most rigorous and elegant presentation of a theory will be of no help to students who are just beginning to deal with the subject. Thus Hertz will speak of three characteristics of our models of nature. They must be logically permissible, i.e., internally consistent, empirically correct, and communicatively appropriate or effective (PM, 2). The third criterion for the acceptability of a model is its usefulness in a given situation. Without referring to Mach, Hertz actually criticizes him for failing to see that representations have to be constructed with a view to the questions that are being posed to us. As well as accuracy and rigor sensitivity belongs to our models of physical reality. Put differently rhetorical adequacy is as important as architecture in the development of our models of physical reality. Although Mach was hardly opposed to the idea that models are constructs, his concentration upon empirical accuracy and architectural simplicity led him to overlook the positive significance of the teleological element in modeling. Although Hertz is as sensitive as Mach to the demands of empirical accuracy and logical coherence (indeed, one problem with his introduction is that on a superficial reading it seems to be the case that he is merely restating Mach's view with a somewhat different emphasis), he is adamant in insisting that the crucial feature about models of physical reality is that we construct them: "our requirement of simplicity does not apply to nature, but to the models we fashion of it" (PM, 28). If we sometimes paint ourselves into a corner by so constructing our models as to confuse ourselves about the objects to which they refer as in the case of Newton's concept of force, we must eliminate the problem in precisely the way that we have created it, namely, by creating alternative models which dispense with the unessential characteristics-Hertz refers to them somewhat confusingly as "contradictions" (PM, 9 et passim)-that we have built into those models which have come to puzzle us (we should not forget that Hertz's own contribution to physics, which led to the unit of frequency being named after

154

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

him, was his clarification of the meaning of the mass of mutually inconsistent equations which Maxwell developed for interpreting the results of Faraday's experiments with electricity). Thus Hertz's way of handling the metaphysical problems which arise in the course of developing physical theory entails literally a (mathematical) re-presentation of our theories such that we are able sharply to distinguish those elements in the model (Bild) which arise from logical necessity, and those that are matters of empirical evidence, from those that we have interjected into them with a view to rhetorical effectiveness. It is these latter which bear upon the philosophical presuppositions of a theory inasmuch as our mode of posing questions necessarily involves introducing unarticulated presuppositions into our theory. To be sure Hertz's emphasis upon purging our models of inconsistencies has a lot to do with logical analysis (i.e., the mathematical component in modeling). However, it is all too easy to be misled by his very real concern with logical clarification into thinking that it was the main element in his program; whereas he, in fact, wants to place the main stress on our capacity to achieve conceptual clarification in physical theory on the basis of alternative presentations of our theories. In short, Hertz wants to solve the sort of problems that bothered Mach in physical theory by working within physics, rather than developing a theory about the nature of physical theory as Mach did. Thus, his contribution to the conceptual clarification of foundational problems within physics came in the form of the axiomatic system that he presents in the body of his text (which, if successful, would amount to fulfilling the Cartesian program for mechanics''). Again, the notion that his contribution to physical theory should take the form of an axiomatic system has tended to create the erroneous impression that his principal concern was with the formalization of mechanics pure and simple, rather than with demonstrating the value of that formalization for clarifying conceptual problems within scientific theory on the basis of an illuminating alternative representation of the same body of mechanical knowledge. However, we forget at our peril that this axiomatization of mechanics, which would surely be a tour de force by any scientific standards, 12 is not an end in itself (as axiomatization would tend to become in logical positivism especially in the hands of Carnap) but part of a program for articulating the conceptual foundations of physical theory, whose sense is to be found in the ways in which that /

Saying and Showing

155

axiom system differs from the traditional Newtonian presentation and the alternative presentation developed at the turn of the century known as energetics. Thus the task of his philosophical "Introduction" to the Principles is to present the two currently available systems of mechanics as an introduction to his own, which, in turn, is part of a way of doing what we would today call philosophy of science. The first of the representations is classical mechanics, which begins with an account of statics, i.e., the study of space and force without respect to motion, proceeding to kinematics, i.e., the purely descriptive study of motion without reference to mass or force, and culminating in dynamics, i.e., the study of bodies under the action of forces which produce changes in their motion. The basic concepts upon which Newton's development of mechanics rests are space, time, force, and mass. Here Hertz is in full agreement with Mach concerning the conundrums that the Newtonian notion of force brings with it (PM, 13-6). The very word tempts us to ask the wrong sorts of questions and thus into metaphysical speculations about the "nature" of forces, which only confuse us with respect to our empirical expectations. The program of energetics (developed by Wilhelm Ostwald, father of physical chemistry and later Nobel Prize winner) was a rcac~ tion to those conundrums strongly influenced by the development of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. On the energeticist view the problems that the notion of force presents for classical physics can be avoided if all observable changes are treated as transformations of energy (PM, 19). This entails basing mechanics upon the concepts of space and time as mathematical quantities and mass and energy as physical quantities. For energetics the properties of force are derived from fundamental laws and definitions, which function as ways of simplifying notation such that it becomes clear that they are matters of the appropriateness of the theory. In energetics there are no intangibles; there are no "arbitrary and ineffectual" hypotheses (PM, 22). However, the idea of a complex fundamental principle offends against our demand for simplicity with respect to principles in an analogous way to Newton's "force," i.e., epistemologically rather than ontologically. Hertz himself offers us a third possibility in the form of an axiom system which purports to deal with both of these problems in terms of what Helmholtz called "concealed masses and motions" (PM, 31). In this third presentation of the principles of mechanics all me-

156

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

chanical phenomena are explained in terms of masses and movements, although the masses and movements that enter into explanations are not always perceived by us. Nevertheless, they are in principle identical with the sorts of masses and movements that we perceive and in no way "occult" qualities. In short, Hertz offers a way of going beyond our actual experiences without going outside of experience, i.e., by modeling possible experiences mathematically. Thus, to speak with Kant, all of mechanics is represented within the limits (Grenzen) of the empirical, but not within the bounds (Schranken) of the empirically givenY Whether Hertz succeeds or fails in his efforts to axiomatize classical mechanics is a question that need not concern us here, for it is his strategy as a philosopher of science that is so important for Wittgenstein. Let us tum to Wittgenstein's mature conception of philosophy as presented in sections 100 to 133 of the first part of the Philosophical Investigations. By now it is familiar territory to Wittgenstein's friends and foes alike. Coming from the Introduction of Hertz's Principles to Wittgenstein's text we ought to be struck at once by a number of similarities both in philosophical strategy and mode of expressionsimilarities that are hardly coincidental given the fact that Wittgenstein seriously considered giving the Philosophical Investigations a motto from the Introduction to Hertz's Principles. That is, of course, no secret, but its significance has been all too little recognized. Like Hertz, who could marvel at "how easy it is to attach to fundamental laws considerations which are quite in accordance with the usual modes of expression in mechanics, and yet which are an undoubted hindrance to clear thinking" (PM, 6), Wittgenstein is concerned with the problem that our usual ways of speaking, like Newton's, conceal as much as they reveal of reality rather like spectacles that allow us to read but are not themselves "seen" (PI, I, 103). We are held captive by a picture (PI, I, 115) both in a general sense and in a specific sense. Generally philosophers have a picture of language as exclusively a matter of representing the world, that at once (1) leads them to consider the logical basis of representation as constituting an ideal language, and (2) systematically prevents them from seeing the most obvious fact about it, namely that there are myriad speech acts which are both nonrepresentational and irreducibly different from one another. Wittgenstein's discussion of the nature of philosophy thus begins with a consideration of how we tend to become fixated upon an ideal language when we do philosophy. /

Saying and Showing

157

Specifically, we are all like philosophers inasmuch as we are so tied to specific, one-sided ways of seeing things that we forget that it is legitimately possible to understand words in startlingly different ways than we normally do. So we associate the word "cube" with the drawing of a cube, but there is also a very real sense in which it describes a triangular prism as well (PI, I, 139). Although the latter is always there we need to be reminded of that fact occasionally. What we need in this situation is "eine iibersichtliche Darstellung" or an overview (PI, I, 122), which shows us what other possibilities there are. We need a "depth grammar" or logical grammar (PI, I, 664) that diverts our focus from the seductions of surface grammar and permits us to liberate ourselves from our "grammatical illusions" (PI, I, 110) and focus our attention upon a number of simple, commonplace truths, whose very obviousness prevents us from grasping them. In the preface to the Investigations Wittgenstein had already compared his task to that of an artist (in ways reminiscent of Cezanne painting his various pictures of Mont Ste. Victoire from different points of view) making sketches of a landscape from different directions in order to get a comprehensive overview of something that was most definitely visible but which could not be taken in with a single glance. It is precisely in aid of obtaining said "overview" that Wittgenstein speaks of the needs to discover or invent intermediate cases (i.e., language games other than that of representation) to help lead the philosopher away from the confusing exceptional cases and back to the rule, i.e., away from the tendency to want to speculate about the nature of thought and reality and back to the things we actually do with words. Just as in Hertz an alternative to time-honored ways of thinking in physics shows us how those ways of thinking go astray, so Wittgenstein wants to "teach us differences" to paraphrase Kent in King Lear, which was another of the mottoes he considered for the Investigations. 14 Similarly, the metaphor of being entangled in our own rules is no less suggestive of Hertz. Further, Wittgenstein likens the confusions of philosophers to people inexperienced with machinery who confuse an idling engine with one that is running (PI, I, 132); whereas Hertz will describe the role of "forces" in physics as "idling side-wheels" that have nothing to do with the machine's functioning (the standard translation obscures the similarity between Hertz and Wittgenstein here by rendering leergehende Neberrdder as "slceping"-Americans would say silent-"partners" in a business, PM, 14). Thus on

158

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Wittgenstein's view the traditional philosopher is "whipped" (gepeitscht) by questions that seem logical but in fact are not answerable (PI, I, 133), because they are not questions at all; whereas in the very passage that Wittgenstein contemplated as motto for the Investigations Hertz speaks of the mind of the physicist ceasing to be "tormented" (gequiilt) by the contradictions in a concept like force or electricity (PM, 9). What the philosopher needs to discover is the spectacles on his nose to put his vain questioning to rest. The influence (a problematic term, but we have no better one and, as we have seen, it is Wittgenstein's own for describing his relationship to Hertz 15 ) of Hertz would seem at this point to merge curiously with that of Freud; for philosophy thus becomes a therapeutic art (PI, I, 133) that seeks to assemble techniques for attaining the goal of disabusing the philosopher of his obsession with seeing the relationship between language and world exclusively as a matter of representation 16 : '"It is high time for us to compare these phenomena with something different'-one may say.-I am thinking, e.g., of mental illnesses." (C + V, 55e). In an unpublished early version of section 106 of part I of the Investigations Wittgenstein writes, "One of our most important tasks is to express all false thought processes so characteristically that the other says: yes, that's just the way I meant it." 17 He has to be put into a position where his difficulties cease to be difficulties and he finally attains peace of mind. Lest this expression seem an overly religious description of Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy it is important to note that in the very same text he asserts that to so eliminate the source of our questioning in philosophy is to find the "redeeming word," an expression that he first used in his struggle with fear of death as he manned a searchlight in World War I (GT, 21.XI.14). Already in 1914 in his daily encounters with death as the ideal target for enemy fire Wittgenstein was insisting that in philosophy as well as in existential matters the solutions to our most distressing problems must be immanent ones: the problem of life must be solved in the living of it and the problem of representation must be solved in the act of representing and not in some theory about it: "the hard problems have to dissolve of themselves before us" (GT, 26.XI, 14; cf. C + V 27); whereby it is clear that he refers to both his personal problems and the problems he was having understanding the nature of mathematics ( GT, 67 .VII.l6; cf. N, 39, 54, where the English translation misleadingly renders the phrase as "the key word").

I

Saying and Showing

159

If the above is correct there ought to be other earmarks of Hertz both in Wittgenstein's other mature works as well as in his development generally. What might these be? In fact the closer we look, the more similarities we find in the form of (1) shared claims; (2) deep concern for appropriateness of presentation as a means to attaining clarity; or (3) for showing us how alternative modes of presentation and representation can dissolve philosophical problems; (4) intertextual similarities; and, finally, (5) striking similarities of tone. 18 One surprising place where we encounter a clearly Hertzian notion is in Wittgenstein's last work, On Certainty, where Wittgenstein denies that there is a fixed distinction between the propositions which function normatively, i.e., as criteria, in our inquiries and those which have merely empirical status. For Wittgenstein it is a matter of choice (although by no means arbitrary) which propositions are in Wittgenstein's words "hardened" into the systematic framework of scientific inquiry and which remain "fluid" as empirical facts (OC, 96). Here we find a direct parallel both in substance and tone to Hertz's idea that "the concept of a mechanical principle has not been sharply fixed" (PM, 4). In the course of articulating his position that the principles of mechanics ought to be developed in various ways with a view to showing how fundamental difficulties are, in fact, more a matter of our modes of representation than they are of ontology Hertz came to see clearly that what in one presentation functioned as a principle could be a corollary or a mere proposition to be demonstrated in another (PM, 4). Thus Hertz anticipated Pierre Duhem, Otto Neurath, and W.V.O. Quine as well as Wittgenstein himself in rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction. It is noteworthy that Wittgenstein's way of alluding to the propositions which have been "hardened" into the framework for raising empirical questions is strikingly similar to that of Hertz. Thus Hertz writes at the very beginning of the Author's Foreword to the Principles about what we know with certainty as that which "stands fast" (steht fest, [PM. Xxv]); whereas Wittgenstein will assert, "I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me" (die Siitze, die fur mich feststehen, Ierne ich nicht ausdriicklich [OC,. 151]) and "what I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions" (Das, woran ich festhalte, ist nicht ein Satz, sondern ein Nest von Siitzen ( OC, 225, cf. OC, 125, 144, 235, 343). The point is that for both Wittgenstein and Hertz there is no such thing as a principle, as such,

111[

I

1~

1

]1'

I l1

1

II

1

160

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

only propositions whose functions change in differing representations of physical systems (cf. OC, 318-21). This takes us right to the heart of the matter with respect to the continuity in Wittgenstein's thought; for it is too seldom recognized how closely the view that there is no qualitative distinction between what belongs to the conceptual framework and what is an empirical matter in our scientific inquiries in On Certainty is related to the Tractarian view that there are no logical propositions that are by their nature axioms. If one simply reads the seven propositions that constitute the main ideas of the Tractatus consecutively one quickly comes to the realization that the book's center is in fact propositions 5 and 6. Proposition 5 tells us that all meaningful sentences are truth functions; whereas 6 tells us that simultaneous negation is the general form of all truth functions. The force of this assertion is that all of the propositions of logic are of equal logical significance. The philosophical significance of the truth table method of representing propositions (as opposed to its significance as a logical decision procedure) is literally to show that nothing that is a proposition can be anything other than a tautology, a contradiction or an empirical proposition (T, 5.10 1). If this is true, not only is the Kant ian notion that the propositions of philosophy are synthetic a priori truths shown to be logically nonsensical, the Fregean notion in the Begriffschrift that logic is based upon privileged propositions designated as axioms turns out to be equally nonsensical. 19 Thus Wittgenstein's central concept, which, in fact, rules out there being a the.ory of logic, in the Tractatus directly parallels the Hertzian view that there are no principles, as such, in science. The best that one can do is get straight about what makes a proposition a logical truth on the one hand and what we do when we apply representations to the world on the other. No theory can help us with the latter because logical form cannot be represented logically. Once we realize this we arrive at the limits of logic and, like good Hertzians, cease to be bothered by unanswerable questions. It is evident from Wittgenstein' s correspondence with none other than Gottlob Frege that the latter found such a Hertzian conception of clarity incomprehensible. It seems that his views on clarity and Wittgenstein's were profoundly different. "I cannot pass a judgment on yo~.r treatise, not because I am in disagreement with its content, 20 but because its content is insufficiently clear to me," wrote Frege.

I

Saying and Showing

161

Yet, for Wittgenstein the whole of the Tractatus was nothing but an exercise in clarity. If what he had written was not clear, then it was worthless. Thus enormous frustration emerged on both sides. For Frege, who saw the whole task of philosophy as that of producing a razor-sharp distinction between the intelligibility (sense) and the object (reference) of an assertion, clarity is a matter of strict formal consistency21 (Hertz's idea of obtaining clarity on the basis of axiomatization would thus hold great appeal for him). What formal analysis shows to be consistent is clear; what formal analysis proves to be inconsistent is unclear. Wittgenstein accepted this account of clarity in his early work inasmuch as it bore upon scientific statements. However, even in his early phase philosophical clarity was more than that. For better or worse philosophical clarity in the Tractatus is something that is neither an empirical nor a formal matter, but first and foremost a matter of obtaining the right perspective on the relation between the empirical and the formal, i.e., something that neither empirical nor logical propositions can say, but is in fact a matter of the application of propositions (T, 5.557). 22 In short, Wittgenstein understood clarity as something essentially attached to showing the limits of language appropriately. Thus the point of his Tractatus is essentially related to the way Wittgenstein presented his thoughts. The ever perspicacious Frege only dimly recognized this; but he rejected Wittgenstein's "showing" gesture as being more artistic than scholarly. That is why the extremely curious, very first sentence of the preface, which asserts that only those persons who have already had the thoughts contained in it will understand the book, was "displeasing" (befremdlich) to Frege. 23 To his credit the skeptical Frege recognized, as nearly all commentators since then have not, that the importance of the Tractatus to its author lay in its form and was thus principally a matter of aesthetics to him, 24 which in tum is probably why Wittgenstein was to tum to a publisher of fiction, Ludwig von Ficker, when it became clear that Frege would not agree to publishing the book in any form but that of a logical treatise (W-F, 22). The importance of the book's form is again stressed towards the end of the preface. Wittgenstein insists that the achievement that he sees in his book bears upon the way it expresses the thoughts it contains. Wittgenstein makes no claims to novelty (something that always seemed absurd to his readers, since there is considerable, even astonishing, novelty in the book), rather he insists that what is

I IIi

11

1

II I II I

I I,

1

1

1

1

1'

,

162

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

really important about the book is the form in which it presents the results of his wrestling with the nature of logical symbolism. Rather like the author of an ancient tragedy Wittgenstein claimed only to tell a well-known story in a more powerfully nuanced language than it had yet been related. Seen from the point of view of Russell and Frege's (Machist) project for the purification of language this had to be a virtually incomprehensible thing to do; however, from the point of view of Hertz Wittgenstein was doing exactly what a good philosopher of science should do: presenting a strictly immanent account (W-F, 22), as he wrote to Ficker, of the limits of the domain of language (viewed as a representational system) as opposed to Russell's profoundly disturbing but continual efforts to solve problems in logic by means of dubious stratagems such as the Axiom of Infinity or a Theory of Types, which arbitrarily stipulated how things had to be in logic from without. 25 It is not our intention to examine all of the various ways in which Hertz had an impact upon the Tractatus here; that would go far beyond the scope of this investigation, rather, we can identify yet another echo of Hertzian thinking with respect to the problem of the aims and goals of philosophizing that illuminates what is normally taken to be a very curious text. Wittgenstein' s encounters with Schlick and the Vienna Circle proved to be no less frustrating to his interlocutors than that with Frege. There is much to be said for the fact that what made Wittgenstein's views, say, of contradiction so puzzling was the Hertzian perspective he had upon the matter. In those discussions Wittgenstein returns repeatedly to Hilbert's attempt to introduce technique for proving that a calculus does not contain a contradition (WWK, 119). Wittgenstein was totally convinced that this was an entirely false approach to mathematics. He insists that it is not a proof that is required here, but an analysis that substitutes a clear expression for a vague one, because the contradiction does not arise in the mathematics but in our mode of projecting mathematical problems (WWK, 120). If I am confused in formulating my mathematical problems, no proof will help me. If I am clear about how I pose them, the question of contradiction does not arise. In no case does clarity. bear upon proof, rather it has to do with what has to be done before proof is possible. Thus Wittgenstein insists that we need to get clear about our frame of reference, our mode of posing problems (cf. BBB, 169), in order to eliminate our problems with respect to c'ontradictions, which do not arise from our doing mathematics,

(

Saying and Showing

16~

but from the sorts of questions we pose mathematically. This view connects the frequently expressed Tractarian idea that there are no surprises in logic and a fortiori mathematics (T, 6.1251, 6,1261; cf. 5.473, N., 42, 2 ) with the view expressed in the Investigations that philosophy does not resolve contradictions in mathematics but seeks to get clear about the situation in mathematics that led us into contradiction (PI, I, 125). From the Hertzian perspective of a non-dogmatic empiricism contradiction merely indicated that it is necessary to form another representation of the situation at hand to extricate ourselves from this entanglement in our rules. It is in no way a catastrophe, rather a challenge to our ingenuity to reformulate our way of representing matters such that the tension that our model has introduced disappears. If there is nothing to fear in a tautology, then there is also nothing to fear in its logical equivalent, contradiction (WWK, 131). The challenge is to find out how our normal procedures for projecting problems have gone astray. The matter is us "clear" as that. 26 There would seem to be yet other echoes of Hertz in Wittgcns1cin that are perhaps not entirely obvious or documentable, bul which also should not simply go ignored, i.e., the role that alternative modes of presentation plays in Wittgenstein's way of writing philosophy, which he compared with writing fiction: "Philosophie durfte man eigentlich nur dichten" (C+ V, 24). We have seen that "discovering and inventing" intermediate cases to correct the philosopher's bud diet of examples is fundamental to the sort of therapy that Wittgenstcin wants to employ for the sake of extinguishing our urge to raise philosophical questions of the traditional sort. Wittgenstein's "dissolution" (GT, 26.XI.14) of philosophical problems is accomplished by showing us aspects of reality that were invisible because they were always before our eyes. To make us astonished at the "splendor of the simple" to employ a phrase of Heidegger's 27 Wittgenstein became increasingly convinced that he had to invent concepts, even natural histories, whose peculiar, striking character could shock us out of our intellectual fixations on the representational character of knowledge. By giving us examples of how things could be, but, in fact, are not, Wittgenstein shows us how many different ways there are of "weaving language and actions" (PI, I, 7) together. This .is of course, something quite different from what Hertz did in his Principles but it could well be seen as continuous with Hertz's philosophical strategy, a kind of variation on a theme as it were.

164

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Moreover, Wittgenstein's very mode of writing philosophy would seem to incorporate the Hertzian method of dissolving problems by on the basis of alternative modes of representation as philosophical tactics at a relatively simple level. In order to show himself how language confuses us he was fond of trying to determine how many different ways the same thought could be put into words, or of showing us how the same word functions quite differently in sentences which are very similar with respect to their surface grammar: Consider how the following questions can be applied, and how settled: "Are these books my books? " "Is this foot my foot?" "Is this body my body?" "Is this sensation my sensation?" Each of these questions has practical (non-philosophical) applications (PI, I, 411) or Compare knowing and saying: how many meters high Mont-Blanc ishow the word game is usedhow a clarinet sounds." (PI, I, 78)

Saying and Showing

165

material can either confuse us or prevent confusion. This example is particularly interesting because it has nothing directly to do with philosophy and because the speller is merely made up of a list of words that pupils have had problems with, i.e., it contains no text; it is simply a list that has to speak for itself. Here Wittgenstein is primarily concerned with preventing confusion. So he must consider the relative merits of alphabetical presentation in relation to that of presenting groups of etymologically related words with the derivatives following the base word, which would clash with the alphabetical principle (WV, xxviii). How should he organize the series alt [old], Altar [altar], Alter [old age], Altertum [antiquity], altertiimlich, [antique], etc. (WV, xxix)? The usual modes of presentation for adults are sure to be either confusing to children or to make too sophisticated demands upon them. Appropriateness thus dictated to Wittgenstein that he opt for an unorthodox, but practical, solution: alt, das Alter derAltar

It is hardly a secret that there are any number of similar sets of sentences for us to compare with one another in Wittgenstein's works. Hertz would seem to be the ancestor of this approach. In any case, the point is that it is hardly unlikely that Wittgenstein, who was so well-versed in Hertz's views about the role of alternative presentations of physical theories, developed such analytic methods wholly independent of him. It has recently been argued with considerable brilliance on the basis of copious analysis of unpublished manuscripts that Wittgenstein's almost absurdly painstaking mode of formulating and reformulating questions, assertions, observations and the like involved collecting alternatives such as "we could say ..."; "we might say ..."; "one is tempted to say ..."; "could one say ..."; "or--could one say ..."; "we are tempted to say ..." and literally hundreds of variations are essentially related to his philosophical goal of obtaining clarity about how philosophical problems arise through our tendency to misunderstand the logic of our language. 28 Wittgenstein seems to have seen variation in mode of expression as a mode of battling against our tendency to let ourselves be bewitched by language. This, too, would seem to be part of his Hertzian heritage Even Wittgenstein's Worterbuch fiir Volksschulen bears traces of this Hertzian concern with the ways in which alternative ordering of /

D[ d]as Alterum, altertiimlich etc.

Thus the central list in emphatic print contains the alphabetic order; whereas the derivative follows the base but are printed normally. In every instance Wittgenstein follows Hertz by asking systematically what is the appropriately simple, the "natural" order (cf. PI, Preface) of presentation-a question that would preoccupy him till the end of his life with respect to the ordering of his philosophical thoughts in the Investigations. In any case, thirty-five years after Gellner first raised his objections to Wittgenstein's nihilistic "linguistic" philosophy Wittgenstein's thought has proven itself to be few of the things that Gellner excoriated. Wittgenstein's assertion that philosophy leaves everything as it is has come to be seen as he meant it: as an admonition against wanting to reform our concepts without really understanding how they function in the first place. The likes of Peter Winch (ever an exceptional Wittgensteinian even in the eyes of Gellner) and Charles Taylor in social science, Stephen Toulmin and N.R. Hanson in natural science, Hilary Putnam and Stanley Cavell in ethics and aesthetics (to mention a few of the most prominent) have shown us graphically how Wittgenstcin's later philosophy is vital to grappling with

166

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

the sorts of conceptual conundrums that arise in human enterprises when we lose sight of the ways that the world is constituted through language. It is considerably more difficult to maintain Gellner's position today than it was thirty-five years ago although there are people who still try. What is remarkable, however, is that the scientific origins of the kind of analytic hermeneutics 29 that Wittgenstein practiced should have remained so long obscure. We are accustomed ~o associating hermeneutics with a philosophical tradition that has tended to be suspicious of, when not overtly hostile to, science, as well as to analytical philosophy. 3° Failure to take Hertz seriously as a precursor to Wittgenstein's philosophical method has gone hand in hand with locating his mature thought in the Machist tradition and then in an incapacity to understand how it could possibly be that anyone could at once belong to that tradition and want to undermine its central tenets about the nature of philosophy. Or it has led to a superficial identification of Wittgenstein's views with the much betterknown hermeneutics of Dilthey and Gadamer. Such hermeneuticists who have found something congenial in Wittgenstein's mature philosophy have nevertheless been deeply puzzled at the absence of any reference to typically hermeneutical themes such as historical narrative or the relationship between texts and contexts in the Investigations. Such puzzlement now becomes understandable in terms of the little known and less understood Hertzian hermeneutic program for the elimination of metaphysics within mechanics. A good part of the reason why the scientific origins of Wittgenstein's linguistic hermeneutics certainly rests generally with Hertz's obscurity as a philosopher of science, but more specifically with failure to grasp the importance of his notion of "appropriateness" and alternative modes of presentation as the basis for a kind of philosophical thinking which is at once analytical and hermeneutic. It also helps us to understand why Wittgenstein never moved in a more conventionally hermeneutic direction. There was simply no reason to do so. However, another part of the reason why the scientific origins of Wittgenstein's mature thought have remained obscure bears upon the fact that we have been accustomed to dividing his development into an early, more or less positivistic phase and a later assault upon positivism. This is something that Wittgenstein himself wanted to avoid, for example, in insisting that the Tractatus be published along /

Saying and Showing

167

with his later work. Maurice Drury has pointed out that even Sraffa's devastating critique of his views of the dependence of meaning upon "logical form," which left him like a tree bereft of its branches, did nothing to disturb the "roots" of his thinking. 31 These, Wittgenstein insisted, came to him early in life. Indeed, K.T. Fann insisted long ago that perhaps the "later" philosophy was, in fact, earlier than the "earlier" philosophy in its origins. 32 This sketch of the Hertzian origins of Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy should help us to understand more clearly what that claim means. Till we have a complete picture of Wittgenstein's texts all discussions of his development will be to some extent speculative; however, that is not to say that such speculations must be idle. There is any amount of evidence from the extant notebooks that Wittgenstein kept during World War I that themes such as the distinction between wishing and willing (N, 88), the emphasis upon use and application (N, 82), the idea of the importance of "etc." (N, 89-90), and even the more existential idea that in the course of fighting he sometimes became like an animal that he discussed there (GT, 29.VII.16) clearly anticipate central ideas in the so-called "later philosophy." Indeed, it seems to be the case that Wittgenstein's return to philosophy was a matter of taking out the notes he kept and studying them carefully by continually revising them and producing alternatives of them as was his wont: he seems to have done this after returning to philosophy around 1930 and once more at the very end of his life in the manuscripts that have come to be known as On Certainty and On Color. There is at least some intertextual evidence for this hypothesis. If this is true, there is no less reason to believe that he returned to Hertz as well with equal enthusiasm. 33 Further, Hertz himself distinguishes the a priori procedures of a "mature" science from the more expedient modes of concept formation in practical scientific work in a way that clearly anticipates Wittgenstein's perspectives on Bilder both in the Tractatus and in the Philosophical Investigations: "in mature knowledge logical purity has to be taken into consideration above all. Only logically pure models [Bilder] are to be tested for correctness, only [empirically] correct models are to be compared for appropriateness. Pressing need frequently prompts us to proceed in the reverse manner: models are invented that are suitable for specific purposes, then tested for their correctness, and finally cleansed of inner contradictions" (PM, 12). There is much to be said for the thesis that Wittgenstein

168

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Saying and Showing

wrote the Tractatus with the first half of this text in mind, the Investigations with the second. Finally, approaching Wittgenstein's later philosophy after reading the Introduction to Hertz's Principles it is clear why a scientifically oriented thinker would maintain that there were no theses to advance in philosophy, no explanations to offer, only a description of how our concepts systematically confuse us into thinking that we need theories to explain the nature of concepts when we really only need to get straight about their functioning. After Hertz it becomes clear how philosophy can dissolve problems by leaving everything as it is, i.e., by giving us a new perspective upon what has till now puzzled us such that we no longer are impelled to raise questions without lapsing into a know-nothing, anti-scientific irrationalism. Finally, after taking Hertz seriously as an influence, as profound as it was early in Wittgenstein's career, we can understand more easily how "unscientific" thinkers as different as Kierkegaard and Weininger, Tolstoy and Lichtenberg, Spengler and Kraus could have impressed him to the point of taking on profound philosophical significance for him, i.e., by presenting radically striking alternatives to the cliched "absolute presuppositions" informing both everyday thinking and philosophy. In short, in Wittgenstein's eyes they were capable of offering just the sort of freshly liberating points of comparison that could bring philosophy to rest. They were allies in the battle to gain clarity, not about some specific object before us, but about the ways in which our preconceptions about said object often systematically confuse us by leading us to ask inappropriate and impossible questions. If this is true, then Wittgenstein's turns to religion in the World War I was preceded by his encounter with Hertz, which explains why the scientific and religious elements in his thought, which all of his contemporaries, both positivists and hermeneuticists, took to be absolutely incompatible, could nest comfortably in his thinking. Fifty years after his death it remains a challenge to Wittgenstein scholarship to reconstruct Wittgenstein's philosophical odyssey from science to what he himself termed the "religious point of view" 34 essential to his way of approaching problems. There is much to be said for the view that the first step is to be found in the hermeneutics of Heinrich Hertz.

(

*

*

*

169

Strange and paradoxical as it may seem, if what we have said till now is correct it was Wittgenstein 's background in physics that brought him to philosophy and ultimately to a view of philosophy in which aesthetics, as opposed to epistemology or ethics, would play the central role as well as to his religious point of view. In short, everything that distinguished him from "logical positivism" originated in a unique scientific conception of philosophy that was entirely foreign to other "scientific" philosophers (with the exception of another brilliant loner, Ernst Cassirer, who has no bearing on our story). Once we are clear about that we are in a position to see how "Vienna" in the form of Kraus and Weininger could have had an impact upon his concept of philosophy. The next two chapters are devoted to exploring the Viennese origins of Wittgenstein's philosophical project.

8 Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View" Twentieth-century philosophy has been the scene of titanic struggles about religion, struggles for which philosophy has paid an enormous price. Positivists threw hermeneutics out as superstitious metaphysics without really considering the matter seriously and in so doing made their own efforts to clarify scientific method completely unintelligible; whereas hermenuticists would have nothing to do with Godless science, thereby cutting themselves off from llw mainstream of twentieth-century culture. One distinctive feature ofWittgenstein's philosophy in all its phusl's is that, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, he grants a philosophically privileged status neither to science nor to religion although both were important to him albeit in different ways. He neither uccepts science as model for philosophy like the Vienna Circle und mainstream "analytic" philosophy nor does he reject science out of hand on the ethical and/or religious grounds that it "dehumanizes" us as much of mainstream "Continental" philosophy has insisted over the course of the twentieth century. 1 Thus he found himself in his own lifetime between two stools: rejecting the interpretation that the Positivist Vienna Circle, which claimed inspiration from him, put on his work, and being rejected by Ludwig von Ficker, whose (loosely) "Existentialist" Brenner Circle he sought in an odd way to approach. 2 Rather, he sought assiduously to "show" the limits of scientific discourse as an ethico-religious project, whose very importance puts it beyond the bounds of what philosophical propositions can express-although we must hastily point out that ineffability here is not a matter of there being nothing to say as the Positivists thought, rather, what you end up saying when you try to put what is higher (TL-P,6.42) into words is something trivial. It's like

172

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

telling somebody not to be nervous. It hardly has the effect you want it to especially if the person in question really is nervous. Be that as it may, my aim here is to recount the genesis of the two most fundamental layers in Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy, the hermeneutic strategy of showing and the ethical sense of recognizing our limits that allowed him to find a way between the ideological struggles of twentieth-century philosophers and thus make his transformation of analytic philosophy possible. Wittgenstein's view of the matter, like Pascal's, puts science and religion on two entirely different, if legitimate, planes of human discourse. Moreover, he insisted early on that philosophy was not and could not be one of the sciences but had to be either something above or below science (TL-P, 4.111). Thus all three had a place in human experience but only to the extent that they were not conflated. Wittgenstein could develop this view of the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion because his way to religion was rooted both existentially and philosophically in the conception of philosophy of science that he inherited from Heinrich Hertz. Curiously it was Hertz who made it possible for Wittgenstein both personally and philosophically to see all questions from a religious point of view 3 as he put it. Thus, unlike so many philosophers in the twentieth century, he was never faced with a choice between science and religion. How did he find his way to this view? What did it enable him to do as a philosopher that he could not otherwise have done? To answer these questions we must begin by recapitulating a number of points about Hertz from the last chapter. In his introduction to The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form of 1894 Hertz produced a dazzling alternative to the Machist program for dealing with the classical metaphysical problems in mechanics that Locke had identified in Newton. Unlike Mach, who sought a criterion for meaning similar to what would later be termed the Verification Principle, Hertz did not set out to reform the language of physics. Rather, he endeavored to show on the basis of a new striking example that these problems could be dissolved by representing literally the substance of mechanics in the context of an alternative conceptual framework in which the classical difficulties accruing to "force" did not arise in the first place. Hertz was not the first, to do so, for Wilhelm Ostwald and the "energeticists" had already' successfully provided an alternative representation of me-

\

Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View"

173

chanics that avoided the pitfalls of the Newtonian system. However, this representation with its complex first principle was too cumbersome for Hertz. Instead, he boldly proposed an axiomitization of the principles of mechanics along the lines that Descartes had worked before Newton. Thus Hertz would offer Wittgenstein a non-positivistic technique for the dissolution of metaphysical problems on the basis of a striking alternative representation of the matter at hand matching the conventional method of projecting the matter in question but avoiding that problems associated with it. Such a strategy marks all of Wittgenstein's philosophizing. On the basis of a new way of seeing the matter at hand an immanent solution to a seemingly intractable metaphysical problem could be shown without the slightest need to say anything. He came to attack deep-seated prejudices in the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Russell by weaning it from a one-sided diet of examples as he put it (P/, I, 593)-which technique bears a certain comparison to the classical skeptical technique of Sextus Empiricus for protecting our mental health from philosophical indisposition. 4 Classical epistemology, for example, had been a search for a definition of certainty in the face of absolute skepticism, both of which are extreme positions in epistemology and have nothing whatsoever to do with knowing everyday life. By concentrating upon such extreme examples of knowledge, and its lack, epistemology systematically, but arbitrarily, cut itself off from "normal" knowledge and thereby from life itself. Rooted in a "religious point of view," Wittgenstein's philosophy, in contrast, defends everyday, unsophisticated, "impure" reason from philosophical attack, contenting itself with "any logic good enough for an animal" ( OC, 4 75) even to the point of admitting that the logic involved in normal human reasoning may not in the end even be representable (OC, 501). Be that as it may, Hertz gives us the historical point of departure for reconstructing Wittgenstein's philosophical development as a development of the notion of "showing" in the Principles. It too loses much of its mysterious character against this background. However, it also turns out paradoxically to be the key to understanding Wittgenstein's "perspectivism" and ultimately how ethics and religion could become so philosophically important for himthere is no question as to their importance in his personal life as all biographical sources more than clearly indicate.

174

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Should Wittgenstein's youthful attachment to Hertzian scientific hermeneutics seem implausible, we need simply recall that seeking alternative ways of viewing oneself, especially in the context of the family constellation, on the basis of comparing a person's plight with that of figures in a novel, say, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit (Soli und Raben) was a sort of hermeneutic parlor game in Karl Wittgenstein's house. 5 So the philosophical strategy that Wittgenstein learned from Hertz was one that he was well-prepared to receive as a teenager. Moreover, the crucial role of drawing and illustration as a mode of representing differences comparatively in experimental physics and engineering played in Wittgenstein's education as an engineer at Charlottenburg has only recently come to light. 6 So it should not surprise us that "showing" on the basis of comparing striking alternative formulations became his strategy for coping with both his philosophical and existential problems. At the beginning of July 1916, seemingly out of the blue, Wittgenstein began to pose questions about "the world," which he construes in a decidedly Augustinian-Pascalian-Husserlian sense, God and the meaning of life, the limits of willing and the nature of happiness alongside his musings about reference and generality in his philosophical notebooks. 7 A close look at what he was writing to himself about himself reveals that just at the moment that he begins to raise "big" questions about God, happiness, and the meaning of life (N, 11.VI.16 ) he is struggling actively to connect the battle with the fear of death that he had been waging since the beginning of the war-now documented in the so-called "Secret Diaries"-with his struggle to understand the foundations of logic: "Colossal strain in the last month. Have reflected much about everything but curiously incapable of producing the connection with my mathematical trains of thought. However, the connection will be produced! What cannot be said, cannot be said!" (GT, 6-7.VII.16). The "Secret Diaries" clearly indicate that Wittgenstein personally considered the War an ordeal by fire of his character. They record his efforts to lead what he took to be a philosophical life8 in the face of death threatening him each night as an ideal target for enemy fire manning his searchlight on the Vistula patrol boat Gop/ana. His exercise in courage was certainly inspired by his prewar encounters with William James's Varieties of Religious Experience 9 as well as his reading Schopenhauer. 10 In the early months of the war his discovery of Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, 11 which was his first en-

Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View"

175 .

counter with Christianity as such, certainly lent him strength in the face of death by reminding him that, although we may be subservient to our flesh, we are free through the spirit, which he regarded as the Redeeming Word. However, it seems that Wittgenstein became the Wittgenstein we know today as he struggled to find a common solution to both his existential problems and his philosophical problems on the basis of what he had learned from Hertz as he applied it to a few pages in Otto Weininger's Uber die letzten Dinge entitled "Tierpsychlogie" (Animal Psychology), 12 which intensified and encapsulated what he had learned existentially, as it were, from Schopenhauer, James, and Tolstoy and raised it to importance for his philosophizing. In all of these latter thinkers he found an alternative picture of the relation between the self and the world which was striking enough to push his thoughts in a new direction. However, in the few pages of Weininger it seems that he found the requisite possibility for connecting his moral strivings with his reflections on logic in the demand to recognize our intrinsic or, if you like, our transcendental, limitations. Now Weininger would offer him a provocative picture of two possibilities for the willing self to relate itself to the world, which would "show" him that the solution to both his existential problems, as he faced death, and the philosophical problems about logic, which had tormented him and Russell, was ethical in nature. What does that picture look like? However, to understand the full significance of the transformation that was about to reach its completion in this thought we do well to reflect upon his "existential" situation. In the month before he began to write about the "big" question, he was involved in "some of the heaviest fighting in the war." 13 We can get a glimpse of the intensity of the fighting by considering the ways in which Wittgenstein's division, the 24th Infantry, has been described in the official Austrian history of the war. After Brusilov's initial onslaught on the 4th of June 1916 its situation is described as "exceedingly serious," its condition as "frazzled," "ruined," "fagged out" or "worn out." As early as the 12th of June a mere 3,500 of its 16,000 men remained ofWittgenstein's formation. By the end of August Brusilov's offensive had left 475,138 of the Central Powers' 620,000 troops on the Eastern Front dead, wounded, sick, captured, or missing in action.14 Some historians have gone so far as to date the inevitability of the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy from that point. 15 What

176

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

is certainly clear is that the survivors were wholly demoralized. So it is little wonder that Wittgenstein would write of the "colossal strain" that he had experienced in the last month. Brian McGuinness has given us a well-documented, eloquently nuanced account of these 17 developments, 16 emphasizing Wittgenstein's "skill and courage" in battle and rightly insisting that by early August "he had bridgedor was about to bridge-some gaps between his philosophy and his inner life." 18 Weininger's "animal psychology" was crucial to that project. Weininger's concern in this curious text is not with making an empirical generalization about actual people, rather, he presents an "ideal type" or model of what it is to be immoral in itself The point of producing this proto-phenomenological description is to press his reader to reflect upon happiness and the good life by giving us the negative example of a life in which guilt and the idea of human limitation play no role whatsoever. We should not be distracted by the fact that Weininger speaks of the criminal in this context; rather we should concentrate upon how he characterizes the mentality of the immoral person. Thus the criminal is that person who knowingly does evil and as such knowingly continues to commit original sin. Weininger, in fact, describes the polar opposite of Kant's autonomous human being, who lives for others and not merely for himself.19 However, his explicit reference to Protestant Christian values should not go unnoticed. The criminal's sin, like original sin, is nothing other than egoism, the will to self-assertion, the pursuit of happiness at any cost, the refusal to acknowledge any authority outside of one's self. Ultimately immorality for Weininger is successful egoism or what is vulgarly considered to be "happiness," i.e., considering the goal of human life to be possession of wonderful things. To this end he will try to manipulate everything that he can get his hands on. Indeed, he views everything as an extension of himself, subject to his will and existing for his pleasure. It is in fact what would become the Hollywood version of human life where there is no room for guilt except for failure to become rich, successful, or powerful enough. The criminal is in fact the "unhappiest man" without knowing it, having encapsulated himself solipsistically in his "earthly" existence by virtue of his very successes. Viewed philosophically, ethics is swallowed up into an effeminatt; aestheticism. However, just as the criminal world is psychologically egoistic and _!!lOrally nihilistic it is ontologically acciden-

Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View"

177

tal. It has no principle of inner unity. The reality of things is a function of the criminal's ego. It is only a world as long as he is successful, in failure everything falls apart as it does on Dallas or Dynasty or some other Hollywood travesty of tragedy. In any and all situations he is either master or slave, possessor or covetous. What he cannot possess he would kill-or be killed by. There is a certain flip-flop in his character, whereby he is a fatalist with respect to what he cannot have or has lost. Thus he goes to the gallows with neither guilt nor remorse but, nevertheless, convinced that it all had to be that way. Being dominated is entirely consistent with the desire to possess, it is simply its obverse: being possessed by fate. The criminal world, then, is a world in which fear and hope reign supreme, since the principle of reality is the fulfillment of the criminal's wishes. As such, the past and the present are uninteresting to him: only the prospect of future gain interests him. He is essentially anti-social because he is incapable of recognizing the intrinsic worth of another person, who would, as such, be a limit upon his will. He can never be a friend or comrade, for he always wants to exploit every relationship he enters. Thus the sexual exploitation that Don Juan embodies is a paradigm case of criminality inasmuch as he can never relate to the other as an "I" to a "Thou." 111 The criminal is compulsively talkative, 21 always chattering to somebody, even when he is alone, but his words are always lies, for they too are simply a function of his wishes. Like the alcoholic who hates drunks, he experiences fear and nausea when confronted with his own self-image, which is not surprising in a creature who entirely lacks self-knowledge. For that reason he never wants to be alone. He has no real life of his own and thus no respect for the lives of others. Since he is already inwardly dead-a crucial theme in the works of Henrik Ibsen, who inspired this picture in the first placeit makes no difference if he kills the other. Even as a seeker of knowledge, "his drive to know is never pure, hopeful, needy, longing, never directed against insanity, never an inner need for self preservation, rather he wants to force things and also to know. The idea that something should be impossible for him contradicts his absolute functionalist mentality that will join itself to everything and everything to itself. Therefore, he finds the idea of bounds or limits, even of knowledge, intolerable." 22 Unlimited and all-powerful, he would be God himself.

178

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

This sketch must suffice to give us a sense of what Weininger is after and what. he presented Wittgenstein with as a solution to both his existential and his philosophical problems and thus as the source of the second basic component in the latter's view of philosophy. How can this scenario be taken to illuminate his problems? Wittgenstein's "public" notebooks of the period give us a pretty clear idea of the former. In his wartime notebooks Wittgenstein emphasizes that the problems of life must be solved in the living and not in a set of beliefs about life or expectations from it (i.e., what philosophers conventionally-and confusedly-term "ethics"). That is what is "mystical" in the Tractatus. The problems of life must disappear in the living. Happiness is a matter of learning that I can only master the world (the facts) by making myself independent of them (N, 11.VI.l6), Wittgenstein claims in a Spinozistic turn. That independence is a matter of taking a position with respect to the world ("eine Stellungnahme zur Welt" 23 ). At this juncture (N, 2.IX.16) Wittgenstein insists with Weininger that "I must judge the world, measure things"-this is neither Schopenhaaer nor Russell nor even Tolstoy but it is Weininger: "judging is a phenomenon of the will; the criminal does not judge [things]." 24 To will is not merely to wish but to act, to live without fear and hope. Fear and hope, it should be noted, presuppose that I identify myself with what I possess or what I want to possess-in the most extreme case with life itself considered as something which I have as opposed to something which I am. Fear and hope presuppose loss and gain as well as a past and a future in which said loss or gain can transpire. When I abandon the idea that life is a possession to be hoarded the problem of life disappears. I have nothing more to fear. Thus it would seem that an evil life would be one in which I expected to be rewarded for my actions. In the end, the happy life is a life in which our actions are by their nature, rewarding because they are "harmonious." Thus Spinoza passes over into Aristotle at this point as ethics and aesthetics become one in a profound sense. Such a happy life is one dedicated to work in the form of the pursuit of knowledge, exactly what those "Secret Diaries" show Wittgenstein striving for in the face of death. It is only possible to the extent that we are prepared to recognize that we are limited by the way the world is. Ho'Yever, to fulfill Wittgenstein's demands this "ethical" notion must also provide him ~th the key to dealing with the problems

Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View"

179

about logic that he and Russell had been wrestling with together since 1911. And indeed it did. Russell was prone to "fudge" both in logic and in philosophy. When it suited him he could revert from the rigors of deduction to simply stipulating that there must be an infinite number of "objects" for logical operations because it was convenient for him to make that assumption. Moreover, he would cover his tracks by proclaiming the swindle to be "The Axiom of Infinity."25 Similarly, he was capable of changing his mind about the question of whether our knowledge of the self is a matter of acquaintance or of description, i.e., something intuitive or the conclusion of an argument. If Russell could change his mind about something so central to his philosophizing between 1912 and 1913, 26 there had to be something wrong with Russell's attitude to philosophical questions that corresponded exactly to the "functionalist" relationship of the self to the world which Weininger condemned. To make a long story short, David Pears has eloquently and insightfully expostulated in The False Prison how Wittgenstein's confrontation with this sort of question led him to press the idea that the relationship between the self and the world was neither a matte!' of acquaintance nor description but "mystical" in the sense that we could not capture it objectively but experience it immediately as a feeling in the manner of Schopenhauer's Will. The world and the self stand in an internal relationship limiting each other from within, as it were, in a way that cannot possibly be either an object of knowledge in the sense that there could be true propositions about it, i.e., because we are "encompassed" (umgriffen) by it to use the preferred expression of Karl JaspersY The "mysticism" at the end of the Tractatus turns on exactly this point. It is (1) a feeling of awe inspired by a certain riddle-like awareness of (2) the existence of the world as a totality (3) limited by the self (4) in a way that can only be shown, i.e., gestured at, and not argued about. Henceforth "wonder at the existence of the world" would become the unuttered, because unutterable, basis of the religious point of view that informs both his philosophizing and his ceaseless self-criticism. To recapitulate: the deepest strains in Wittgenstein's view of philosophy, developed out of a scientific and an ethical moment in his thought, i.e., the notion of showing that he encountered in Hertz's philosophy of physics as it came to be complemented by Weininger's notion that there is an ethical obligation to recognize certain intrinsic limits to thought and action, which are transgressed, not at the

180

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

price of paying some unpleasant penalty, but at the cost of losing objectivity with respect to what is most important both in philosophy and in life itself. Thus he came to insist that there simply are certain things that you cannot succeed at doing no matter how hard you try such as creating private money-if its private, it simply is not money and, if I say it is, I simply do not know what is meant by the word. Human action is thus limited by what we might term "pragmatic contradictions." However, there is a deep-seated tendency within philosophy to overlook precisely that. This realization led Wittgenstein to pursue a kind of "ideology critique" with respect to his own motivations and at the same time to philosophize in the tradition from Descartes to Russell. Thus he castigates those "slumlords " 28 of philosophy as he once put it, emphasizing certain ethical dimensions to his own task, for posing their questions about knowledge and reality in a way that systematically prevents them from seeing precisely those general features of human natural history (PI, I, 25, 415) such as, say, the fact that everybody has to be taught to speak by playing with somebody, which alone puts the philosophical mind to rest. To be sure, it is by no means only moral laxity that leads us to philosophize in the grand Cartesian tradition, for Wittgenstein, like Hertz, strongly emphasizes that there are quasi-transcendental features of language itself that tempt us to pose metaphysical questions. However, submitting to that temptation is another matter. Classical epistemologists have a way of practicing criticism without being self-critical, of simply assuming that the set of "deep" problems that rationalists and empiricists have quarreled over since Descartes are "the Problems of Philosophy" to which there must be equally "deep" answers. The result has frequently tended to intelligent non-philosophers to look like three hundred years of rearranging the furniture in a house where nobody lives-or even could live. Wittgenstein differs from other critics of Cartesianism such as, say, Martin Heidegger, with whom he bears a number of significant similarities, 29 because, unlike Heidegger, he does not reject the questions posed by modem philosophers but insists that they pose them superficially. Unlike Heidegger, Wittgenstein does not criticize Cartesians for failing to pose deep questions; rather, he attacks them for failing to consider the nuances of things and situations which provide, us with crucial hints and clues about important differences. Like Heidegger, he admonishes them, not to think, but to take a

Wittgenstein 's "Religious Point of View"

181

look for themselves but he realizes that there are deep-seated tendencies both in the minds and wills of philosophers that tempt them to think when they really only need to look. To return to my point of departure, we might say that Heidegger criticizes the would-be scientists of the mind for not being artists; whereas Wittgenstein criticizes them for not being craftsmen. Like Heidegger, he is fully convinced of the "splendor of the simple" (die Pracht des Einfachen 30 ) but, unlike Heidegger, he does not think that reminding us of it is an alternative to classical epistemology. Nor does he think that the "general facts of our natural history," which philosophers so easily forget, are anything but trivial in themselves. They only become important in situations where the speculative intellect has allowed itself to lose sight of them. Rather, like the poet Georg Trakl, who insisted that as a Protestant he did not have the right simply to withdraw from the corruption of the world 31 but must face up to it, Wittgenstein's religious point of view determined that he must dis~ mantle the conceptual framework of classical modern philosophy as only it could be dismantled in the strict sense, namely, from wit.hin (F, 23, undated). His Hertzian heritage made it possible for him to do so without taking an irrationalist stance against science. Even il' he thought science was vastly overvalued in our society (C+ V, 5 t'l passim), he did not think that there was anything wrong or decadent about it. It was much more that our modem expectations of it were wholly unrealistic. His Weiningerian heritage demanded that he challenge the conventional conception of philosophy at the limits of experience, i.e., from a more radical point of view than that of orthodox philosophy for which no detail is too unimportant and no assumption unquestionable. So he found himself in the role of a sort of a Prince Myshkin of philosophy having to think crazier than the philosophers in order to solve their problems (C+ V, 75). 32 Indeed, Wittgenstein came to regard the techniques he developed for doing so, the striking counter-example, the unanswered implausible question, the novel analogy, his distinctive form of thought experiment, the invented "language game," in short his way of assembling reminders (PI, I, 127) about the basic facts of our natural history that philosophers tend to forget, as his most important contribution to philosophy. The astonishing thing about the ethico-religious in Wittgenstein, then, is not that it is not opposed to the scientific but that in a sense it emerges from it-or at the very least is continuous with it

182

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Wittgenstein developed his notion of showing from Hertz and a sense of the importance of the limits of thought and action from Weininger, who had also emphasized our deep-seated human desire to run up against them. Yet, unlike Weininger, Wittgenstein did not believe that philosophy could say that and, unlike Heidegger, he did not consider that insight to be particularly profound. The problem really was that philosophers could not see what was plain to everyone else, not that mere mortals were incapable of rising to their level of insight. If there was little that was "modern" in Wittgenstein, there was still less that was "postmodern." Thus Wittgenstein disdained from participating in the Vienna Circle's campaign against metaphysics without being any the less anti-metaphysical for all that. The religious point of view which he took to be distinctive of his philosophizing took its philosophical sense from the immanent character of his philosophical analyses and from our misconceived desire to make the gesture or the spirit in which the word has life explicit (C+V, 8). In a sense Wittgenstein should be compared to Pascal at this point as G.H. von Wright suggested a half century ago. 33 Like Pascal, Wittgenstein wants to distinguish between different "orders" of experience which are sources of radically different kinds of knowledge. 34 For Pascal they are the animal order of nature or instinct, the rational order or science and the affective order, the heart, or authority. The latter is transrational but by no means irrational. For Pascal they are irreducible to one another and the autonomy of each must be protected. The enemy within, according to Pascal, is the vanity of reason that would explain everything on its terms and thereby distort both nature and Grace. One can well imagine Wittgenstein endorsing Pascal here point for point. For Wittgenstein it is a matter of seeing how all that can be said in the strict sense is what science can establish but how little that help us with human problems, whose solutions he insists uni sono with Pascal and the classical tragedians 35 can only come from life itself. Knowledge is gray for Wittgenstein and only science really counts as knowledge in the strict sense; whereas religion is colorful ( C+ V, 62)-and philosophy remains something else, above and/or below science but also different from religion. However, nothing is more misguided than to criticize one on the basis of the other. Science can neither verify nor falsify our most fundamental beliefs because they are formed out of experience in a wholly different way. Nor can they possibfy replace one another. Religion lends us powerful pictures

Wittgenstein's "Religious Point of View"

183

that we can use to orient ourselves in the world but they can never be true or false in the way that scientific propositions are. Their role in our lives is a completely different one36 On Certainty provides a penetrating Hertzian account of how it is possible, indeed, necessary, for a creature with a natural history like ours to "harden" certain aspect of experience into unquestioned presuppositions ( OC, 96) without our being any the less rational for all that. The religious point of view is, at once, what gives us the strength to face life's vicissitudes and to cope with our own vanity (K, 47 et alibi passim), ever the enemy of self-knowledge in life as in philosophy as Pascal knew. That religious point of view is what gives both life and philosophy their vitality but it is for all that something about which we cannot speak without muttering nonsense. *

*

*

A philosopher with a religious point of view such as Wittgenstein needs to develop techniques for introducing color into the drab world of comfortable securities. In this his situation was a bit like Kierkegaard's when the Dane wrote Either/Or. Waking people up to the choice that makes ethical life possible required developing literary techniques for presenting various points of view in one book. The treatise form was the last thing that could help in this situation and Kierkegaard's greatness as a philosopher has much to do with his skill in inventing stylistic techniques appropriate to the situation. The same could be-and indeed is being increasingly-said of Wittgenstein. In this Karl Kraus helped show him the way. So we must examine the nature of Kraus's influence upon Wittgenstein.

9 Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language That Karl Kraus influenced Wittgenstein's philosophical "work of clarification," as he called it, is beyond question: "So Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me" (C+ V, 19), wrote Wittgenstein in 1931. How he did so is completely unclear. We know from Brian McGuinness's magisterial biography of the young Wittgenstein what must have interested him personally in Kraus: "It is obvious enough what he liked about Kraus ... the style and the man. The satire, the exposure of shabby moral attitudes, the scorn were conveyed by a use and criticism of language which was more ethical than literary. Ludwig all his life had Kraus's habit of taking his opponent at his word and reading from a single ill-judged sentence a whole moral character."' Moreover, the fact that Wittgenstein ceased to be interested in Kraus in the mid-twenties when, on the philosopher's view, the satirist's work ceased to be funny 2 gives us a further clue concerning what drew Wittgenstein to Kraus. However, that information is more about Wittgenstein the man than his philosophy. At best it provides us with clues to the impact Kraus had on his philosophical "work of clarification." The latter is the important issue. So the present story, unlike the one Toulmin and I told a quarter of a century ago, will bear principally on Wittgenstein's later philosophy (as it turns out much of what we attributed to Wittgenstein's "Krausian" background then is more directly traceable to Otto Weininger, although the two streams are anything but incompatible). Lack of documentary evidence as well as the subtle, indirect character of Kraus's influence upon Wittgcnstein, then, implies that our investigation of Kraus's influence upon Wittgcnstcin necessarily has a con-

186

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

jectural character. However, it should be emphasized that this is nothing strange: we know nothing at all about the decisive role that Piero Sraffa played in stimulating the author of the Philosophical Investigations to his most consequential thoughts (PI, Preface). "Influence" covers a multitude of sins. So we should be clear from the start about what counts as philosophically interesting with respect to that concept. Inasmuch as the notion of "influence" has a philosophically significant meaning, it refers to the way in which one thinker takes over a concept from another such that his or her own problems can be viewed in a fresh new way. What was previously puzzling becomes manageable. To be influenced in this sense is to develop a concept of one's own on the basis of a suggestion made by another such that one is capable of "seeing things together" in a new and profitable way, i.e., asking new questions and/or representing hitherto anomalous phenomena such that they can now be considered "typical." For historians of philosophy, then, the concept of influence is a crucial aspect of the hermeneutics of reconstructing a philosopher's perspective on his or her subject, i.e., the Problemstellung that determines the form and/or the substance that said philosophizing assumes. In short, if we are to consider influence at all in the history of philosophy, it should be an absolutely 3 central matter and not a mechanical push-pull phenomenon. It is clear from Wittgenstein's list that he means to say something similar about what he took to be his most important philosophical achievement, his new method of making philosophical problems "dissolve" (GT 26.XI.l4; cf. PI, I, 133) by introducing strikingly new comparisons, when he speaks of having been "influenced" by the ten figures mentioned. The very fact that he fails to mention any number of thinkers with whom he was intensely preoccupied his whole life long such as Kierkegaard, St. Augustine, Tolstoy, William James, or Lichtenberg (to whom Wittgenstein compared Kraus negatively in Culture and Value [C+V, 65]), to name but a few, should not pass unobserved. The crucial thing is that these figures, who may have "influenced" him in the less interesting, conventional sense, seem not to have had an impact upon his philosophical method, his peculiar approach to philosophical problems. Moreover, we know that in Wittgenstein's case what was strikingly provocative was more important than what was true when it came to stimulating his thoughts as the <;:ase of Weininger demonstrates. Thus he could write to Moore on the· 23rd of August 1931 that "it isn't necessary or rather possible I

Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language

187

to agree with him but the greatness lies in that with which we disagree" (M, 17). The list of "influences" upon Wittgenstein is also interesting in another respect. According to Georg Henrik von Wright, 4 it is chronological. If this is so, the fact that Kraus comes after Russell but before Laos is a clue in establishing what Wittgenstein read at the decisive moment. We know that Wittgenstein first encountered Russell at Cambridge in 1911 and that he first met Laos in July of 1914. Given the intensity of Wittgenstein's Cambridge interactions with Bertrand Russell in 1911 and 1912, it seems safe to infer that Wittgenstein's profound encounter with Kraus most likely took place in Norway-and not Vienna-in 1913. Of this very special, extremely important and little documented period he would say eighteen years later: "When I was in Norway in 1913-14 I had original thoughts, at least it looks that way to me now. I mean it seems to me as if I had given birth to new movements of thought within me (maybe I am mistaken). Whereas I just seem to be applying old ones now" (C+V, 20). However, we have no documentary evidence that he came under Kraus's influence then. What do we know about Wittgenstein's interest in and knowledge of Kraus? The answer is very little. We know that Wittgenstein had been reading the Fackel from his youth, 5 and had it forwarded to him religiously in Norway in 1913 as well as later during the war. 6 Concerning Wittgenstein's thinking in this period of seclusion, which he considered to be perhaps his most creative, we know nothing beyond what we find in his correspondence with Gottlob Frege and his Cambridge friends and colleagues. There are no references to Kraus in those letters. However, we do know that Kraus's second volume of aphorisms, Pro domo et mundo, appeared in 1912 along with a reprint of essays from the Fackel collected originally in 1910 under the title Die chinesische Mauer. It is probably not entirely accidental that in 1914 Wittgenstein would employ the example of Chinese when he wanted to give an example of something that was so foreign as to be incomprehensible and thus scarcely compatible with the human: "If we hear a Chinese, we are inclined to take his speaking for an inarticulate gurgling. Someone who knows Chinese will recognize it as language. Thus I cannot frequently recognize the human in people" (C+V, 1; cf. Z, 219). That could, of course, be pure coincidence but it is interesting that the aperfu is from August 1914. Be that as it may, Kraus, along with Weininger, was certainly

188

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language

later an intense topic of conversation with Paul Engelmann and his Olmiitzer Circle in the crucial discussion of 1916, during which his ideas about "the mystical" and "the limits of language" crystallized. 7 Edward Timms has called our attention to a number of transformations in Kraus's writing in the crucial period between 1911, when he began to write the Fackel alone, and September 1913, when he fell in love with Sidonie Nadherny, that are important here. In this period polemic gave way to satire as the liberal social critic came to be overshadowed by the literary artist and irony gave way to declamation, casuistry to monologue, as the objects of Kraus's attacks came to be described with hyperbole and his own literary ego simultaneously took on exaggerated, monumental proportions. In short, Kraus took on the role of the Old Testament prophet welcoming the destruction of a corrupt Western civilization. "The challenging dynamism of the satiric monologue arises precisely because apocalyptic conclusions are drawn from such apparently commonplace material and trivial symptoms," 8 writes Timms in a passage that directly reflects Brian McGuinness's estimate of what drew Wittgenstein to Kraus. Might it be that the apocalyptic tone of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a reflection of Kraus's tone? Perhaps. What is clear is that tone was a direct reflection of an author's moral and aesthetic worth in Wittgenstein's eyes as in the cases of Trakl (F, 12) and Tagore, whom he compared negatively with Ibsen in this respect (E, 43). Indeed, Kraus emphasized at this time that the society around him was nothing less than a world turned upside down. 9 What claims to be justice is wholly unjust; what claims to be morality is utterly immoral. He thus found himself confronted with the task of setting things straight; what claims to be art is mere entertainment; what claims to be respectable is corrupt. The Krausian techniques of performing a moral "analysis" on perverse speech acts involved taking his opponent "at his word," i.e., simply quoting his antagonist or juxtaposing, say, morally "uplifting" editorials from prominent liberal newspapers with dubious personals from the advertising pages. 10 The parallel to Wittgenstein's self-appointed moral and aesthetic task in the Tractatus of helping us to see the world aright by showing us the limits of language suggests itself at once, although, on the face of it, their respective subjects could hardly be farther removed from each other. Moreover the perspicuous contrast that the technique .of juxtaposition offered him seems distantly /

189

related to the kinds of comparisons that should help us to dissolve philosophical problems in his later works. In any case, it is at this time that the crucial ethical notion of the Ursprung, the origin or source of all true value, emerges in Kraus's work. Ursprung refers to "a world of idyllic naturalness and pure 11 spirituality" corresponding to Lichtenberg's utopian vision of a language in which grammatical as well as moral errors would not be possible. This notion would become the Archemedean point for Kraus's critique of cliche-ridden notions of Progress and Enlightenment characteristic of the fashionable positivism of the day after he had lost faith in politics. The poem "Two Runners" (Zwei Laufer) is a kind of Krausian parable of the Ursprung: Two runners down time's road have sped, one bold, the other full of dread: The one from nowhere who reaches his abode; the one from the source of life who dies on the road. The one from nowhere, after he's arrived, has to make way for the one who died. The latter, though his days are full of fear, knows that the source of life is always near. 12

While this notion is foreign to Wittgenstein's philosophizing, u reference to the poem does turn up in his self-commentary in the Culture and Value: "In the race that is philosophy the one who runs slowest wins. Or: he, who reaches the goal last" (C+V, 34). In this development the aphorism comes increasingly to take on importance for Kraus. From 1908 onwards Kraus began reprinting articles from the Fackel in books such as Sittlichkeit und Kriminalitiit and Die chinesische Mauer. These works were thus presented to the public at one remove from their polemic origin and thus took on a somewhat different meaning. From 1909 onwards Kraus further concentrated and "de-contextualized" his thoughts, as it were, by excerpting aphorisms from those writings. Wrenching them first from their polemical and then from their satirical contexts at the same time involved further monumentalizing his literary ego. Thus, what began as social critique came increasingly to lay claim to artistic merit and, ultimately, to being a kind of oracular wisdom, which, like Lichtenberg, but unlike La Rochefoucauld, is deeply rooted in a punning style. The step from satire to aphorism was in fact a step into the muchneglected tradition of practical philosophy at least us old us La

190

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Rochefoucauld, embracing Pascal and the French moralists as well as German writers such as Lichtenberg and Goethe, not to mention Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. We do well to remind ourselves of the functions of the literary form in that almost forgotten philosophical tradition. The aphorism condenses a judgement authoritatively into a phrase that has paradigmatic character. 13 However, its mode of concentrating simultaneously releases energy in the part of the reader. When the aphorism works the imagination of the reader is set into motion. The aphorism thus functions to open the fantasy to possibilities hitherto concealed from it. Thus the sense of an aphorism, as J.P. Stern emphasized in his excellent study of Lichtenberg forty years ago 14 is to help us to take a second look at something whose very familiarity permits us to take it for granted and thus to ignore it in everyday life. The aphorism's strange and surprisingly complex configuration of words hides a perfectly integrated antithesis. As the literary emblem of the paradox it is at once literary and philosophical in a strongly anti-systematic sense. Aphorisms induce precisely the sort of reflection on what we actually do, as opposed to what we think or say about what we do, that Wittgenstein always sought to occasion in his reader. In short, it is a vehicle for attaining a certain kind of Socratic self-knowledge. As such an aphorism transcends truth, as Kraus wrote, it is either half true or one and a half true. 15 To employ a phrase to which Wittgenstein attached much importance both in philosophy and in life a successful aphorism presents us with "das erlosende Wort," which "allows us to grasp what has burdened our consciousness in an increasingly intangible way." 16 It is anything but continuous with "business as usual" and this is precisely what Wittgenstein needed to wake philosophers from their dogmatic slumbers. On Wittgenstein's view, Socratic self-awareness requires that we have to be awakened from a dreamlike state: "Human beings-and perhaps whole peoplesmust awaken to wonder" (C+V, 5). It is not difficult to see a parallel to Kraus's desire to awaken us to the evils of the double standard and moral responsibility here. In the punning aphorism, for example, new aspects of the use of words dawn upon us. It is significant that Wittgenstein would compare the depth of philosophy with the depth of a grammatical joke: "Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.)" (PU, I, 111). Oddly, "grammatical jokes" in the conventional sense play n9 role in Wittgenstein's philosophizing.

Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language

191

Style takes on a philosophical significance at this point. Punning aphorisms, such as Kraus's, have a way of reversing meaning, of wrenching a word/concept of its conventional context and showing us something important about meaning, namely, that our conventional ways of speaking and thinking emphasize one aspect of meaning at the cost of concealing others. Here we will do well to remind ourselves of some of Kraus's typical gems in this genre. "Je groBer der Stiefel, desto groBer der Absatz" plays on the meanings of the words "Stiefel" (= boot; nonsense) and "Absatz" (=heel, paragraph, sale), such that the boot and its heel are at once images of commerce and journalism and, at the same time, morally dubious precisely in 17 their reciprocity. For Kraus the substance of the joke is important for showing us something about the relationship between capitalism, journalism, and nonsense; for Wittgenstein the form of the joke shows us something about meaning itself. Word play, as such, does not enter into Wittgenstein's philosophizing at all. Indeed, Wittgenstein would later go so far as to question the dazzling character of Kraus's aphorisms. However, for all Wittgenstein's mistrust, he does imply that Kraus's aphorisms and his own way of writing philosophy are connected (C+V, 66). Let us consider a very different example of Krausian word play from Spriiche und Widerspriiche. "Man lebt nicht einmal einmal" "You don't live once once" or "You don't even live once." 18 In th.is example the negating force of the second "einmal" should not pass unnoticed. Indeed, Kraus's extraordinary use of negation and double negation in these aphorisms is noteworthy: "Nicht griiBen geniigt nicht. Man griiBt auch Leute nicht, die man nicht kennt" ("Not greeting does not suffice. We also do not greet people, whom we do not 19 know"), "Man weiB nicht nur im Ausland nicht, was hier geschieht: man weiB es auch hier nicht ("It is not only that people abroad do not know what is happening here; people here do not know either."20 It could hardly have passed unnoticed by a logician who insisted that the general form of the proposition was simultaneous negation. On the basis of this operation one could construct truth tables, which showed in a foolproof way which propositions were tautologies, i.e., had logical status, and which were not. In this way he eliminated the need for axioms in logic. This procedure of simultaneous negation on Wittgenstein's view showed that not only that axioms could be dispensed with in logic, but that theory itself was superfluous. Indeed, the logical force of Wittgcnstein's conception of show-

192

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

ing in the Tractatus is bound to the notion that the application of logic should solve the problems for which Frege and Russell had introduced the notion of logical theory. Thus the idea of calling his as yet unnamed book "Philosophical Logic" would strike Wittgenstein as absurd in 1922: "There is no such thing as philosophical logic" (0, 2). Here, too, at the very logical heart of the Tractatus, strange as it seems, there might be an echo of Kraus. In any case, fascination with wordplay is certainly nothing new in philosophy. We forget at out peril, for example, the fascination that wordplay exerted upon, say, ancient Pythagorean philosophers. 21 From the latter, the fact that the word for body, soma, was virtually identical with the word for tomb, sema, was evidence that there was somehow a deeper sense in which the body was like a tomb or was in fact a tomb as it came to be seen in the Pythagorean-inspired Platonic tradition. This is certainly one way in which philosophers have been seduced by the outer forms of language into seeking some "inner" source of depth. However, there is also something to wonder at, something puzzling, a bit like a riddle, in which we can at once delight and challenge our understanding. 22 This is important. As we have seen, philosophy in Wittgenstein's sense was a matter of waking us up (C+V, 5) to the richness, variety and complexity of the everyday and of the constitutive role that language plays in forming human experience. As such his philosophical mission bears strong resemblance to Heidegger's in Sein und Zeit. In both cases stylistic peculiarities are intimately linked to philosophical tactics. The difference is precisely in their respective methods of "describing." 23 For the phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, at least in comparison with Wittgenstein, it is a relatively straightforward matter of directing our attention from theory to practice and thus of producing an alternative to the traditional philosophical way of describing what it is to know and act. Wittgenstein faces the same problem. However, he insists that it is not mere stupidity or a certain deformation professionelle that prevents us from "seeing the world rightly" but "deep disquietudes" rooted in the routines that are drilled into us as we learn language itself, which tempt us to see the world wrongly and thus make "the world as I find it" so devilishly difficult to describe. It should not be surprising that we find Wittgenstein saying in this context that "philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of ,our minds by means of language" (PI, I, 109). The source of the de.pth typical of the philosophical disquietudes that language pro-

Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language

193.

vokes is a tendency to confuse surface grammar with depth grammar. This confusion involves identifying language with words, signs, and symbols as opposed to understanding it in terms of the practices ("language games") that confer meaning upon those words, signs, and symbols. It is a perspective consistent with Krausian practice but foreign to Kraus's writings on language. Indeed, at just the point where Kraus appeals to the mystical "Ursprung" of language Wittgenstein will de-mythologize by demanding that we take a good look at practice, quoting Goethe all the while: "Im Anfang war die Tat" (OC, 402). So philosophical analysis as Wittgenstein would understand it is, in fact, a sort of gesturing that aims at wringing a description of practice out of language. The fact that our conventional view of the world is drilled into us until it has become second nature makes it devilishly difficult to redirect our attention. Thus Wittgenstein is emphatic in insisting that philosophers urc engaged in a battle with language (C+V, 11). Here there is an interesting passage reminiscent of Kraus that deserves to be mentionl.!d. Kraus writes, When I don't make any progress, I have bumped my head against the wall of lunguu~('. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go onY

Wittgenstein writes, The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonscnsl' and bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limHs of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery. (PI, I, 119)

Here we have a hint of Kraus at a crucial junction in Wittgenstein 's own discussion of his "work of clarification." Wittgenstein's philosophical strategy is dictated to him by the capacity of language to seduce us into forms of thinking that lead us to disregard what is normally before our eyes. In effect, Wittgenstein must re-seduce philosophers away from those outer forms of language. So it is no wonder that his strategy for restoring philosophers' orientation to the everyday must be strange as, indeed, his curious way of writing philosophy is. At one point Wittgenstein must surprise us. Thus despite the fact that Wittgenstein insists that the description must replace explanation in philosophy, we find virtually nothing that corresponds to a straightforward description, be it phenomenological or empiricist, in Wittgenstein. Instead we find gestures in the form of thought experiments, questions, aphorisms,

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

194

and reflections, often of a most peculiar character. Should there be any doubt of this one need merely consider the following fact: in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein poses 784 questions. He 25 answers but 110 of them and then seventy intentionally false. His questions typically surprise us by catching us off balance as it were. They too are gestures that direct us away from our accustomed way of looking at things. Furthermore, it has been for the most part overlooked that a curious kind of humor plays a definite role in that strategy, one which is also dictated by our natural history. Wittgenstein suggests that "in philosophy it is significant that such-and-such a sentence makes no sense; but also that it sounds funny" (Z, 328), where "funny" (komisch) clearly means odd, strange, curious or, perhaps best, peculiar. So there is clearly room for humor in his philosophizing even if it is not typical of him. The collection of texts known as "Zettel," where we find the last remark, contains a number of humorous philosophical anecdotes: Imagine someone saying : "Man hopes." How should this general phenomenon of natural history be described?-One might observe a child and wait until one day he manifests hope and then one could say "Today he hoped for the first time." But surely that sounds queer ! Although it would be quite natural to say "Today he said 'I hope' for the first time." (Z, 468)

or So he is having real pain and it is the possession of this by somebody else that he feels doubt of. -But how does he do this?-It is as if I were told: "Here is a chair. Can you see it clearly?-Good,- now translate it into French!" (Z, 547)

or If someone were now to tell us that he eats involuntarily-what evidence would make

one believe this? (Z, 578)

Some further examples from other works: Why can't a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? (PI, I, 250)

and, A rose has no teeth. This .. .is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none.And yet it is not so clear. For where should a rose's teeth have been? (PI, II, xi, 221)

These questions are less to be answered than to be thought through by Wittgenstcin's reader. That these questions seem to verge on the

Kraus, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language

195

absurd is intentional: We speak of red hot or white hot but we do not speak of brown hot or gray hot (OCL, I, 34). Why do we speak of brown rather than reddish green? (OCL, 11). Like the servant girl who laughed at Thales when he fell into the well while observing an eclipse, Wittgenstein suggests that normal people will find the kinds of claims that analytic philosophers make to be simply mad: "I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden. He says repeatedly, "I know that is a tree," as he points to one nearby. A third person comes along and hears that. I tell him, "this man is not crazy: we are only doing philosophy." (OC, 467)

His thoughts thus have to be ways of thinking crazier than the philosophers in order to dissolve their problems. He does this by creating fictive natural histories that illuminate our actual one. Thus his questions about what would have to be different about us (i.e., our natural history) for us to prefer calling a color "reddish green" rather than "brown" have to seem silly. It is in this sense that Wittgenstein insists that philosophy can only really be written as fiction (C+V, 24) or as jokes (he once suggested in conversation that he could imagine a work of philosophy entirely composed of jokes). 26 This should not be entirely surprising if his aim is really to teach us: "to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is plain nonsense" (PI, I, 164). In fact, if I negate the seemingly straightforward, but, in fact, wholly nonsensical, report, "I know that is a tree," the result is pure nonsense: "I do not know that is a tree." This move is as old as philosophy itself but sometimes such things escape even clever analytic philosophers. 27 It should hardly seem curious to suggest that Wittgenstein's wit and perspicacity here and elsewhere owes something to Kraus. In fact, Kraus alone among the ten figures who "influenced" Wittgenstein might vaguely be considered the precursor of such modes of thinking and writing. In addition Wittgenstein was most certainly at one with Kraus with respect to the idea that, "language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought." 28 The constitution of human knowledge through language is a deeply shared conviction of the satirist and the philosopher, whatever their differences might be. That conviction would shape their respective style as satirist and philosopher. For Kraus it would lead to an absolute morality based upon style: "That one is a murderer does not necessarily prove anything against his style. However, his style can prove that he is a murderer." 29 So he would take his opponent at his word literally and

196

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

extract all that was dubious about him from his typical mode of expression. This way of concentrating upon exact quotation was Kraus's method of setting an inverted world on its feet again. It doubtless played a role in Wittgenstein's realization that philosophy must do something similar in helping us to "see the world aright" by aiding us to acknowledge the limits of language in the Tractatus. Later, sensitivity to style in the form of singling out the very strange, peculiar character of traditional philosopher's seemingly reasonable but actually "insane" claims about the world will be central to Wittgenstein's philosophical mission. Moreover, that same sensitivity to style suggests a way of waking philosophers up to those simple and familiar things that are the foundations of their inquiries but, nevertheless, fail to strike them in everyday life precisely because they are so familiar (PI I, 129). His task, then, was the paradoxical one of bringing that which is always before us to our consciousness powerfully and strikingly. No wonder that the task requires special stylistic tactics. Is it absurd to suggest that his early readings of Kraus's satires and polemics presented him both with a parallel problem about seeing what is morally before us rightly and insight into how we must understand language if we are to cope with the deep disquietudes that tempt us to misunderstand it? I doubt it. Parallel to Kraus's relationship to language, Wittgenstein in his philosophical "work of clarification" was obliged to turning the prostitute of everyday "impure reason" into a virgin again. Like Kraus, albeit in a somewhat different sense, Wittgenstein would teach us to hear the meaning of what is passed over in silence. 30 *

*

*

Moral intensity, perspectivism, and philosophical preoccupation with style are defining characteristics of all of Wittgenstein's philosophizing. However, they are precisely the factors that distinguished him from the mainstream of Austrian academic philosophy in the tradition of Bernhard Balzano and Franz Brentano as well as from the Vienna Circle, for which all three were suspect. What was the relationship between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle and in what ways does his relationship with this illustrious group of selfproclaimed "scientific" philosophers reflect indirectly their origins in di~ferent strata of Viennese culture? These questions pose themselves at this juncture in our inquiries.

10 Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle-in the 1950s the two were absolutely inseparable. Together they represented philosophical modernism: a no-nonsense, "scientific" conception of philosophy, clarity in the pursuit of the values of the Enlightenment, commitment in the battle against the forces of authoritarianism and obscurantism, in short, rationality itself. While there is much to recommend that picture, much is also cliche. Above all, the close association of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle was something that has turned out to be highly ironic, for Wittgenstein was, in fact, always opposed to the Vienna Circle in the style and substance of his thinking. However, only Otto Neurath was able to get a glimpse of that difference at the time. Neurath insisted that, while the Vienna Circle agreed with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus what can be said can be said clearly, it must vehemently reject the idea that there was something about which we must remain silent. 1 Compared to the Vienna Circle's classical modernist faith in progress through the advancement of science, Wittgenstein developed what I have called a "critical modernist" analysis of the limits of reason and progress. Paradoxically, both of these views were deeply rooted in Viennese culture despite their lack of recognition in Vienna. The task at hand is to show how that was so as well as what difference these two ways of conceiving knowledge and culture, respectively optimistic and skeptical, present for European self-understanding. So the story that must be told is, of necessity, a complex one involving the main philosophical claims of both the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein, their relation to Vienna and the broader European cu.ltural scene, and finally the implication of their views for our current self-understanding.

198

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

The immediate pre-history of the Vienna Circle is the story of how various forms of opposition to the idea of philosophy as a Platonist super-theory of reality or a Kantian science of science coalesced into an international movement in Vienna in the 1920s. 2 On the simplest version of that story the Vienna Circle was continuing the work of the German logician Gottlob Frege and the Austrian philosopher of science Ernst Mach as they had been united in the work of the Cambridge philosopher Bertrand Russell before World War I. The efforts of Gottlob Frege ( 1848-1925) to realize the Leibnizian project for developing an ideal language on the basis of formal logic was so revolutionary that his work was often said to be the first real advance in logic since Aristotle. His achievements can hardly be summarized here. His aim was to prove that all of mathematics rests upon the basis of formal logic. To do this it was necessary to develop a standard method for representing anything that would count as a proposition, be it logical, mathematical, or empirical. This notation would enable us to distinguish with crystal clarity between the logical structures which form the basis of intelligibility in general and those which permit exact reference to empirically real objects. His rigor in defining the concepts that underlie mathematical relationships would be the model for the development of analytic philosophy. Ernst Mach (1838-1916) was involved in a parallel project to Frege's concerning the conceptual foundations of Newtonian physics which came increasingly under fire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Newton claimed that his system of physics rested upon a number of unobservable phenomena such as force and absolute space, time, and motion. Mach pointed out that force was nothing more than a misleading word that actually represented a relation rather than an object, a function of mass and acceleration, whereas the "absolutes" never really entered into physics itself only into Newton's exposition of its basis. He thus advanced a critique of the language of physics that centered upon the correlation of empirical observation on the basis of mathematical functions and pronounced inadmissible anything that was neither observable nor mathematical. His project complemented Frege's inasmuch as the latter had also used the notion of function to articulate the most fundamental characteristic of propositions. In the period immediately preceding World War I Bertrand Russell ( 1872-1970) was generally considered to be the embodiment of the

Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

199

new project that combined the best in classical rationalism and empiricism. In collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead he undertook to complete Frege 's program for logic in the Principia Mathematica (1910-14). In numerous essays in the journal Mind as well as in books like The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and Mysticism and Logic (1917) he developed and extended Mach's view of the nature of empirical knowledge. His "theory of descriptions" (1905) developed a logical technique analyzing propositions with misleading referents such as "the king of France is bald" such that they ceased to be confusing by breaking down problematic complexes into manageable constituents. Thus "logical atomism" was born and with it the program for "analytic philosophy." The first inklings of what became the Vienna Circle were the meetings between Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, and Otto Neurath in 190H. The "Vienna Circle" proper formed itself as a discussion group around the new professor of philosophy of science, Moritz Schlick, whn took the chair that had been created for Mach in 1921. The official organ of the group "The Ernst Mach Verein" was formed in 192H. In 1929 Neurath, Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap who had recently joined the group from Germany composed the manifesto "Wissenschaftliclw Weltauffassung" in which the credo of logical positivisrn was formulated. The "wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung" of the Vienna Circle (1929)3 was a synthesis of all the elements that contributed to u program of making philosophy scientific, a project that was itself the prelude to enlightened social reform. That project would become the basis of the professionalization of philosophy in the English-speaking world and Scandinavia. Logical positivism or logical empiricism as it came to be known had five basic goals, one negative and four positive. 4 The first was the negative goal of eliminating the claim to legitimacy of any form of knowledge that was neither empirical nor mathematical. Speculative theories about the nature of reality (i.e., metaphysics) or revealed truth (i.e., theology) could lay no claim to be knowledge. Not only Platonists, Aristotelians, and Scholastics were thus divested of the title philosopher but Kantians, Hegelians, and Bergsonians as well. The assumption was that past societies had been based upon such fundamentally superstitious, if often sophisticated, metaphysical beliefs as those attributed to the aforemcn-

200

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

tioned and had thus been repressive of human freedom. On that account the elimination of metaphysics would be the prelude to radical social reform. The logical analysis of language would establish the legitimacy of our concepts and consign those that did not pass muster to the flames in the word of the positivist's hero, David Hume. Indeed, Otto Neurath took this assault on Platonism so seriously that he produced an index of forbidden (i.e., because metaphysical) expressions. So Draconian were his prescriptions that a distinguished Neurath scholar has said that, were one to take his own admonitions seriously, it would hardly be possible to describe Neurath's own epistemological position. Psychoanalysis and Marxism, although partially tainted by metaphysics, were allies in that effort to the extent that they supplied "scientific" explanations for the origins of metaphysical superstitions. Philosophically (and later politically) beleaguered in Vienna, the logical positivists devoted the main part of their efforts to the battle against metaphysical superstitions. Despite their failures in Vienna they were highly successful worldwide after World War II. However, the price they paid for their successes in the battle against metaphysics was that the positive sides of the program tended to suffer. The second goal pertained to the testing of empirical claims to knowledge. Only those claims that could be verified on the basis of sensory perception were admissible. All others were (often scornfully) rejected as "meaningless." Moreover, in their purist desire to eliminate confusing ambiguities from language they ended up in a campaign to banish metaphor that ultimately turned out to be selfdefeating because it made scientific development incomprehensible. Third, the Vienna Circle took theoretical physics to be the paragon of empirical knowledge. All other forms of knowledge were to be compared to it. Only to the extent that a discipline resembled physics in its mode of theory-building could it be said to be a repository of genuine knowledge. Fourth, all genuine knowledge should be unified into a single body of knowledge on the basis of a "neutral observation language" such that it would be possible to see the development of science as a seamless coherent whole with a linear progressive development. Only then could the results of scientific investigation be really available for application to social problems. Fifth, all practical issues, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and so on, were' to be considered as utilitarian matters to be decided on the

Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

201

basis of Bentham's calculus of utility. Appeals to the private validity of conscience and metaphysical questions about the meaning of life were to be eliminated from ethical discourse since "values" were in fact nothing more than emotional responses to states of affairs in the world. Philosophy itself was viewed principally as a matter dispelling confusing ambiguities in thought on the basis of logical analysis and not a subject with a content like the sciences (Mach refused to have his chair of philosophy of science in the department of philosophy in Vienna). It was either a matter of battling against metaphysics or formalizing the results of scientific theorizing to further clarify their implication. Its vehicle was an ideal language purified of the vagaries of everyday language. Moritz Schlick's study of space and time in relativity theory served as a model in this respect. Only the results of scientific investigation were philosophically interesting to the Vienna Circle. They argued that it might be possible to arrive at a scientific discovery in all sorts of ways, only thr question of whether the resulting discovery was "justified,'' i.(~ .• a genuine contribution to science, was philosophically interesting fo the Vienna Circle. Kepler, for example, determined the elliptical orbits of the planets on the basis of his mystical Pythagoreanism. But this was only accidental, they claimed, to the truth of the discowry, which could only be determined on the basis of public testing. Sir Karl Popper is rightly considered part of the Vienna Circle from this point of view, for despite his other disagreements with the Vienna Circle about, say, falsification, he never abandoned a hard and fast distinction between the context of discovery, which might be his~ torically, psychologically, sociologically, politically, or religiously interesting, and the context of justification which alone was philosophically significant. Indeed, the essence of the Vienna Circle's campaign against metaphysics was its complete rejection of the idea that individuals or groups have privileged access to knowledge. Its claim to represent a democratic mode of philosophy rested upon its commitment to intersubjective testing irrespective of the status or power of the testing individual. For the Vienna Circle all genuine knowledge was intersubjective or public knowledge. That amounted to asserting that science was, above all, a collective undertaking distinguished for its precise standards of acceptability. With that sort of consideration in view, but also in the face of increasing German-national, later Nazi, agitation at Vienna Univcr-

202

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

sity and in general a distressing political climate in Vienna that would ultimately drive them into exile, the Vienna Circle sought contact with like-minded philosophers throughout Europe and by the midthirties it had satellites in Berlin, Prague, Lvov-Warsaw, Upsaala, and Munster as well as among pragmatist and operationalist circles in America. Their very successes in spreading their message to these groups and at congresses in Prague (1929, 1934), Oxford (1930), Paris (1935, 1937), Copenhagen (1936), Cambridge, England (1938) and Cambridge, Massachusetts (1939) attests both to the resonance of their program to make philosophy scientific and to their energy in realizing it. 5 Little wonder that logical empiricism, as it would later be called, would come to dominate the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian scene after the war. Henceforth one had to justify why one did not share their ways of thinking. Be that as it may, with respect to the four positive points in the program there was but a verbal agreement within the group-like any other political movement in the realm of ideas such as, say, phenomenology, it seemed considerably more unanimous viewed from without than viewed from within. Differences between the various members of the Vienna Circle can be captured schematically if we distinguish between a strong and a weak interpretation of the latter four theses. On the strong view (Schlick and the early Carnap) verification was a matter of comparing propositions about particulars with sensations in order to determine whether there was a 1 to 1 correspondence between them, i.e., whether the propositions in question were true. On the weak view (Neurath) the very idea of such a Lockean "correspondence" was itself too metaphysical, for it implied that there was such a thing as a world external to mind. On the weak view truth was considered as a Berkeleyan "coherence" between a proposition (i.e., in the literal sense of a sentence being "proposed" to be true) and the body of already accepted scientific knowledge. Similarly, with respect to physicalism the strong view stipulated that physical theory was the ideal state of scientific knowledge towards which all other branches of knowledge should strive. In short, other academic disciplines had to apologize for not having the same character as physical theory in what became a virtual methodical "reign of terror" in countries like America where the movement was successful in the 1950s and 1960s. The weak version of physicalism simply stipulated that anything that really counted as a scientific

Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

203

theory was a theory about the physical world, i.e., not talk about entities that were themselves not "physical objects." Here physicalism was simply a practical extension of the campaign against metaphysics into an area like, say, psychology in which our normal vocabulary includes any number of words like "thought," or "spirit" whose meanings cannot be verified on the basis of sense data. The unity of science was also taken in two different senses: as a logical unity and as an "encyclopedic" unity. On the strong view (Carnap) whatever was logically derivable from physics and that alone counted as science (which lent a curious sort of purpose to the formalization of accepted theories). On the weak view (Neurath) the unity of science was taken as a commitment to sharing the results of scientific investigation both between scientists in different fields and between scientists generally and the public. With respect to point five the strong view stipulated that there was simply nothing "ethical" that we could talk about apart from the discussion of the question which course of action brings with H the greatest good for the greatest possible numbers. On the weak view (Schlick) of ethics there was a certain Nietzschean attachment to lhc idea of a renewal of society through commitment to "scientific" ideals to be pursued engagedly by the young. In general, it was the strong view of the program that came to dominate the movement. Carnap eclipsed Neurath to the point thut we are only now in the process of recovering the strengths of the weaker view of the program (which turns out to be the only viable one). Thus, when the physicist Michael Polanyi attacked strong physicalism on the empirical grounds that it reduced physics to theory without taking into account that experimentation requires a sort of knowledge that cannot be expressed in propositions, 6 he was virulently denounced as trying to mystify knowledge. Moreover, the triumph of the strong version of the program in the United States and Scandinavia implied not only the end of metaphysics but the dethronement of the traditional center of the humanities, philology and history. The study of language became a matter of formal logic, whereas history became an uninteresting story of the "crimes and follies" of humanity to use Hume's phrase. Wittgenstein had significantly influenced all of these views without holding any of them either in his early phase or later (at least in the way that the members of the Vienna Circle did). Moreover, his later philosophy 7 became a motor for the criticism that eventually

204

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

discredited the strong form of verificationism, physicalism, and the unity of science from within physics. Paradoxically, the rejection of the prevalent strong form of scientific philosophy did much to rehabilitate the weak view without being aware of it. The very lapidary, eschatological style of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus seemed in the 1920s to represent a complete break with all philosophical traditions. It lent a fitting intensity to the campaign to eliminate nonsense from human discourse on the basis of logical clarity. However, Wittgenstein's radicalism, even in his 8 early philosophy, actually outstripped that of the Vienna Circle. His peculiar mode of employing truth tables enabled him to demonstrate the inner relationship between tautologies, contradictions, and meaningful statements on a single matrix. Moreover, the same matrix showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there could be no metaphysical propositions, i.e., propositions that were empirical but necessarily true. The threefold distinction alluded to was exhaustive. As such it presented the "definitive and unassailable" truth that metaphysics was nonsense. There simply could not be synthetic a priori propositions. Moreover, Wittgenstein managed to get clear about certain problems concerning sense and reference that had bothered Frege and Russell deeply. However, issues about verification, and the unity of science and the like did not concern him at all in the Tractatus; whereas he would later claim that Carnap plagiarized his term "physicalism." 9 Furthermore, Wittgenstein's view of ethics was diametrically opposed to theirs. For him the question of the meaning of life was too important to be able to be put into words, whereas for them it was for the most part a trivial, emotional matter. Wittgenstein emphasized that formal analysis could never enlighten the profoundest human problems. Although he did not express himself this way we might summarize his position as follows: there are problems that we have to which there can be technical solutions and problems that we are that can only be solved by living differently. Thus he emphasized how little we would accomplish when all possible questions were answered, in short, that there were limits to knowledge that Russellian rationalism failed to recognize. However, it would take half a century before the depth of this side of Wittgenstein's thought would come to be recognized. One interesting feature of the recovery of the early Wittgenstein's view df philosophy and the limits of language is that it required,

Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

205.

among other things, insights drawn from his later philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations to gain access to his earlier insights. The central view in this work is a devastating critique of Russell and Carnap's program for analytic philosophy on the basis of the notion that the most fundamental human form of knowledge is the practical "know-how" that scientific work presupposes but never enters into the exposition of theories. His central view was that knowledge is basically a matter of following a rule where no formal rule, only a model to be imitated, is present. For the majority of human activities, dancing the tango, pole-vaulting, running a complex machine, playing a role in a play, formal rules are of no help in learning how to perform the activity. Only when the basic techniques have been mastered behaviorally do formal rules help. However, they too huw their limits inasmuch as such rules admit exceptions as arc thus always subject to emendation in ways that cannot be foreseen. ln tlw end Wittgenstein came to insist that the logic of practice, und thus experience itself, cannot be represented at all formally. Morcuvc.~r. he came to consider the Vienna Circle's technocratic attitude to science and society as symptomatic of the genuine metaphysical malaise of our time: the refusal to recognize the limits that Nature itself imposes upon an animal that speaks. It would take us far afield to explore this most important insight in contemporary philosophy in any depth. However, it is possible to grasp something of Wittgenstein's significance for contemporary philosophy by looking at the critique of physicalism that philosophers like Norwood Russell Hanson, Stephen Toulmin, and Thomas Kuhn (to mention a few of the most famous) produced on the basis of his mature views about knowledge. 10 These figures were all physicists who, like the loner, Polanyi, rebelled against the cliched view of physics that "strong physicalism" represents. They insisted that the problems that physicists actually face are almost never illuminated by formalization. On the contrary, physicists and scientists generally are much more concerned about why it is that they cannot understand the results of their own investigations, with a problem that can best be described as a problem in hermeneutics. In order to cast light upon actual problems in physics it was necessary to grasp how physicists think in practice and that was only possible on the basis of an in-depth consideration of examples drawn from history. Thus the history of physics came to be seen, not as part of its dead past, but as the key to its future development inasmuch as it is the

206

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

repository of the dynamics of its practical logic. This close historical scrutiny disclosed a discontinuous development. The various areas of research, even within the single discipline, physics, turned out not to share a common methodological framework. Thus in the practice of physics knowledge was too closely tied to specific Fragestellungen to be accurately represented at a general level. The practical perspective on physics showed us something the positivists' exclusive focus upon theoretical physics obscured, namely, how knowledge was essentially local knowledge thereby discrediting the strong program for the unity of science. However, the historically oriented philosophy of science that emerged in fact ended up rehabilitating much of Neurath's longforgotten weak program. 11 For example the practices of scientists as they learned their trade came to be seen along Wittgensteinian lines as constitutive of knowledge. "Discovery" came to be replaced by "invention" which ceased to be opposed to justification because the procedures, Wittgenstein would say "language games," 12 through which genuine scientific development took place were, in fact, modes of inventing new criteria, and thus legitimating the extension of the "language of physics," not merely discovering new "facts." The context of discovery could not be sundered from the context of justification because when one closely scrutinizes an actual scientific "discovery" one sees that it entails reformulating the criteria for explanation in a particular branch of science as the scientists extend the language of their fields of research. The crucial philosophical insight behind this revolution in philosophy of science was the Wittgensteinian notion that language is not merely made up of words, sentences, symbols and signs but constituted as those words, sentences, symbols, and signs are interwoven into action. This occurs in a plurality of ways that can never be reduced to a single type. The sciences are problem-solving practices or activities that are only loosely and analogously related to one another. They do not all share properties such that there can be a definition of science in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions as the positivists thought. Moreover, the fact that we can always employ a sign metaphorically implies that there can be no complete account of the meaning of any expression for it can always be used in new and unexpected ways-which accounts for the growth of knowledge. However, that growth moves in a plurality of directions, not in any single direction.

Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

207

Be that as it may, from the Wittgenstein perspective of historically oriented philosophy of science one came to see the scientific disciplines as definitely related to one another but not in terms of any logical hierarchy. The linear, progressive model came to be replaced by a comparative, historical one. The unity of science was curiously preserved inasmuch as the members of the family of activities known as science, as Wittgenstein would put it, could only be understood in comparison with one another. By establishing their differences one could also establish what characterized each specifically. In elaborating the notion that meaning is constituted in interweaving words with actions by imitating examples Wittgenstein was able to show how our particular human mode of concept formation makes knowledge possible and how the scope of concepts is limited to specific contexts-and ultimately why logical analysis obscured more thun it clarified with respect to language. In the critique of the monolithic concept of rationality of the Vienna Circle's "strong program" there emerged an excitingly new pnu.:tice-oriented conception of rationality as both pluralistic and anchored in tradition. Let us now tum to the cultural origins of· these ways of thinkin!l, in fin de siecle Vienna. Although both Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle emerged frutn fin de siecle Austrian culture it could well be said that both were in il but not of it. To see that we should look briefly at the various cultural "strata" that existed in Vienna in the two decades before the outbreak of World War I. For our purposes these were fundamentally four: the Baroque, the liberal, the "decadent" for want of 11 better word, and what I have called the "critical modernist." Official Vienna was Baroque Vienna. Its politics was absolutist but mollified by slovenliness, as the saying goes. It rested upon the unity throne and altar, whose Catholic symbolism marked every one of its institutions. Its philosophy was Jesuit scholasticism, which lent the principle of throne and altar a "metaphysical basis," but was in practice by 1900 otherwise more or less ignored. The bearers of this official culture apart from the nobility, were the bureaucrats who constituted the official intelligentsia and paid lip-service to Catholic values. So the Jew, Gustav Mahler, for example, had to become a Catholic to become director of the Court Opera. With respect to Catholicism and values generally the society was at once curiously tolerant and hypocritically repressive

208

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

as Robert Musil emphasizes in his penetrating novel The Man Without Qualities. From the time of the Compromise with Hungary 1867 after defeat at the hands of Bismarck, Vienna was introduced to the modem world of industrialization and finance as well as progressive, cosmopolitan culture by the ascendant liberals. 13 Steven Beller has argued provocatively that Viennese liberal values were strongly impressed with the stamp of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, with a highly idealistic emphasis upon progress through science, and Voltairean contempt for arbitrary authority either in the realm of ideas or politics. 14 Those liberal values are summed up in the phrase "property and cultivation" (Besitz und Bildung) which were emblazoned in the very historicist design of Vienna's public buildings on the Ringstrasse after 1860. The liberals' failure to dominate Viennese politics after 1895 should not obscure liberalism's cultural importance. However, it was typical by 1900 that liberals often failed to live up to the high ideals of tolerance and integrity they professed. The scandals surrounding the infamous stock market crash had done much to discredit liberal "idealism" already in 1873. Nevertheless, Austrian Social Democracy came to incorporate the best elements of classical liberal modernism in its programs for social reform. The third cultural paradigm at the tum of the century was the socalled "Wiener Moderne," embracing the Secession, "Jugendstil," and so on, which distinguished itself from the German modem movement by its utter rejection of scientific rationality and naturalist aesthetics. "Die Moderne" attached itself to an irrationalist cult of subjective experience that sought thrills in everything "new," especially in what was obscure and ambiguous. Thus it was in most respects closer to our post-modernism than any classical form of modernism except Symbolism. The Viennese "Moderne" borrowed heavily from the literature of France (Baudelaire) and Belgium (Maeterlinck) as well as from Scottish developments in art and design (Mackintosh). It was to a great extent a reaction to the double standard that resulted from failure to live up to ideals that were set too high from the start (as we now know with the wisdom of hindsight) as well as to the rigidly cold rationalism of the first generation of liberals, whose irrational claim to a monopoly on reason "die Modeme" misguidedly recognized. The fourth cultural paradigm was "critical modernism," the reactibn of a small but intense group of intellectuals revolving around

Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

209

the axis Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos and Otto Weininger and extending to Hermann Broch, Arnold Schoenberg, Georg Trakl, Ludwig Wittgenstein and, in his last work, Egon Schi~le. Musil and Freud as well as Schnitzler (in some of his work such as The Far Country or The Road to the Open) could also be counted as critical modernists even if they often were opposed to the Kraus-Loos-Weininger axis. 15 The critical modernists aimed at exposing the double standard of Catholic morality, the corruption of politicians, the press and big business and against the superficiality of "die Wiener Moderne" without abandoning respect for genuine novelty. The question which the critical modernists posed was: what makes innovation in arts and letters worthwhile. Critical modernism pursued an immanent critique of the means of expression, the "language" or the medium, if you will, which in turn became its first principle in aesthetics. Critical modernism in the arts could be summed up in Wittgenstein's phrase "ethics and aesthetics are one" (TL-P, 6.421)-in contrast to liberalism which on the face of it rejected aesthetics on the basis of ethics and "die Moderne" which sacrificed ethics to aesthetics. Critical modernism was distinctively Viennese because it was a skeptkal and analytic response to distinctively Viennese problems in the otiH.'r three "layers" of Viennese culture, which refused to take them at their face value. The Vienna Circle represented a development of Viennese liberalism, whereas Wittgenstein was a product of critical modernism. However, neither were at home in Vienna as the reception of both logical positivism and Wittgenstein's work indicates. Vienna stamped both profoundly, if only negatively. From its earliest origins in the meetings between Hahn, Prank, and Neurath in 1908 the Vienna Circle was an "outsider" group in Vienna. Moreover, like its hero, Mach, it was not anxious to become part of philosophy anyway. Thus to this day the sort of scientific philosophy it represented has remained foreign to Vienna despite its international successes. The same is true of Wittgensteinian philosophy which is scarcely represented there at all, let alone in the way that it is, say, in Bergen, Norway 16 or Swansea, Wales. Perhaps this has its justification for nothing is more foreign to the Viennese mentality than silence conviction in matters ethical or aesthetic. Be that as it may Wittgenstein's critical attitude to the central tenets of logical positivism remains of the utmost significance for the new Europe.

210

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

An age that would be an age of European integration in politics and globalization in economics could hardly have come into existence without the widespread acceptance of the sort of technocratic intellectual and cultural values that the Vienna Circle represented. It is not accidental, for example, that in Sweden, the European country whose culture has been most deeply stamped by the rationalist spirit of logical positivism, modernism was as profoundly influenced in matters of design by the architect, Josef Frank, brother of Philipp Frank and "official" sympathizer of the Vienna Circle, 17 as social thinking was by Otto Bauer. It is not for nothing, then, that the most powerful critique of Swedish technocratic conceptions of development should rely heavily upon humanistic arguments drawn from the arsenal of Wittgenstein's mature philosophy. 18 But what of Europe? Jorge Semprun has lamented the fact that the European Union's immense power to legislate lacks legitimation at the local level. I take the manipulative, monolithic character of technocratic rationalism as evidenced, say, in the widely recognized "democracy deficit" within the European Union to be a strong indication that Wittgenstein's critique of scientific rationalism, with its emphasis upon pluralism rooted in local traditions of practice (as opposed to the ideological traditions we parade on holidays), is entirely relevant to that legitimation. If there is ever to be a truly integrated Europe, it must be a "Europe of the regions," whose political power clearly rests upon the consent of the ruled. The emphasis upon plurality at the center of Wittgenstein's mature philosophy, of course, guarantees absolutely nothing, but it just might provide important clues about the identification of what is really and not merely apparently common practice of a sort that could be extremely valuable to determining just what a "region" is. Wittgenstein's potential for ideology critique at this level has only recently begun to be tapped. This is important; for, like Justus Lipsius, philosopher of the Old Europe, Wittgenstein insists upon the reality of fundamental differences, like Karl Marx, one of Old Europe's most scathing critics, Wittgenstein insists that we make our own history but not simply as we choose, like his contemporary fellow-Viennese, Sigmund Freud, Wittgenstein insists that we cannot hope for rational change, that civilization cannot hope to cope with its discontents, until we grasp how reason is rooted in nature. Just as we do not create the traditi\)nS of practice which regulate our lives at will, neither can we alter them at will. Indeed, because those traditions are more "in our bod-

Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and European Culture

2,11

ies" than "in our minds" there is a real sense in which we hardly know them in the formal sense. And that is a collective as well as an individual trait. Thus what we really need is to learn to reflect, to take a hard look at how social traditions really function, before setting out to change them or dealing with them mechanically. Wittgenstein's account of the local rationality immanent in the logic of human experience and its concomitant pluralism looms large as a source of profound reflection, and even constructive criticism, in any Europe worth having.

*

*

*

It remains now to establish Wittgenstein's relationship to two otlwr Viennese critical modernists, Sigmund Freud and Georg Trakl, in order to see how he fits into Viennese critical modernism. 1-Iis relation to Freud, whose disciple he claimed to be, in his later ycurs is ut once indicative of the critical acumen with which he took up idl·us and at the same time provided him with a key for understanding lhl• mentality of traditional philosophers. Thus his reception of psychoanalysis is at once a key to understanding his relation to an important strain of Viennese thought and to philosophy as well. Yet, his views on psychoanalysis are not entirely without relevance f<w patients and practitioners as well today.

•I II !

11 Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method "But I am a madman. I am a madman! "Dr. Tomas Stockmann -Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, V.

Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that madness (Wahninn, lrrsinn) could be illuminatingly compared and contrasted with normal mistakes. Just as the mistaken are either misinformed, fail to have no~ ticed significant aspects of situations, or are in some other wny ignorant with respect to something that they should have known hul in fact did not, the "mad" make "mistakes" about their identity t~nd personal history that are so grotesquely out of step with reality thut they seem to have severed all bonds with conventional social practices. Such a view of mental illness would be little more than an interesting aper(:u of a brilliant amateur, if it were not for the fact that Wittgenstein was wholly convinced that the assertions of tradi· tiona! metaphysicians from Descartes and Locke to Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore stood exactly in the same relation to conventional social practice that those of people who are usually termed mentally disturbed do. Thus, despite the fact that Wittgenstein's observations about Freud and psychoanalysis are few and scattered, there is every reason to think that they are the results of the same sort of relentless, painstaking analysis that he brought to those philosophical problems which most preoccupied him his whole life long. At the very least, no less thinking went into his view of psychoanalysis than into his conception of philosophy itself, i.e. into that which was, in fact, most central in his life's work. In taking this view, he was not simply taking sides with the servant girl who laughed at Thales when he fell into the well while observing an eclipse, but, rather, suggest-

214

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

ing that those who insist upon making pronouncements about what is real, what is knowable with certitude, the nature of thought, and so on, require a sort of therapy rather than refutation. Thus, if Wittgenstein's ideas about philosophy are as important as they are often taken to be, he should be understood to be making an important statement about the nature of mental health. As novel as it might seem, this attitude toward philosophy is as old as the subject itself. For Pythagoras as well as the ancient Stoic sages the task of philosophy was nothing other than restoring a lost mental health. What is new and exciting with Wittgenstein is less that he revived an ancient tradition (nothing was further from his intention: he fully rejected all such efforts to turn the intellectual clocks of Europe backwards) than that he should have modeled the radically new sort of philosophical analysis that his later philosophy represents upon a limited acceptance of Freudian practices. The following is a set of sketches whose aim will be (1) to cast light upon Wittgenstein's relationship to Freud; (2) to articulate Wittgenstein's ideas about what madness might be; (3) to develop his analogy between metaphysics and madness and, finally; (4) to suggest tentatively some of the implications of his later thought for psychiatry (I make no special claims to profundity for the latter but, rather, suggest that they might be of some value as reminders of what an extraordinary undertaking psychoanalysis is). Wittgenstein's remarks about psychoanalysis, like those of Arthur Schnitzler, are neither voluminous nor systematically developed. 1 However, that fact alone should not tempt us to believe that they are mere casual observations. In fact they are highly interesting, provocative reflections, which we ignore at our peril. We must bear in mind that Wittgenstein's comments, like Schnitzler's, are not those of an intellectual flaneur but those of a skeptic who has reflected long and intensely upon a parallel course to Freud's. It will be natural to begin this discussion with a sketch of Wittgenstein's relationship to Freud's theories and therapy. In likening his sort of philosophical analysis to therapy (PU, I, 133), Wittgenstein saw himself as explicitly following in Freud's footsteps. He considered Freud a psychologist who really had something to say. Indeed, Wittgenstein even went as far as to call himself a disciple of Freud's-and he never took that assertion back. However, despite all his admiration for the "clever" (geistreich) character of Freud's work, he was basically critical of the most central

Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method

215

claims of psychoanalytic theory, namely, of the notion that the successes of Freudian therapy count as confirmation of the truth of the theory. For all the sketchiness of his account here Wittgenstein 's view is basically at one with the most refined and sympathetic of Freud's critics Alasdair Macintyre, whose trenchant critique of Freud turns upon just this point (L+C, 42ff). 2 Briefly, the argument runs as follows: it is a stipulation, not a discovery, of psychoanalysis, that the patient accepts the theory for the therapy to be effective. This in itself distinguishes psychoanalysis from more conventional medical practices, whose successes depend more upon the physician's competencies than the patient's beliefs. If this is true, psychoanalysis is something other than the medical science that it would claim to be. Just what this remarkable transaction between analyst and analysand is remains to be seen. All of this is further complicated by Freud's way of dealing with the failures of analysis in terms of "resistance." Here the sheer diulectical subtlety of Wittgenstein's analysis seems to involve being more Freudian than Freud: this bears upon Wittgenstein's comments upon Freud's notion that we are disinclined to accept his accounts of our behavior. To this Wittgenstein responds: yes, there muy be u disinclination to accept Freud's accounts of the origins of ncun>tk symptoms as expressions of repressed sexuality, but this disinclination is symmetrically aligned with an inclination to accept those very modes of explanation. What we might reject as "dirty" on the basis of conventional mores or on religious grounds might just as well be considered sufficiently fashionable (think of the cachet attached to being psychoanalyzed in France in the 70s), flattering ("a person of great sexual needs") or titillating (to the puritan) at a personal level that our prejudice against Freudian explanation is but the other side of the coin of a certain fascination with them: a way of finding ourselves "deep" and "exciting," which is not otherwise available to us. In the end, Wittgenstein suggests that psychoanalysis is a mode of persuasion according to which one mythology, i.e., one way of weaving words and actions together comes to replace another. In these circumstances he raises the question: how are we to know when we should stop reinterpreting our behavior? The Freudian therapeutic criterion is effectiveness, i.e., after therapy the neurotic functions better in society than before. However, given the considerations Wittgenstein has brought to bear upon the interpretation of these results, successful therapy does not entail evidence that Freudian

216

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

theory is true, i.e., in the way that laboratory experiments do in the physical sciences. In the end Wittgenstein is highly skeptical with respect to Freud's claims but at the same time most impressed with the practice of his therapeutic methods, which are so successful in leading us to replace one self-image with another by adjusting our behavior to a less flattering image of ourselves: "Freud's idea: in madness the lock is not destroyed, only altered: the old key can no longer unlock it, but it could be opened by a differently constructed key" (C+V, 33). Psychoanalysis is the transaction according to which we shape the new key; yet, at the same time this view of how we manage to restore psychic balance and effectiveness to those who have lost it provides the crucial clue to what has gone wrong in the first place: "Madness need not be regarded as an illness. Why shouldn't it be seen as a sudden-more or less sudden--change of character?" (C+ V, 54). This description surely fits some cases of religious or political conversion quite well. For example, certain women have reported just such a sense of loss of contact with reality upon becoming aware that they were no longer prepared to play the roles cast for them in patriarchal society. 3 Why, we may ask, should these sorts of change of character-if that is indeed what they are-be so difficult to observe? The answer is, in part, suggested by Wittgenstein's emphasis in the passage cited that the transition is extended over time in such a way that it is and is not sudden. Generally, we fail to perceive the basis of our own action and a fortiori our own character because it is bound up with the particular constellations of speaking and acting (Wittgenstein's way of describing "language games"), which itself has to have a certain mythological character such that the very fact that these constellations through which we have been socialized constitute our very character and on that account must be beyond our own ability to see. The idea sounds complicated but the principle is simple and familiar: if I need contact lenses to read, their very instrumentality in the act of reading prevents me from seeing them as I read. So from the first moments of our existence we are learning modes of acting (i.e., already in the womb) which are later complemented by principles of comparison as we learn language, whose features remain obscure to us because, like the contact lenses in the example, they are always before us in a way that we cannot observe (i.e., as the basis of observation itself). I must know my name,, that of my immediate family, my address of long standing,

Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method

217

etc., if I know anything at all. Conversely, to make a mistake about any of these things (which is not the same as not to know them, i.e., the latter could be the result of misinformation [for example, I need not necessarily know my legal name if I am, say, normally called by something else], amnesia or brain damage) is to be in a position where our general competence to function as human beings can legitimately be questioned. Here as elsewhere, we should not be misled by the homeliness of Wittgenstein's examples; for he is talking about nothing less than our very identity. For that reason the example of the housewife-become-feminist who comes to question her sanity is altogether continuous with Wittgenstein's examples of people who suddenly fail to be able to present basic data about themselves correctly. Thus the woman in question, after having learned to define herself in terms of patriarchal social practices, gradually experiences an identity crisis as she begins concretely to seck alter·~ natives to the social practices through which she has been enculturated: '"It is high time for us to compare these phenomena with something different' -one might say-I am thinking, e.g., of mental illnesses" (C+ V, 55), writes Wittgenstein. On Wittgenstcin 's view of the way that our very capacity to think is constituted by modes of acting and comparing, which are drilled into us (abgerichtet), this sort of development is hardly one which can occur consciously. This drilling (Abrichtung) produces a quasi-mythical "logical grammar" in us, which is the result of learning to speak and act as we learn the rules of certain games simply by playing them and not by learning any explicit rules. 4 However the implicit character of what we have learned in the process of becoming enculturated implies that the most significant problems that we experience with respect to our identity will occur when the unspoken basis of our practices shifts somehow, with the result that we become enigmatic to ourselves to paraphrase St. Augustine. Natural disasters have this effect upon societies, e.g., droughts which transform the environment, and individuals, e.g., the death of a friend, as was the case with Augustine. On this view of the role of comparisons in constituting normalcy in human behavior it becomes plausible as to why a poet like Friedrich Holderlin or Georg Trakl, who cultivates unconventional comparisons intensely can change his own character in such a way as to call his sanity into question. Because this is possible, we ought to be most reticent to attribute to them or to the housewife-become-feminist some sort of "degeneracy."

218

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

These are not cases that Wittgenstein directly discusses but they are, nevertheless, the sorts of issues that his observations aim at raising. His Dostoevskian remark, "Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness" (C+V, 13) would seem to be an important clue in this direction. One thing is certain: he was a lifelong student of character and character-building and as such his remarks about character are hardly casual ones. He seems anxious to defend a view of character change that would at once account for its subjectively earthshaking, shattering nature but at the same time leaves the door open to an objectively protracted period over which our modes of acting and comparing gradually shift. It was no less crucial to him that the question of whether or not the transition represented a positive development be left open. This attitude is clearly connected with his conviction that the religious picture of human nature as basically ill was more profound than the Enlightenment's picture of it as imperfect (C+ V, 45). Religion is for Wittgenstein the source of color and vitality in life; it is what makes life worth living. For this reason he was anxious not to prejudge the significance of any given development either in society or in individual life. If we are to be absolutely correct, we must simply describe the Before and the After of personal and cultural developments with great precision (L+C, 7-11; C+V, 55). The main tendency in our society, one that penetrates all aspects of our culture, is to view all development as something good by its very nature, a view that Wittgenstein looked upon with scorn. Like Tolstoy, he considered that it was more the pride and folly of the modern worldview than insight which tempted us to such judgments. 5 In any case, in his confrontation with Freud, Wittgenstein wanted to emphasize that Freud's techniques for bringing his patients to a new, less problematic, perspective on their own behavior should not be confounded with the truth of, say, his claims for the Oedipal account of neuroses. Wittgenstein insists that the only legitimate consequences of successful therapy are more general and neutral with respect to the value of personality transformations of a particular sort. He sought in these transformations, rather, clues to the natural history of personality. As R. D. Laing would later do 6 he questioned what "normal" could possibly mean with respect to human personality. 7 This questioning should be seen as continuous with one of his central notions about the nature of rulefollowing, namely, that the role of guessing and inventing ways of following rules leave it an open question whether a rule has been

Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method

219

followed correctly. What is in accordance with the rule and what is an exception cannot be set down once and for all. In other words, legitimate innovation is real but by its very nature we should not expect to develop a theory of it. Be that as it may, Wittgenstein's confrontation with Freud yields, then, the notion that human beings can radically transform their modes of self-understanding. Psychoanalysis is, in fact, a kind of hermeneutic technique. It provides a new mythology in the sense of a new scenario for living, which is more effective than the old one but which is not, in Wittgenstein's view any better grounded. Having said that, we must now take up the question of the therapeutic treatment of the questions of traditional philosophers such as G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell: I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know thalthut \ a tree," pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, nnd I tt•ll him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.'" (OC, 46)

It is always important to read Wittgenstein with the utmost curl'. Here he is not actually saying that the philosopher, in this case Ci.l~. Moore, 8 is mad but that he appears mad on the basis of what hl' wants to say about the world. The point seems at first trivial: nobody says what is obviously the case as if it were some sort of discovery. Who goes around saying with conviction, "I know that my name is Allan" (i.e., when it really is and always has been), "I know that I have a body," "I know that I am a male"? What we all know needs no assertion. However, this does not hold for philosophers, who want systematically to forget what everybody knows: "God gmnt the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes" (C+V, 63). Wittgenstein, far from finding this assertion merely silly, is fascinated by what leads the philosopher to make this assertion. What does it really signify? For traditional philosophers the "depth" of philosophy consists precisely in that justification of the obvious. Wittgenstein turns this around in an interesting and important way. What he discovers by questioning just why normal people find these assertions so silly is just what Descartes wanted to find with his systematic doubting: unshakable certainty. We do not have to go around asserting that we know our names, etc., because our actions show clearly what we know and do not know about the world at this obvious level. Going around repeating "I know my name is Allan," with a view to establishing certainty with respect to that proposition

220

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

is like reading several copies of today's newspaper in order to make sure that what I read in the first one is correct. It does not take the argument any further. What is obvious, is obvious. To assert it is every bit as silly as to deny it. This symmetry plays a great role in establishing meaning in Wittgenstein's philosophical practice. He insists that the seemingly meaningful sentence "I know my name is Allan" is exposed as meaningless when I contrast it with its negation "I do not know that my name is Allan." The assumption is standard in logic, but Wittgenstein employs it as a way of reducing covert nonsense to overt nonsense in philosophical matters in a wholly novel way. What makes the philosopher seem insane to the servant girl is this propensity to make pronouncements about truth where mistakes are ruled out in normal circumstances by the very nature of our practices. If I could genuinely be mistaken about what I am normally called or where I have been living, there would be no point here. However, the very inconceivability of mistakes here tells us important things about our practices and about the way philosophers fail to understand them. Thus Wittgenstein is actually calling our attention simultaneously (1) to the logical complexity of everyday mistakes (presumably taking his cues from Freud here too; for we do know that he was familiar with the latter's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) 9 and (2) to the fact that part of that logical complexity entails the idea that mistakes are only possible where there are recognized procedures whose order has been violated. Mistakes are only possible if we truly intend what we do, if this intention is a matter of expectation and if some aspect of that expectation turns out to be empirically misconceived. But these expectations rest upon certain unshakable foundations. Philosophers tend to get upset (positively or negatively) about the idea of unshakable foundations to knowledge usually because they conceive those foundations in terms of absolutely true propositions. This is precisely what Wittgenstein is not doing. What is absolutely true, i.e., my "knowledge" of my name; not moral absolutes, which are an entirely different matter, is nonsensically and unsayably true. This is because what is obvious in the sense I have used the term is part of the framework according to which the community in which I have been socialized tests truth and falsity. When I am no longer operating within that framework, members of that community will certainly question my sanity, and I for my part will certainly have problems with my identity. What

Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method

221

belongs to the framework is like the Paris meter in that it is (or was) used as the standard of measurement and for that very reason cannot itself be meaningfully measured. Because it is impossible to measure the Paris meter (i.e., metrically), it is meaningless for us to assign a length to it. On this view both metaphysical dogmatism and skepticism are equally nonsensical. The former wants to assert foundational "true-for-all-time" propositions; whereas the latter wants to deny them. They end up on the same level despite themselves. Both are profoundly mistaken. Wittgenstein on the contrary, wants simply to show that our experience is as it is because we do take certain things, i.e., our knowledge of our own name and address, etc., to be obvious. However, these most important things we "know" do not count as knowledge. Philosophers from Descartes to Russell want to discuss these matters as if they were theoretical or propositionul knowledge; Wittgenstein wants to put an end to the resulting nonsense. His mode of doing so he describes as a set of therapies. However, the therapies he practices are very curious ones. "It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solw their problems" (C+V, 75). If we consider Wittgenstein's central claim about mental disordrr, namely, his statement that it involves new modes of comparison, we can begin to see the point of this seemingly curious assertion. Like the mentally disturbed, the traditional metaphysician no longer takes what is obvious to all as such because he has a new and unusual point of view, a new grammar, according to which there must be something exotic and sublime about what people normally take to be obvious and uninteresting. This is what is "sick" in philosophy (there are strong points of comparison with the James of both Pragmatism and The Varieties of Religious Experience here). However, Wittgenstein, unlike the psychoanalyst, insists that this "sickness" can only be "cured" by the philosopher himself, i.e., in a kind of self analysis: "A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense." (C+V, 44). But what is the way to this self-overcoming that is more insane yet than traditional philosophy? "Nothing is more important for teaching us to understand the concepts we have than constructing fictitious ones" (C+V, 74). The therapies, which the philosopher administers to himself, then, are a matter of constructing fictive natural histories, as Wittgenstein puts it in the Philosophical Investigations, not as thought-experiments (with which

222

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

they bear a superficial similarity) but as a way of obtaining an overview of how our normal set of concepts functions by contrast (PU, II, XII). To do this Wittgenstein was convinced that philosophers would have to suppress their professional urge to be clever (geistreich-a word he also applied to Freud as we have seen) or profound in order to formulate stupid (dumm, C+ V, 76) questions, which bring what everybody knows without saying it into sharp contrast with an imaginative impossibility: if we speak of "white hot" why don't we speak of "brown hot," too?'' (OCL, 1, 34). This is what he understands when he writes of philosophy as a kind of lyric art (Dichtung, C+V, 24), whose aim is to make a problem dissolve by exhibiting its origin to us from a wholly new angle (L+C, 27). However, we must bear in mind that the mode of comparison which gives us so much trouble is not merely a hypothesis but something similar to the conceptual framework of a mentally disturbed person, i.e., something which is constitutive of our very ways of acting and speaking. Therefore, the new diet of examples must be varied and striking to be able to win us away from deeply ingrained habits, habits that we don't simply have but habits that we are (on this point there is curious similarity with Gabriel Marcel's distinction between problem as something I have and mystery as something I am). Thus repetition plays a central role in Wittgenstein's therapeutic philosophizing; for we have to learn--or better as philosophers-we have to teach ourselves to see the landscape from many new points of view (PI, Foreword) other than the ones to which we are accustomed before, we get a grasp of its contours in all of their complexity. But what significance could all of this have for the practice of psychotherapy? There is of course no clear-cut answer. However, it is possible to make some suggestions. In many respects Wittgenstein's perspective on psychoanalysis would seem to bear resemblance to that of R. D. Laing. This is in part accurate, but we should not make too much of the point. Like Laing and others, Wittgenstein was critical of the ideological dimension of psychoanalysis and warns us to be wary of its seductive claims; on the other hand, he does not suggest an alternative. In any case, he is quite convinced that the way Freud went about bringing his patients to accept a new, less flattering picture of themselves was one form about which there was a great deal to learn. Wittgenstein's sense of the relationship between language and the world is clearly something to which anyone concerned with the

Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method

22~

mind should be sensitive. His view that language consists of an interweaving of words and actions is still a radical departure from most views of language. His denial that our experience is private is equally radical with respect to accepted views of mind. His insistence that we have to understand words in terms of deeds and vice versa is an important reminder about something we are all likely to forget in the face of structuralism and mentalism. The idea that language is not a neutral medium for describing the world but is part and parcel of a particular way of structuring the world-the idea that the limits of my language are the limits of my world-is also a notion that can have considerable heuristic value to those involved in restructuring shattered worlds. The same is true for the correlative notion that it is language which at once obscures as we]] as reveals the nature of my world. Similarly, the idea that the analyst is directly involved in a moral as well as a medical enterprise undcrscor<.~s its radical nature. There is doubtless much to be gained from a close consitk•ra1 ion of Wittgenstein's view that normal mental life is constilull'd around trust. If the theory upon which psychoanalysis is built is qlwstion· able, as Wittgenstein suggests it is, his notion that the basis of our practices (or "language games"; the terms can be used interchllll!l.l'ably) are only possible if we trust something, take on a rarticulur importance in restoring balance to a shattered world. Given the increasing inability of traditional institutions such as church and family to cope with mental problems, it is doubly important for analysts to be aware of this aspect of shaping new behavior patterns, upon which a new and more effective understanding of self and environment can be built. The remarks about the therapeutic character of philosophy that I have cited could very well have a heuristic value to therapists. I refer to the notion that there must be a variety of therapies corr·esponding to the complexity of problems, i.e., we have to be brought to the problem from many different angles before we have an overview of it, would seem also to be an important reminder to the therapist. Indeed, if we reflect for a moment upon the ways in which the patient's need for trust and the idea that the therapy has to be as complex as the illness, we seem to arrive at a situation where the therapist has to think his or her way into the patient's problem in such a way that it docs indeed become his or her own problem_: and one which can only be solved from within.

224

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

As abstract ideas these concepts may seem platitudinous, but retracing Wittgenstein's method of self-questioning can only deepen the reflecti~ns of those seriously concerned with the mind. So careful reading of and reflection upon his Philosophical Investigations may be a useful exercise for someone who has to assist another to decide who he or she should be. This is a role that is at once paradoxically godlike and more insane than insanity. Wittgenstein struggled with it as man, as an intellectual in confrontation with Freud and as a philosopher in confrontation with philosophy, so there is every reason to think that even psychotherapists have something to discover from his confrontation with the sources of selfdeception within us. Even if philosophy cannot solve the sorts of problems that analysts confront, it can help to gain insight into their nature and that is the first crucial step to overcoming them. The rest is a matter of living differently, not philosophy.

*

*

*

Having run the gamut of Viennese critical modernism down to Wittgenstein's critical reception of psychoanalysis and his rejection of a clear-cut distinction of sanity and insanity, is it hardly accidental that we should close our excursion to Wittgenstein's Vienna with the discussion of certain of the philosopher's ideas in connection with a figure that conventional wisdom had often identified as mad? Indeed, the unconventional style and content of Georg Trakl's poetry, his love for his sister and his tragic death all have contributed to the myth of Trakl the madman but in fact there is method to his madness (if he indeed was mad) as the saying goes, method that invites comparison with certain crucial ideas from Wittgenstein's Tractatus. A close look at Trakl's poetry in fact yields a scathing critique of the "cheerful apocalypse" that was Old Vienna-here we have another effort of a very different kind to confront an "inverted world"-and yet further insight into Wittgenstein's place in it.

12 "Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins": Wittgenstein and Trakl Dear Sir, Mr. Ludwig von Ficker transferred 20,000 crowns to me yesterday in your namt•. Permit me to thank you most respectfully for your magnanimity. For years ahrmdoned to life's every caprice, it means everything to me to be able to pursue my 011'11 silence undisturbedly. May it produce a poem worthy of that noble person to whom I owe so much. -Georg Trakl to his anonymous benefactor (i.e., Ludwig Wittgcnstcin)

The unexpected parenthetical remark "Ethik und Asthctik sind Bins" (ethics and aesthetics are one) in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (6.4 1) has long mystified philosophers. Not so Austrian literati. For them it has always been recognizable as nothing less than the rallying cry of a peculiarly (but by no means exclusively) Austrian reaction to modernity which we have termed, critical modernism. Critical modernism, in contradistinction to the fashionable "postmodernism," refers to a healthy skepticism with respect to what is typically modern that runs through Austrian letters from Kraus, Musil, and Broch to Bachmann, Canetti, and Bernhard. However, that skepticism does not reject modernity but emerges from it in critical confrontation with it. If Austrian literati had trouble understanding the epistemology of their greatest philosopher, they certainly had no difficulty with this assertion.' It was the rallying cry for those cultural critics around Karl Kraus, who abhorred the yawning chasm between words and deeds that permeated Austrian life. Since those authors who attacked that double standard seem, if anything, to grow in stature with time, to understand their main concerns is to understand something very important not only about the Austrian past, but also about contemporary Western values.

226

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Our aim here, then, is to identify the parallels between Wittgenstein and Georg Trakl, arguably Austria's greatest twentieth-century poet, as Austrian thinkers. To be sure, there is always a grave danger of oversimplification when one tries to find a common denominator between philosophy and poetry, let alone to interpret two notoriously difficult writers at once. However, the aim here is not to show that "they were really saying the same thing all along," which would be ludicrous, but rather to identify certain parallel reactions to a particular cultural milieu, parallels mutually illuminating of the unity of ethics and aesthetics in Wittgenstein's philosophy and Trakl's poetry. Each of them respectively represents a powerful element within that immanent social critique, i.e., that social critique that realized itself primarily as a purist reduction to the medium that we have termed critical modernism. But why single out Georg Trakl especially for comparison with Wittgenstein when seeking to illuminate the claim that ethics and aesthetics are one? The full answer is complex, for it involves a comparison of two personalities remarkable for their Promethean combats with depression, their almost Calvinist purism and asceticism, their attitudes toward work and working habits, their contacts with leading cultural critics of the day, i.e., the circle around Karl Kraus, and their deeply pessimistic views of modern society. 2 More importantly, however, it is a matter of seeing a striking resemblance in the moment of cultural criticism immanent in their respective contributions to philosophy and poetry, i.e., in the very style in which they write. How could Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Trakl's poems be so much more than the "primitive" works of genius they seemed to be to logical positivists and expressionists respectively? 3 Why should we suspect that they somehow complement one another? The answer is that both Wittgenstein and Trakl have strikingly formulated variations on the thought that ethics and aesthetics are one. Consider Wittgenstein's assertion "Philosophy can only really be written as fiction" (Philosophic diirfte man eigentlich nur dichten, C+V, 24). Certainly this was written at a later period when the aphoristic strategy of the Tractatus had been supplemented with that of creating fictive natural histories to compare with our actual natural history for the sake of obtaining clarity about the essentially practical nature of human knowledge. Nevertheless, when we regard this aphorism as another way of formulating a notion that Wittgenstein exptessed in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, namely, that his book

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

227

was strictly philosophical and at the same time literary (F, 12), we have to ask how Wittgenstein could have built the principle that ethics and aesthetics are one into the very form of the Tractatus (I am concerned only with the Tractatus here, but the same sort of question could and should be asked with respect to his later work). In a similar vein consider Trakl's aphorism: Feeling in moments of death-like being: All human beings are worthy oflove. Awakening You feel the bitterness of the world. In it is all your Unforgiven guilt; your poem an imperfect atonement. Geftihl in den Augenblicken totenahnlichen Seins: Aile Menschen sind der Liebe wert. Erwachend ftihlst du die Bittemis der Welt. Darin ist aile deine ungeli:iste Schuld; dein Gedicht eine unvollkommene Siihne. 4

If this statement is to be taken at all as a serious assertion about how Trakl viewed his own work, there is a deeply religious-and thcrt•fore "ethical" dimension (on Wittgenstein's view)-to Trakl's poetry, in whose absence those magnificent lyrics would be misunderstood. Thus there is prima facie evidence that both Wittgenstcin und Trakl present more than meets the eye. A parallel investigation ( I) into the ways in which Wittgenstein's mystical silence entails the unity of ethics and aesthetics and (2) into the ways in which Trukl's poetry can be seen as a "silent" mode of repentance and awakening to the humanity of people (C+V, 5) will help to highlight those aspects of Wittgenstein and Trakl that most need illumination. We cun begin by reexamining the conclusion of the Tractatus, i.e., 6.4-7, where the phrase "ethics and aesthetics are one" occurs. The first thing to be said about the mysterious sentence "Ethik und Asthetik sind Bins" is that a close reading of the text yields a much less mysterious interpretation than philosophers have been inclined to see there. If we start from the last two sentences of the Tractatus, we can obtain a foothold which will allow us to see that this sentence does not exactly spring from out of the blue. The final injunction to silence is too well known to require comment. What is less often noticed is the sentence immediately preceding it (6.54). After suggesting a Ia Sextus Empiricus and Fritz Mauthner that the nonsensical (unsinnig) propositions of the Tractatus are a ladder to be discarded after we have climbed it, Wittgenstein writes that the reader "must overcome these propositions, then he will sec the world

228

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

rightly" ("muB diese Satze iiberwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig"). Two things deserve emphasis here: (1) the mystical silence of the Tractatus is a matter of perspective; the fact that we see the world rightly only at the end of this difficult journey implies that we do not do so normally; (2) that we come to do so only at the end of a tortuous reconsideration of the logic of language. It is clear from 6.54 that this has to do with grasping the world as a limited whole. In other words it is a matter of understanding the way in which the world is simultaneously limited as it is constituted by language. It seems that we are for whatever reason strongly disinclined to see the world as constructed by us. 5 We tend to see the ego as distinct from the world. Lest this seem to be too abstract, we should tie these remarks to some texts. The best place to begin is proposition 6.422: There must be a kind of ethical reward and punishment, but these must lie in the action itself-and it is also clear that the reward must be something pleasant and the punishment something unpleasant. Es muB zwar eine Art von ethischem Lohn und ethischer Strafe geben, aber diese mussen in der Handlung selbst liegen (und das ist auch klar, daB der Lohn etwas Angenehmes; die Strafe etwas Unangenehmes sein muB).

Here Wittgenstein clearly rejects Utilitarianism or, indeed, any form of moral theorizing as providing a key to the happy life (6.43). Genuine happiness is not something that results from deliberative reasoning; rather, it is a matter of acting in a particular way. Wittgenstein's Notebooks give us an important clue to his reasoning here. There Wittgenstein suggests that the world must be either happy or unhappy (N, 29.VII.l6). These qualities he links to one another in a way that indicates that he takes the Stimmung (mood) of the world (to use Heidegger's term 6 ) to be a transcendental property. In the more recently published "Secret Notebooks" we have among other things a picture of Wittgenstein grappling existentially with just this problem: what sort of life is intrinsically happy? With his characteristic radicalism he reflects upon Nietzsche's vitriolic rejection of Christianity: Certainly Christianity is the only sure way to happiness. But what if one disdains happiness? Couldn't it be better to perish in a hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is meaningless. But why not lead a meaningless life? Is it unworthy? How does it square with the strictly solipsistic standpoint. But what must I do to prevent my life from being lost? I must always-always spiritually-be con'scious of it.

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

229

GewiB das Christentum ist der einzig sichere Weg zum Gluck. Aber wie, wenn einer dies Gluck verschmahte? Konnte es nicht besser sein, unglucklich im hoffnungslosen Kampf gegen die auBere Welt zu Grunde zu gehen? Aber ein solches Leben ist sinnlos. Aber warum nicht ein sinnloses Leben flihren? 1st es unwurdig? Wie vertragt es sich mit dem streng solpsistischen Standpunkt? Was muB ich aber tun, daB mein Leben mir nicht verloren geht? Ich muB mir seiner immer--des Geistes immer-bewuBt sein. (GT, 8.XII.l4)

So it is clear that Wittgenstein's remark in the "public" notebooks are anything but speculation. His search for a mode of living that would be essentially happy, i.e., regardless of the adversities we face, was an existential effort to cope with the threat of death daily at the front from the early days of World War I. Here, too, there is a parallel to Trakl. His only other surviving aphorism reads: "Knowledge comes only to people who despise happiness" (Nur dem, der Gliick verachtet, wird Erkenntnis). 7 The conclusion to this protracted deliberation is what we find in the Tractatus: a conception of the good life which in startlingly good Aristotelian fashion is immanently pleasurable because it is harmonious. If all of this is correct, we can suggest that coming to sec the world "rightly" is a matter of seeing happiness as residing in our actions rather than in what we possess. In order to see the wurld "rightly" we must understand that it is essentially and not merely accidentally related to the self. Thus constructivist epistemology is indirectly the key to the problem of the meaning of life. This antibourgeois conception of the good life seems to be the end product of Wittgenstein's confrontation with Weininger and Tolstoy. It stipulates that the moral life is the inherently rewarding one and, as such, an aesthetic life because it rests upon nothing outside of itself. If this is true, the happy life has to be a totality. It would seem then that seeing the world wrongly is a matter of identifying ethics and aesthetics with a part of life or with something external to actions themselves. If this is right, the saying "ethics and aesthetics are one" is a way of insisting that real value is to be found only in an inherently satisfying way of life. It is a matter of action, not scientific theory, i.e., learning in practice that there are transcendental limits to acting happily, i.e., limits that we cannot overstep no matter how clever we are or how hard we try. Wittgenstein's point here is absolutely parallel to his rejection of private language: to believe that you arc following the rule in no way implies that you are actually doing so. H you insist that there can be such a thing as a private language, you

230

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

231

If we do not try to express the inexpressible, nothing is lost. Rather the inexpressible is-inexpressibly--contained in what is expressed.

simply do not know what people normally mean when they speak about language, i.e., philosophers tend to forget that gestures are as much a part of language as words. However, just as there are deepseated tendencies in the mind of the philosopher to overlook the fact that language is constituted of both words and gesture, there are deep-seated tendencies in us that lead us to reject the idea that there are intrinsic limits to action. If there were not, there would be little sense in thinking that there is merit in coming to see the world rightly as Wittgenstein insists. However, there is a dimension to the matter that Wittgenstein does not touch on at all in the Tractatus-remember that he would later come to criticize his early work for just such "oversights" (PI, I 23). If we have to be taught to see the world rightly, as we must; in what does that teaching consist? Wittgenstein does not say beyond suggesting that

Trakl's poetry, by constructing imagery only to transform the significance of that imagery, radically builds into itself something very similar to what lies at the heart of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, i.e., what has been described as the Abnehmen and Zunehmen of the world (terms usually employed in respect of losing and gaining weight). In both of these moments in Wittgenstein and Trakl respectively "ethics and aesthetics are one." Upon reception of a volume of Trakl's poetry from Ludwig von Ficker in 1915 Wittgenstein wrote of the poems:

The world must through this [experience] become a completely different. It must increase or diminish as a whole so to say.

I do not understand them, but their tone makes me happy. It is the tone of a truly brilliant person.

Die Welt muB dann dadurch iiberhaupt eine andere werden. Sie muB sozusagen als Ganzes abnehmen oder zunehmen. (6.43)

This Abnehmen and Zunehmen (words normally associated with one's weight, translated as "waxing and waning" by Pears and McGuinness-they could also be rendered as flourishing and failing) would seem to have to be understood as essential properties of the world as we find it, i.e., as experienced rather than as known scientifically, and not merely as external states. In that situation genuine happiness comes from suddenly and surprisingly learning that all that happens to us in accidental (6.41). But this is not something that can be said, i.e., that can be described with the unambiguous propositions of Russellian logical calculus, because it bears upon the practice of living with the awareness that the self constructs the world and with it its own happiness. Thus Wittgenstein is convinced that the nature of happiness can only be shown. If that is so, we may ask how it may be shown. The Tractatus gives us no answer to that question. However, it is clear from Wittgenstein's correspondence with Paul Engelmann that he considered poetry a mode of "showing" things that cannot be said, but only under the proviso that we silently appropriate the unsayable in the· poem:

Wenn man sich nicht bemiiht das Unaussprechliche auszusprechen, so geht nichts verloren. Sondern das Unaussprechliche -ist-unaussprechlich-in dem Ausgesprochenen enthalten. 8

lch verstehe sie nicht, aber ihr Ton begliickt mich. Es ist der Ton der wahrhaft gcniulcn Menschen. 9

There can be no doubt that Wittgenstein, who was notoriously sparing with his praise, was deeply impressed by Trakl's work; for nothing was more significant for him about an author than his tone (E, 43). However, for those who know Trakl's poetry well his judgment is wholly appropriate, for it is precisely the tone that is so extraordinary. Our question, then, ought to be: how does Trakl produce that tone? If our thesis is correct in answering it we shall at the same time illuminate how a world of sterile facts can "wax and wane as a whole." What, then, happens in a Trakl poem? His method is first to evoke images, visions, fantasies even, and then to transform them unexpectedly in such a way that after reading a Trakl poem readers are left with a feeling that something uncanny has happened to them in reading it. First the unusual nature and order of the images forces the reader to read slowly and carefully, actively seeking the poem's elusive sense, which is frequently linked to an abrupt transformation of the emotional significance of the images. Thus the line between illusion and reality, normally so clear, becomes uncomfortably and puzzlingly unclear as the epiphany at the "logical" center of the poems occurs. It is almost as if the artist himself is ironically showing us the truth of the Platonic allegation that the poet is noth-

232

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

ing more than an artist in illusions. This is critical modernism at its most profound. In short, Trakl's peculiar tone is tied to a particular way of evoking and transforming an image of the world usually such that what we have previously found charming becomes disturbing. So vivid and distinctive is Trakl's power of evocation and transformation that the Trakl "world" and "tone" have become expressions with a well-established place in the literature on Trakl. 10 Trakl's mode of forming and transforming images: "how lovely image upon image all in a row. That perishes in peace and quiet " (wie schon sich Bild an Bildchen reiht. Das geht in Ruh und Schweigen unter, "Verklarter Herbst"), 11 is a very significant way of showing how the world can have this property of becoming an altogether different one. This is, of course, not unique to Trakl; for it is a commonplace among European poets after Baudelaire. What is unique to Trakl at the tum of the century was his "deflationary" employment of Symbolist technique. Furthermore, Trakl's mode of deflating conventional concepts such as "beauty" rests upon brilliant exploitation of the ambiguities inherent in language and has as such the character of a silent showing that takes place in the reader's mind's ear as it were. Let us now tum to Trakl for some concrete examples of how this can be achieved. The Trakl tone, that astonishing ability to evoke haunting images with an amazing economy of expression, is hardly better illustrated than in the four lines which make up his poem "Nachts": At Night The blue of my eyes is extinguished in this night, The red gold of my heart. 0! how still burned the light. Your blue cloak enveloped the sinking man; Your red mouth sealed the friend benighted. Nachts Die BHiue meiner Augen ist er!oschen in dieser Nacht, Das rote Gold meines Herzens. 0! wie stille brannte das Licht Dein blauer Mantel umfing den Sinkenden; Dein rater Mund besiegelte des Freundes Umnachtung. 12

The first thing to notice is the vividness of the color imagery. The images, the blue of my eyes, the red gold of my heart, a silently burning light; a blue coat and a red mouth are so vividly sensual as

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

233

to distract the reader from the extinguishing ohhe blue of the eyes and the sagging of the man enveloped by the blue cloak. 13 It is only the final word "benighted" that awakens the reader with shock to what is being described. Trakl plays upon our willingness to lose ourselves in a set of striking images. He invites us to linger over his images, to delight in their serene beauty, only to wake us up with an almost brutal abruptness at the final word "benighted." It shocks his readers into seeing how little they can trust their first impressions. The poem is at once profoundly sensual and at the same time intellectual in that its "meaning" (a word that has to be used with great caution when we speak of Trakl) rests upon the potential for ambiguity that is present in "the given" as it were. In fact the images create a "world" whose sense comes to be called into question through a controlled ambiguity. Thus the word "benighted" completes the transformation of the original impression or the mood that has in fact been underway from the word "sinking" 14 and forces us to doubt the reliability of what we have read. It is necessary to go back and read the poem a second time. The poem's "meaning" has less to do with a "message" than it does with something remarkably akin to what we have seen Wittgenstein term the increment and diminution of the world as a whole, which is part and parcel of everything relating to that musical sphere in which we must silently encounter life's most puzzling problems. Moreover, all of this is encapsulated into a shattering experience as Trakl presents it. In Trakl's works, however, these epiphanies are almost always associated with a rude awakening of a highly pessimistic character. Consider "Vorstadt im Fohn," the first poem Trakl published in the Brenner: Suburb in the Fohn In the evening the spot lies dun and dreary, The air permeated with grayish stench. A train thunders from the bridge's archAnd sparrows flutter over bush and fence. Humble cottages, a snarl of scattered paths, In gardens mess and motion, Sometimes howling swells from dull emotion, In a band of children flies red a dress. On the rubbish a chorus of rats whistles rapt. Women carry guts in baskets, A loathsome march full or mange and filth,

234

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited They emerge from the twilight. And a drain suddenly spews congealed blood From the slaughterhouse into the quiet river. Fohn winds lend scraggy shrubs more color And slowly through the waters creeps its red. A whispering that drowns in troubled sleep. Shapes juggle up from watery gullies Perhaps from a past life memories, That rise and sink with the warm breeze. Shimmering avenues plunge from clouds, Filled with lovely carriages, daring knights. Then one sees a ship wrecked on cliffs And sometimes rose-colored mosques. Vorstadt im Fohn Am Abend liegt die Statte od und braun, Die Luft von graulichem Gestank durchzogen. Das Donnern eines Zugs vom Briickenbogen Und Spatzen flattern tiber Busch und Zaun. Geduckte Hiitten, Pfade wirr verstreut, In Garten Durcheinander und Bewegung, Bisweilen schwillt Geheul aus dumpfer Regung, In einer Kinderschar fliegt rot ein Kleid. Am Kehricht pfeift verliebt ein Rattenchor. In Korben tragen Frauen Eingeweide, Ein ekelhafter Zug voll Schmutz und Raude; Kommen sie aus der Dammerung hervor. Und ein Kana! speit plOtzlich feistes Blut Yom Schlachthaus in den stillen FluB hinunter Die Fohne farben karge Stauden bunter Und Iangsam kriecht die Rote durch die Flut. Ein Fliistern, das in triibem Schlaf ertrinkt. Gebilde gaukeln auf aus Wassergraben, Vielleicht Erinnerung an ein friiheres Leben, Die mit den warmen Winden steigt und sinkt. Aus Wolken tauchen schimmerndeAlleen, Erfiillt von schonen Wagen, kiihnen Rei tern. Dann sieht man auch ein Schiff auf Klippen scheitern Und manchmal rosenfarbene Moscheen. 15

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

235

The images of a place bleak and brown with grayish stinking air, a garden in disorder in which a child, really only a faceless red dress, plays, a chorus of rats amorously whistling atop the rubbish heap, while women carry buckets of guts, congealed blood, running into the river below, hardly yield a cheerful picture. Gradually the Fohn's hot winds transforms the scene till finally wondrous images appear in the clouds: shimmering avenues, wagons, bold knights, a shipwreck upon the cliffs, and even pink mosques. It would seem that the wind has blown a bit of hope and cheer into this desolate suburbscape. But this is far from what has happened. Anybody who knows those regions where the Fohn blows knows that the accompanying rapid change of air pressure has such a terribly debilitating and maddening effect upon so many people that violent crimes carry a lesser penalty there when committed during periods of Fohn. Thus there is nothing less than a double transformation taking place in the poem. Trakl contrasts an unpleasant reality with lovely images, not to illustrate that there is more to life than misery and ugliness, as we are first tempted to think, but to establish the hallucinatory character of those ideals and aspirations by means of which we would escape unpleasant reality. Furthermore, it should not pass unnoticed that these hallucinations of an alternative reality are associated in line 19 (significantly dividing the poem according to the principle of the Golden Section) with reminiscences of a former life. This is not merely a vague reference to Platonism but an allusion to the escapist character of Viennese aestheticism, for which the notion of preexistence was a mode of explaining creativity and self-congratulation, "Vorstadt im Fohn" is inter alia a scathing commentary on escapist narcissism in contemporary Austrian letters. 16 This is very important. Trakl's credentials as a critical modernist were impeccable, and the fact that Trakl has been hardly mentioned in the recent "wave" of international symposia on Vienna 1900 such as Traum und Wirklichkeit and Ornament und Askese is a sad commentary on Austrian studies. Through his close friendship with Erhard Buschbeck, Adolf Loos, Oskar Kokoschka, and Karl Kraus in the period between 1908 and 1911, when Trakl lived in Vienna, and continuing until his death in 1914, 17 he was very much a central figure in precisely those circles with which Wittgenstein identified himself, as his search for a publisher for the Tractatus indicates. 18 Among Trakl's oldest friends was Erhard Buschbeck, later to become a distinguished

I

'

-----···-~~-~~~----

236

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

director of the Burgtheater. Before World War I Buschbeck had his finger on the pulse of Viennese cultural life in his dual role as leader of the Ak:ademische Verband fiir Literatur und Musik, the most eminent source of support for young writers, composers, and artists (the Verband, for example, first produced Kokoschka's Marder, Ho.ffnung der Frauen) and as co-editor with Robert Muller of Der Ruf Little appeared on the Viennese cultural scene which passed Buschbeck unnoticed. Through Buschbeck Trakl became acquainted with Oskar Kokoschka as well as Anton von Webern and the circle around Arnold Schoenberg. The eminently musical Trakl was both informed and deeply interested in the dramatic developments in music taking place in Vienna. We see this concern in a congratulatory letter to Buschbeck after a scandalous concert of the new music turned into a fistfight in which Buschbeck hit a concertgoer and had to pay a stiff fine. The friendship between Trakl and Buschbeck is documented in Trakl's many letters and dedications to him. Similarly, Trakl's profound admiration for Karl Kraus found expression in the short poem that he contributed originally to Ficker's Rundfrage iiber Karl Kraus, 19 which was a defense of Kraus in the face of a slanderous attack in the Munich periodical Zeit im Bild: Karl Kraus White high priest of truth, Crystal voice, wherein God's icy breath dwells, Wrathful magician, Under whose flaming cloak the blue cuirass of the warrior clatters. WeiBer Hohepriester der Wahrheit, Kristallne Stimme, in der Gottes eisiger Odem wohnt, Ziirnender Magier, Dem unter flammendem Mantel der blaue Panzer des Kriegers klirrt. 20

Trakl's superb sonata in words "Psalm" is also dedicated to Kraus. For his part Kraus looked upon Trakl with a mixture of admiration and awe. 21 Upon learning of Trakl's death Kraus wrote Sidonie Nadhemy that it was incomprehensible to him how Trakl could have lived at all. 22 While he lived in Vienna Trakl could well have been described as the closest friend of the architect Adolf Loos. Trakl expressed his admiration for Loos in the dedication of his poem "Sebastian im Traum•' as well as in the aphorism he wrote upon visiting the infa-

237

mous Haus am Michaelerplatz, which had so infuriated the Emperor that he never again used the exit from Imperial Palace that forced him to pass it: "Antlitz eines Hauses; Ernst und Schweigen des Steins groB und gewaltig gestaltet" 23 (Countenance of a building, serious silent stone full forcefully formed). The friendship between Loos and Trakl dates from the time when Loos published his celebrated essay "Ornament and Crime" (Ornament und Verbrechen), whose resonance is found increasingly in Trakl's poetry. In the battle against superfluous ornamentation Loos had no more staunch ally than TrakP 4 For Trakl as for Loos this was little less than a campaign against Habsburg tradition. For Loos it was a gesture of opposing simple functional lines to the arabesqucd domes of the neo-Baroque; for Trakl it was a matter of confronting the mood or attitude which is the counterpart to the building, as seen, for example, in the following poem: In an Old Album Again and again you return, melancholy, 0 meekness of the lonely soul. A golden day glows to its end. Humbly the patient one bends with the pain Resounding melody and mellow madness. Look! TWilight is falling already. Night returns and a mortal wails And another suffers too. Shuddering under autumnal stars The head bows deeper year after year.

In ein Altes Stammbuch Immer wieder kehrst du Melancholie, 0 Sanftmut der einsamen Seele. Zu Ende gliiht ein goldener Tag. Demutsvoll beugt sich dem Schmerz der Geduldige Tonend von Wohllaut und weichem Wahnsinn. Siehe! es dammert schon. Wieder kchrt die Nacht und klagt cin Stcrbliches Und cs lcidct cin andcrcs mit. Schaudcrnd untcr hcrbstlichcn Stcrncn Ncigl sich jllhrl it'h ticfcr dns llnupt. 11

238

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

The poem was originally entitled "An die Melancholic." Its title and form are suggestive of Holderlin and the neoclassical hymn of praise such as Schiller's "An die Freude" famous from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but the pessimistic closing tone shows it to be an elegy and thus the very opposite of a hyrnn. 26 In this ambiguity rests Trakl's confrontation at once with Holderlin and Viennese aestheticism a la Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and with them the socalled "Habsburg myth" itself. The latter two points of comparison are those which most interest us here. Trakl's critical stance with respect to Viennese modernism can be clearly established by means of two contrasts: one with Bahr's view of melancholy and another with a comparable Hofmannstahl poem on the same theme. In his review of Gustav Klimt's "Schubert am Klavier" he offers. a striking contrast to Trakl' s somber concept of melancholy. With his typical penchant for exaggeration and pathos the "Mann von Ubermorgen" wrote that the picture was the most beautiful that ever an Austrian had painted .. .it expresses, what we cannot say with our pitiful words but we could not live, if the Viennese feeling for life were not shown to us .. .let me feel this Schubert with his singing maiden, who have something bourgeois but yet almost religious, in all their indescribable-! want to say joyous melancholy in the same consoling sadness that the little mountains in the Brnhl [i.e., the Vienna Woods] have. 27

Whereas melancholy for Trakl means depression and pain solitude and weariness, for Bahr it is nothing more than a frisson and a cultivated one at that. Hofmannstahl's poem "In ein Stammbuch" offers a further point of contrast to Trakl: /nan Album Our saddest sensations Only smart while they last, And all our dispelling exertions, Smile at us when they've past.

In ein Stammbuch Das traurigste Empfundene Ist nur lebendig schwer, Und alles Weg-geschundene, Es liichelt nach uns her. 28

A cute poem! A clever aphorism flawlessly styled, it is typical of the sort that once were written into albums to edify uncertain youth.

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

239

The poem is an elegant caprice on the theme "grin and bear it." So even though our translation fails to do justice to Hofmannsthal 's stylistic elegance, nevertheless, it does capture "the thought" to a T. And, indeed, that is the main problem with the aesthetics of the Wiener Moderne. It permitted just such elegant frivolousness to pass for literature. To be sure the example is a relatively trivial one but nonetheless typical for all that. It, too, is a symptom of how the world of Viennese aestheticism was an "inverted world," to use the phrase of Karl Kraus, in which just such cute effects came to be of central significance. Trakl's aesthetics on the contrary aims at nothing else than setting that world on its feet again, i.e., on helping us to see things rightly as Wittgenstein might put it. Now we can turn to the moment of confrontation with the Habsburg myth that the negative presentation of melancholy, i.e., depression as inescapable torment, in the poem represents. In coining the phrase the "Habsburg myth" in his book of thut name, which has meanwhile become something of a classic, <'lnudin Magris wanted to call attention to the tendency in Austria to rcprt•sent the past nostalgically as a lost period of joy and harmony, "the good old days," into which people could flee from unplcusunlncss at least in their imaginations into a fairy tale world. 29 In fact Mngris insists this was nothing but the obverse of a deeply felt alienation. Trakl, too, saw this and unlike Bahr, Hofmannstahl, and Co. aimed at deflating the inflated value of symbols long since bereft of spiritual and intellectual power. Briefly, he sought nothing other than the exorcism of the demons lurking behind Habsburg symbolism. To see this we must jump back to the origins of that tradition in the spiritual world of the late Renaissance. The poem's theme is melancholy. According to Galen's theory of humors, "melancholy people were sad, poor, unsuccessful, and condemned to the most servile and despised occupations." 30 The melancholic or "saturnine" type's (with whom Trakl himself strongly identified as his poem "Triibsinn" indicates: "Again in the evening above my head I Saturn mutely guides a piteous fate" Am Abend wieder i.iber meinem Haupt I Saturn lenkt stumm ein elendes Geschick 31 )-classical expression is to be found in Albrecht Durer's well-known engraving of that name: The most unfortunate and the most hateful of all the four Saturn-melancholic, was durk in complexion, with black hair and a black face-the facies nigra or livid hue indeed by the black bile of the melancholy complexion. His typical physical pose, expressive uf his sadness and depression, was to rest his head on his hand. Even his "gifl.s," or

240

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited "Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

characteristic occupations, were not attractive. He was good at measuring, numbering, counting-at measuring land and counting money-but what low and earthy occupations were these compared with the splendid gifts of the sanguine Jupiter man, or the grace and loveliness of those born under Venus !32

However, there was another side to melancholy, for it could be transformed from the lowest to the highest type: the genius too was nothing but a melancholic who had transvalued his talents according to the Hermeticist scheme. All of this has special significance for the development of the Habsburg image, for the most extraordinary melancholic of the late Renaissance was the eccentric Emperor Rudolf II in his splendid isolation in the Hradschin in Prague. 33 He is crucial to this story for the way he stamped the culture which would become the Baroque of the Catholic Restoration and the symbol of everything Habsburg. Rudolf was a man of his age and therefore an intense believer in astrology and the occult generally. He sought nothing less than to command the occult powers which ruled the universe. To this end he summoned the greatest magus from the Court of Queen Elizabeth I, the remarkable John Dee, brilliant mathematician, religious reformer, originator of the modem concept of imperialism, and Hermeticist magician, to the Court in Prague. Moreover, Rudolf, the great patron of Mannerism in the arts, was especially proud of the portrait that the Arcimboldo 34 painted of him as Vertumnis: god of the changing seasons, which was entirely a composite of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. It too had Hermetic significance for as God of the seasons Rudolf should, at least symbolically, have power over them. For anyone interested in Vienna at the tum of the century the very description of the Hermetic movement to which Rudolf was such an enthusiastic patron is evocative of fin de siecle aestheticism. Mannerist art aimed at reveling in the mysteries of the universe indirectly in terms of emblems with supernatural power. It combined courtly elegance, the most artificial mode of expression, and cultivated anti-classicism. It embodied a "tendency towards eroticism and unnatural 'decadent' themes, above all the employment of symbols as a means of communication." 35 Since its intellectual attitude proceeded from the premise that all genuine knowledge was esoteric, it was a cult of esoteric genius. To know was to be able to summon up magical powers and therefore to be in a mysteriously personal communion with the universe. In this context to be melancholic was to be at least potentially in possession of the kc;y to knowledge and power. The trick was to find access to

241

those powers. The house of Habsburg, unlike other European monarchies (with the exception of the Romanovs, whose "mystique" was more medieval and Byzantine than Renaissance and European) never entirely rid itself of the vestiges of Hermeticism. Thus all of the above-mentioned features went into the making of the Habsburg "mystique," which persisted in an altered but recognizable form to the end of the Empire. What is crucial for our argument here is that the symbolic came to take precedence over the literal, creating a gap between signs and their meanings in public life which persisted till the end of the monarchy. This helps to explain inter alia how an Austrian court around the turn of the century could find in favor of a politician in a libel suit who argued that everybody knew that Austrian politicians did not mean what they said. 36 Moreover, it is hardly accidental that (1) the irrationalism of the Viennese modernism should be so strongly tinged by the penchant to cultivate ambiguity and (2) one typically Viennese form of cultural criticism would be a puritanical movement to eliminate all forms of ambiguity from language, logical positivism. Thus in tlw context of Vienna 1900 Trakl did for poetry what Karl Kraus had done for prose, i.e., did nothing less than turning that very proclivity to ambiguity against itself, i.e. to create a new form of precision capable of showing the inner vacuity of the "cheerful apocalyps~o•," as Hermann Broch called it, that was fin de siecle Vienna. Be that as it may, how much Trakl explicitly knew of the tradition just sketched is questionable. However, since he grew up in Salzburg, a Baroque gem of a city, which had just decided that its primury form of economic modernization should be tourism-as opposed to industry-based upon the esoteric appeal of its Baroque treasures, it would have been impossible for him to be entirely oblivious to this tradition. Hanisch and Fleischer's study of Salzburg in Trakl's lifetime emphasizes just how much Trakl seems to have been aware of' those elements in his environment. 37 Little wonder that he became so close to Adolf Loos as he reacted against it. Thus the figure of the head bowed ever more deeply with each year, which seems to have inspired Max von Esterle's design for Trakl's bookplate, seems also to be part of a confrontation with tradition, a debunking of the myth of the "depth" of depression. This reading is certainly compatible with what we know of Trakl's rejection of German and Austrian traditions and his ardent Slavophile leanings. The "turnings" which punctuate "In cin altcs Stammbuch" arc wholly and entirely associ-

242

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

ated with "bending," "bowing," and pain. In short they constitute a sort of Baroque arabesque, however one which suggest anything but glory and elegance. To be sure, there is also something personal about defeat at the hands of melancholy, but we should not forget what he wrote to Ficker about belonging all too much to a godless and cursed century. There is more in Trakl's poetry to indicate that the epiphanies of hopelessness that it contains are deliberately a confrontation with Habsburg tradition, however he may have understood it. That tradition from Rudolf on was essentially theatrical: Thus the Renaissance triomfi or ceremonial processions combining music and dance could still be performed in the nineteenth century as on the occasion of the Silver Anniversary of Franz Joseph's accession to the throne in 1873, when the salon painter Hans Makart produced and directed a live version of his monumental historicist painting. As we look back to the great achievements in fin de siecle Vienna, we tend to forget that this is what the "official" culture was all about. It was eminently a culture of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which aimed at a monumental unity of music, poetry, dance, and drama to kindle public spirit and enthusiasm for the Catholic Habsburg world order. It always preferred pictures, emblems, and symbols of all sorts to words. Thus an immanent critique of that order had to be at least in part a critique of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Trakl's Salzburg was-and thanks to Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal still is-the locus of the most serious effort to breathe this culture, which for Kraus and Laos represented nothing more than the unity of entertainment and propaganda for religious and political ideologies that were an affront to genuinely humanistic values. 38 It was the ultimate expression of the "inverted world " against which Kraus's satire and polemic was directed. The task that Kraus, Laos & Co. set for themselves was to set that world on its feet again. It was also Trakl's task as well, for his poetry was nothing less than an effort to produce a critical unity of the arts which rejected narcissistic enthusiasm, monumentality, and the cliche in all their forms. To see his procedure let us look at his "Gesang einer gefangenen Amsel" Song ofa Captive Blackbird Dark respiring in green boughs. Blue flowerlets hover around the countenance of the solitary creature, its golden step dying away under the olive tree. Fluttering upwards on drunken wing the night.

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

243

So lightly bleeds meekness, Dew, that slowly drops from the blossoming thorn. Shining arms' mercy embraces a breaking heart. Gesang einer Gefangenen Amsel Dunkler Odem im griinen Gezweig. Blaue Bltimchen umschweben das Antlitz Des Einsamen, den goldnen Schritt Ersterbend unter dem Olbaum. Aufflattert mit trunknem Fltigel die Nacht. So Ieise blutet Demut, Tau, der Iangsam tropft vom bltihenden Dom. Strahlender Arme Erbarmen Umfangt ein brechendes Herz. 39

There is hardly a more elegant example of the synthesis of the arts in Trakl's poetry than this little masterpiece. The alliterations "griinen Gezweig" and "blaue Bltimchen" create images and meaningful sounds simultaneously. Throughout the poem Trakl paints vivid pictures in his use of color and light words, whose sounds are no less evocative: "dunkler, grtin, blau, goldnen, Nacht, strahlend" are linked to euphonious alliterations, as we have seen, as well as assonances, "blutet Demut," and the incomparable "Strahlender Arme Erbarmen," into a dramatic unity. Moreover, the denouement in the phrase "ein brechendes Herz" bursts the idyllic bubble and has the force of creating an uncanny experience in the readers, as they come to realize the full sadness in the allegory. The poem moves out of itself to the reader but in exactly the opposite of the way that, say, intended in his monumental music drama. Trakl's poem mocks the contrived theatricality of the Habsburg religious pageants as well as Wagner's monumentality, and its small scale corresponds to its private character. In this the parallel, for example, the miniature sculptures of his Innsbruck acquaintance Ottmar Zeiller who sculpted monumental figures such as Bismarck or the painter Albin Egger-Lienz in works scarcely larger than your thumb 40 in the spirit of Nietzsche's critique of Wagner (Der Fall Wagner). Trakl's poem is a Gesamtkunstwerk writ small. It is also something very private. Here it is important to mention the hotly debated question of whether Trakl's poems can be read in public. The poet was wholly opposed to having them read by professional actors, not least because he wanted them read softly in a manner that was totally for-

nrII II;

244

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

eign to the actors of his day. If this is more than a whim on his part, it is because the poems, unlike Habsburg triumphs or Wagnerian operas, have the character of meditations rather than performances. It is almost as if Trakl is taking the place of the Roman slave whose essential role it was to whisper into the triumphant general's ear, "remember you are but a mortal," however the irony and pain in which his "memento mori" was embedded served to deflate the meaning of the whole enterprise. Furthermore, Trakl's Gesamtkunstwerk, true to the spirit of Loos, dispenses with all ornamentation; it entails a reduction of meaning to a mode of construction with the medium: language itself. The image thus ceases to function as embellishment but becomes part of the poem's very syntax (could one perhaps allude to the later Wittgenstein here and speak of poetic grammar here?). Finally, far from being a motor for generating enthusiasm, either for the Catholic House of Habsburg or for Tristan and Isolde's romance, the poem is an instrument of demystification and disillusionment. As much as Tristan, and with considerably less blood, sweat, and tears, it arouses the fantasy, not to transport it to realms of ecstasy but to show how it is essential to beautiful pictures, visions, and idylls that they are illusions. In the end it aims at bringing us back to the real world of ugliness in much the same way that Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray reminds us that the pretty face is but a fac;ade (given Trakl's predilection for the word Antlitz, his Nietzschean concern with masks, as well as Wilde's great popularity in Kraus's Vienna, can this be accidental?). The basic idea is hardly new, for it is common property to thinkers as different as Karl Marx and Feodor Dostoevsky; what is new and exciting in Trakl is the wholly immanent mode of realizing cultural critique in lyric poetry. This immanent dimension of his "critique of language" if I may call it that, makes the parallel with Wittgenstein not only interesting but important. Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig von Ficker that his silence, which corresponded to the important part of the Tractatus, was identical with all that he had not written (F, 23). Silence is no less an imegral element in Trakl's poetry, as Martin Heidegger, for example, has seen. 41 Ludwig von Ficker even went so far as to assert that Trakl was the most silent poet ever to write in the German language, not even excepting Holderlin. 42 Trakl's silence is no more identical with Wittgenstein's at the end of the Tractatus than the later Heidegger's is. For Tr~kl silence is more deeply pessimistic than anything in either Witigenstein or Heidegger. But that is not to say that they

"Ethik und Asthetik Sind Eins"

have nothing to do with one another. Writing to the same Ludwig von Ficker, Trakl could lament that he was nothing less than a mirror image of a godless, cursed century. His silence is tied to the Dostoevskian theme that it is impossible to put the corruption in the world into words without trivializing it. That wholly Calvinist sentiment is not far removed from Wittgenstein's deeply pessimistic Tolstoyan Christianity with its concomitant commitment to ethical and aesthetic purism. The phrase "Ethik und Asthetik sind Eins," inasmuch as it captures something common to Wittgenstein and Trakl, has a deeply religious sense. This is not to say that it is a religious assertion; remember here Wittgenstein's claim much later that he was not a religious man but that he could not help looking at problems from a religious point of view. This parallel to Trakl also presents a way of capturing the religious moment in Trakl's poetry, i.e., as a function of a religious perspective on the problems of life which moved him to compose his poems in the first place. Sectarian commitments are as foreign to him as they are to Wittgenstein. Be that as it may, in the poems of Georg Trakl there is a commitment to the principle that ethics and aesthetics are one, as deeply as in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Trakl's poetic practice entails constructing a world which must also become the reader's world if the poem is to be read at all. However, in the course of reading it this world comes to take on a character different from the one that seemed to present itself at the outset. The poems are constructed, as one sensitive critic has suggested, in the way that one creates a rebus: the allimportant connection between the puzzling images must be left to the reader. In the course of grappling with the unspoken, i.e., the syntactic element of the poem, the distance between self and world disappears. The render and the poem, the self and the world become inextricably bound to one another in a way that defies articulation. Thus reading a Trakl poem, like reading Wittgenstein's philosophizing, becomes essentially a matter of soliloquizing. Far from being a kind of free association, this is a tightly disciplined mode of self-orientation with the text as guide. If this argument is accurate, Trakl's poetry, precisely because it is constructed upon the principle that ethics and aesthetics are one, can teach us in the profound silence that Wittgenstein so admired and which the modem world tends to ignore. Feeling in moments of death-like being: All human beings arc worthy of love. Awakening

li,:

245

1!

ri, 11,,,

I

I l11'

1'1' i

246

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited You feel the bitterness of the world. In it is all your Unforgiven guilt; your poem an imperfect atonement. Gefiihl in den Augenblicken totenahnlichen Seins : Aile Menschen sind der Liebe wert. Erwachend fiihlst du die Bitternis der Welt. Darin ist aile deine ungelOste Schuld; dein Gedicht eine unvollkommene Siihne.

Notes

GeorgTrakl

Introduction I.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Georg Trakl's ex libris, Max von Esterle (Courtesy of the Brenner Archives, lnnsbruck)

13.

14. 15.

For those who might question including the Prague Jew, Kafka, as an Austrian here it can be replied that he counts as an Austrian because he grew to maturity in the Habsburg monarchy and wrote German in what was a reasonably well-defined "Austrian" German-Jewish milieu in Prague. Personal communication from Prof. Gerald Stieg. In what follows I am also indebted to Raoul Kneucker, Friedrich Heller, Emil Brix, Albert Danielsson, Steven Beller, Herberth Czermak, Karl Acham, Kenneth Barkin and the late Herbert Hofmeister and Friedrich Lehne for information, stimulation, comments, and criticism with respect to the topics discussed below. A. Janik and S.Toulmin, Wittgenstein 's Vzenna (2nd ed. rev.; Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996), 3-66. On Kraus see Paul Schick, Karl Kraus (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961 ), cf. Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). See David Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). See Fredrick Morton,A Nervous Splendor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Bernd Urban, "Arthur Schnitzler und Sigmund Freud: aus den Anfangen des 'Doppelgangers,"' Gennanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift (1974), 193-223. Carl Schorske, Fin de Siecle Vienna (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), xxvii. Janik and Toulmin, op. cit., 50. John Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vzenna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 125-6 Schorske, op. cit.,24-115 William Johnston, The Austrian Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 6. For a typical example see the report of the research projectAmbivalenz des Fin de Siecle: Wien-Zagreb, eds. D. Barbaric and M. Benedikt (Vienna: research report, Ministry of Science, Research, and Art, 1995). Johnston. op. cit., 223. Ibid., 221-2, cf. Barbara Ehrenreich and Barbara English, For Her Own Good: One Hundred Fifty Years ofAdvice to Women (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 78f. The latter rightly point out that it was largely under the .influence of "German" trained doctors that American medicine "professionalized" itself among other things by rejecting (often tried and true) medical practices for the sake of "scientific" theories; however the authors do not seem to be aware that it was Vienna more than Berlin or Heidelberg that accounted for American medical excellence and stamped the elitist character of American medicine decisively.

248 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Ilse Barea, Vienna: Legend and Reality (London: Pimlico; 1992, [orig. 1966]), 92. I have benefitted greatly from Barea's study which is arguably the most brilliant single volume on Vienna's history. It is her especial merit to have eloquently and insightfully elucidated the ambiguities and paradoxes which surround nearly all Viennese cultural achievements. On popular theater see Viennese Popular Theaeter, eds. W.E. Yates and John R. P. McKenzie (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1985). On Nestroy see F. H. Mautner, Nestroy (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1974). On the counter-reformation see, R.J.W. Evans, The Making of The Habsburg Monarchy, I550-I700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), cfBarea. op. cit., 46. Robert A. Kann, A Study of Austrian Intellectual History (New York: Praeger, 1960), 84-94. See Allan Janik, 'The Crises of Language", How Not to Interpret a Culture (Bergen University, Department of Philosophy Stencil series# 73, 1986) 95-9. So it is hardly accidental that a theory according to which values were a mere facade, i.e. something imposed from without upon an individual's ego, a super-ego, should arise in a Viennese context. For a similar description of Franz Grillparzer see Barea, op. cit., 125-32. Georg Trakl, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, eds. W. Killy and H. Szklenar (2 vols.; Salzburg: Otto Miiller, 1969), I. 465. Barea, op. cit., 89-110. Ibid., 297-301. Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the relation between ceativity and leadership see Albert Danielsson, "On Creativity and Development", Kreatives Milieu: Wien um 1900, eds. E. Brix and A. Janik (Wien: Verlag fiir Geschichte und Politik, 1993), 15-25, cf. Allan Janik "Culture and Society: Creativity and the Creative Milieu" Europa im Zeitalter Mozarts, eds. W. Pass and M. Csaky (Vienna: Bohlau, 1995). It is Albert Danielsson's merit to have shown that, while creativity as the invention of a new metaphor must be essentially imponderable, the creative milieu as the locus of the impact of innovation is decidedly a subject of investigation. Further, his emphasis upon the creative role of leadership in legitimating innovation is of great value for cultural studies. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Bantam, 1961), 13.

Chapter 1 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

Glenn Gould, "Arnold Schoenberg-A Perspective," The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York: Vintage, 1990), 108. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950). Carl E.Schorske, op. cit., xxvii. On cultural criticism as a topos in Austrian cultural history see William Johnston, "Cultural Criticism as a Neglected Topic in Austrian Studies," Austrian Philosophy, ed. J.C. Nyfri (Munich: Philosophia, 1981), 31-42. Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination, I860-1920, trans. M. Steinberg, op. cit., 55 et passim. Schorske, op. cit., 9. On Grillparzer see Ilsa Barea, op. cit, 35. Spren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, trans. W. Lowrie (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1962), 43. Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1911 ), vi. On Schoenberg's relationship to Kraus at the time of the dedication see Kurt Krolop,

Notes

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

249

"Asthetische Kritik als Kritik der Asthetik," Karl Kraus: Asthetik und Kritik, eds. S. Kaszynski & S. P. Scheichl (Munich: Edition Texte & Kritik, 1981 ), 35ff. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Lac. cit. Arnold Schoenberg, "Rundfrage tiber Karl Kraus;' Der Brenner III (1913), 843. For the best answer to this question to date see Edward Timms, op. cit. Karl Kraus, "Grimassen tiber Kultur und Biihne," Die Fackel (1909), Nr. 270-1, 8. For a full analysis of what this phrase meant to Kraus see Manfred Schneider, Die Angst und dos Paradies des Norglers (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977), 187f. On Loos see Ludwig Munz & Gustav Kiinstler, Adolf Laos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1966). Kraus, Schiften, ed. C. Wagenknecht (12 Vols.; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987) 8, 341. Kraus, "In dieser groBen Zeit," Die Fackel (1914) Nr. 404, 1 Adolf Loos, "Ornament und Verbrechen," Siimtliche Schriften, (Vienna: Herold, 1962), I, 277. For an account of Weininger's main ideas see the essay "Weininger's Critique oft he Culture of Narcissism." Weininger, Uberdie letzten Dinge, 119. See Wittgenstein 's Vienna, 67-120 et passim. Leon Botstein, "Egon Schiele and Arnold Schoenberg: The Cultural Politi~·s ol Aesthetic Innovation in Vienna,1890-1918," Egan Schiele: Art, St•xtmlitv, rtntl Viennese Modernism, ed. P. Werkner (Palo Alto: Society for the Pro111otio11 ol Science and Scholarship, 1994). I have benefitted greatly from innumerable conversations with Wnltl'r Mrthln~t~l about Trakl's art and its place in Austrian culture. He points out thnl Tmkl wn~ In continual contact, direct and indirect, with such figures as Krnus, Loos, w~·lwm, Kokoschka etc. Hermann Bahr, "Die Uberwindung des Naturalismus," in Dir Wil'IU'r Mt~~lrmr, rd. G. Wunberg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 202. The phrase was coined by the American art historian James Shcdcl. Brach, "Notizen zu einer systematischen Asthetik" cited by Walt.cr Mcthln~l, '"I ll~r Brenner' -Beispiel eines Durchbruchs zur Modcrnc," Mittt•ilt./1/Rt'll Clll.l' tlr111 Brenner-Archiv, II (1983), 11-2. Karl Kraus, "Heine und die Folgen" reprinted from Die Fackel,Apl'il 1910 in KK, Heine und die Folgen: Schriften zur Literatur (Stuttgart: Reel am, 1986), .M- 71. Schorske, op. cit., 9. Kraus, op. cit.,36. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, trans. L. Furtmiiller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 133. For a useful overview of this rich theme see Arthur May, Vienna in the Age of Fra11z Josef(Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 68-76; cf. Barca, passim. Cited by Henry Schnitzler, "Gay Vienna-Myth and Reality," Journal of the /listory of Ideas, XV, no.1 (January, 1954), 112. For a passionate statement of the view taken here see Broch, op. cit., 64-5. William Johnston, The Austrian Mind, 130. Schoenberg, Harmonielehre, iii. Henry Pleasants, introductory essay to Eduard Hanslick, Music Criticisms /8461899 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), 17. On Hanslick sec Janik and Toulmin, op. cit., I 03-108. Barca, op. cit., 127-8. Hanslick, Tlte Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (lndinnapolis: Bohhs-M!.!rrill, 1957), 51.

250 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Schoenberg, "How One Becomes Lonely," Style and Idea, 49. Gould, op. cit., 110. Schorske, op. cit., 363 et passim. The sort of interpretation that Schorske suggests is all but ruled out by the inscription Schoenberg wrote in Kraus's copy of the Harmonielehre. See above 9. Loc. cit., 111-118. Schoenberg, op. cit, "Constructed Music," Style and Idea, 107. There is hardly a single idea that is more often repreated in Schoenberg's writings on musical culture. Schoenberg cited in Josef Rufer, The Works of Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Free Press, 1963), 142. Schoenberg, "Hauer's Theories," Style and Idea, 210. Schoenberg, "New Music," Style and Idea, 137. Schoenberg "Gustav Mahler: In Memoriam," Style and Idea, 447. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower (New York: Bantam, 1967), 346. This is a judgment that Glenn Gould would qualifiy considerably. See his brilliant and balanced "An Argument for Richard Strauss," op. cit., 84-92. On the collaboration between Strauss, Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt in forming an Austrian national festival see Michael Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890-1938 (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 1990). For the violent reaction of Kraus and other critical modernists see Gerald Stieg, "Ferdinand Ebners Kulturkritik. Am Beispiel der Salzburger Festspiele" Gegen den Traum von Geist, eds.ChristopfKonig et al ("Brenner Studien" Vol. V; Salzburg: Otto Miiller, 1985), 237-45. Tuchman, op. cit., 390. Schoenberg, "On Revient Toujours," Style and Idea, 109. Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve Tones," Style and Idea, 226. Schoenberg's concluding remark to the first chapter of the Harmoniehelre. ".. .ich ware stolz, wenn ich, ein bekanntes Wort variierend, sagen diirfte: 'Ich babe den Kompositionsschiilern eine schlechte Asthetik genommen, ihnen dafiir aber eine gute Handwerkslehre gegeben' could well have been written by Wittgenstein, or Laos. Schoenberg's very title for this ehapter is highly significant "Theorie oder Darstellungssystem." It also attests to a deep intellectual affinity with Wittgenstein. Schoenberg, "New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea," Style and Idea, 114. Cited in Rufer, op. cit., 143. See Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, Part II, Chapters 5-8. Schoenberg, "Criteria for the Evaluation of Music," Style and Idea, 124. Schoenberg, "Criteria for the Evaluation of Music," Style and Idea, 129-30. Loc. cit.

Notes

2.

3.

4.

Chapter 2 1.

On "paradigm shifts" see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1970), especially chaps. 2-5, 21-53. For some of the problems surrounding the concept of paradigm, see Martin Brody and Allan Janik, "Paradigms, Politics and Persuasion: Sociological Aspects of Musical Controversy" in Allan Janik, Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol.114; Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 1989), 227-29. I have used the term here principally for want of a better one and in view of its widespread employment in discussing the development of disciplines across radical conceptual changes. Ludwik Fleck's Entstehung und ,Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980) pre.sents an account of such changes in terms of the development of alternative "thought

5.

6.

251

styles," which emphasizes precisely the sort of difficulties to which I have here drawn attention. Fleck further emphasizes how the most difficult problems of understanding within science arise at the point where distinct disciplines study the same phenomenon such that their very closeness prevents rather than facilitates understanding (144-145). The transitions referred to with respect to Weininger include the Mendel-Morgan concept of the gene, the Freudian concept of psychodynamics, and the behavioral revolution in psychology, which brought in its wake the notion that psychology must somehow be a theoretical (as opposed to henneneutic ). methodologically monistic, "hard science" among others. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter: eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Vienna: Braumiiller, 1903). I cite Weininger parenthetically in the text according to the reprint (Miinchen: Matthes & Seitz; 1980), which is an exact replica of the first edition (as other editions, all disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, arc not). All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. This edition is not definitive but it is the edition most likely to come into the hands of a prospective render tmlny. On the textual problems with Geschlecht und Charakter see Waltraud .llirsd1, "211. unveranderte Auflage": Bemerkungen zur Textgeschichte von Otto Weinilljtl'IN Geschlecht und Charakter, Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner Arr:hiv, I J ( I'JlJ4), 'ill 73. I shall refer to Weininger's book parenthetically in the body oft he tcxl. Sh1n• I am concerned with Weininger and not with the Wirkungsgeschichtt• or his lt·~t. I only treat of Geschlecht und Charakter here. It is the only work prt•pnrrd lm publication by Weininger himself. One well-meaning study that has fully missed Weininger's intentions in writin~tl~ Jacques LeRider's Le cas Otto Weininger: Racincs dt• l'anti·,\'t'llliti.wnr rt l'antifeminisme, ("Perspectives Critiques"; Paris: Presses lJnivcrsilntit"l'S dt•l,.mm·r. 1982). For a critique of LeRider, see my "Writing about Weininger" /~'.1·.wv.1 "" Wittgenstein and Weininger, ("Studien zur osterreichischen Philosophil'" vol. I X, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985), 96-115. When I speak of Weininger's "intt•ntions,"l am not concerned with the subjective motivation that led him to write hut of tht• intentions that are built into his book, that is, as shown by the way he slrttcturrs his argument by appealing to certain grounds and principles of reasoning, nil of which are relatively easy to reconstruct from the extensive notes at the end of his hook. Tore Nordenstam has made the crucial distinction between the intent ion of' the urtlst and the intentions built into the work of art upon which I model my own uppronch to Weininger. See his "Intention in Art," Wittgenstein: Aesthetics wul'lhiiW't'llclt•ll· tal Philosophy, cf. K. S. Johannessen and Tore Nordenstam (Vienna: I Hilder· Pichler-Tempsky, 1981), 127-135. For Wittgenstein's view of Weininger, see my "Wittgenstein and Weininger" and "Philosophical Sources of Wittgenstein's Ethics" in Essays on Wittgenstein cllltl Weininger, 64-95. Although distancing himself from what he takes to be Weininger's excess with respect to women and Jews, Popper is reported to have a most favmuhle view of Weininger. At least this is what he has said to Reinhard Merkel (personul communication from Dr. Merkel). It is clear why this should be so if we merely glunce at Weininger's notes and references where he clearly indicates who supports and who rejects the view that he maintains in good Popperian fashion. Perhaps Weininger wns in fact the first Popperian! When he discusses "psychologism," for example, he makes copious references to both sides of the debate (522). Carl E. Schorske, op. cit. For a critique of Schorske, sec my "Schorskc's Vienna," European Journal of Sociology XXII ( 1981 ), 354-64. Liberal here must be understood in the European sense, that is, "Munchesler Liberal," rather than in the American sense. I .ibernlism is the view thatt.he individual should be free to achieve whatever goals his or her talents and energy allow. II nlso

252

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. I4. 15.

I6.

I7.

18.

Notes

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited embraces a free market attitude to economic life, an emphasis on individualism and a critical attitude to all forms of authoritarianism, especially political and religious. This includes a very critical view of democracy. Steven Beller was the first to call attention to Weininger's liberalism. I am deeply indebted to him for many stimulating conversations on the topics discussed in this essay. Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern (Giitersloh: Bertelsmann, 1962), 94-5. Albert Fuchs, Geistige Stromungen in Osterreich I867-I9I8 (Vienna: Locker, 1984), 144. Weininger's reference to Binet is oblique, that is, he does not mention him explicitly. Such oblique references help us to determine what Weininger expected his readers to know. On Binet see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasurement of Man (New York: Norton, !98I), I46-54. On Lombroso, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogony and Phylogeny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 120-25. On Hirschfeld see his programmatic statement in the first number of his Jahrbuch for sexuelle Zwischenstufen mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung der Homosexualitiit I (I899). Frank Field, The Last Days of Mankind: Karl Kraus and His Vienna (London: Macmillan, 1967), 56. On the theory of plasms, see my "How Not to Write Austrian Intellectual History," in Structure and Gestalt, ed. Barry Smith (Amsterdam: Benjarnins, I98I ), 263-92. Edward A. Minchin, "Protozoa," Encycloprdia Britannica, II th. ed. (London, I9II ), XXII, 486. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Dr. Weininger's Sex and Character;' The Critic XLVIII (I906),416. Cesare Lombroso, The Female Offender, (New York: Appleton,l899). I have used the French translation, Cesare Lombroso and Guiellmo Ferrero,Lafemme criminelle et Ia prostitute, trans. L. Meille (Paris: Alcan, I896) because the English edition was expurgated of all references to sexual acts. The same is the case with the English edition of Sex and Character. On the significance of the bell-shaped curve for nineteenth-century science and intellectual life generally, see Georges Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, I966), I96 et passim. Various estimates of Lombroso can be found in F. Ward Denys, "Lombroso's Theory of Crime," a paper read before the "Clericus" in New York, I3 Apri!I896, and published privately, Nyack on Hudson, I896; M. Bourault, "Des recents critiques du systeme de Lombroso," discours prononce a1'overature de Ia conference des avocats le 2 decembre I895; the comments concerning Lombroso in Hans Gross, Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners and Students, trans. H. M. Kallen (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1918) are probably a fair estimate of Lombroso's status in I897 when the book was written. They are interesting for two reasons: Gross was a leading Austrian jurist, who considered that Lombroso's "criminal anthropology" was no longer a viable position; yet it is clear from his presentation that the issues Lombroso raised were very much at the center of debate in contemporary jurisprudence. More recent evaluations of the Lombrosan program the motivations of its proponents, and its scientific status can be found in Robert Nye, "Heredity or Milieu: The Foundations of Modem Criminological Theory," Isis 67 (I976) 335-55 and Gould op. cit. See Friedrich Jodi's "Bericht" on Weininger's dissertation in Otto Weininger, Eros und Psyche: Studien und Briefe I899-I902, ed. Hannelore Rodlauer (Vienna: Verlag der tisterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, I990), 2I2. The texts and the meticu~ous commentaries in this volume make it a valuable addition to the literature on Weininger.

I9.

20.

2I.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

253

See Guy Oakes, Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, I988), 30-31. The idea that Weininger "stole" the notion of bisexuality from Fliess is absurd, even if his heirs lost a plagiarism suit to him. For the best account of this truly bizarre affair, see Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books 1979), 222-32. Friedrich Nietzsche, ZurGeneologie der Moral, "Was bedeutet asketische Ideale?" Section I 0 (identical in all editions). Weininger's relationship to Nietzsche is complex and requires lengthy study. He was prepared to accept Nietzsche's critique of conventional morality but not his affirmation of sensuality. For that reason he praises the Wagner of Parsifal as rejecting sensuality and thus overcoming "Jewishness" in himself (408-9). For the same reason, he rejects Schnitzler and Wedekind(!), Weininger Eros und Psyche, I24, that is, because they fail to transcend sensuality. Nevertheless Weininger sees, as Carl Schorske does not, that Nietzsche is not to be identified with the coffeehouse intellectuals who speak in Nietzsche's name (44I). I have discussed the problems of identifying Nietzsche with the "Nietzscheanism" of the Secession in "Ebner Contra Wagner" below. Georg Gimpl has shown that Weininger's discussion of the question "what is ugly?" involves taking exactly the position of his mentor, Friedrich Jodi, against Klimt and the Secession. Gimpl, Vernetzungen: Friedrich Jodi und der Kampf um die Aujkliirung, vol. 2 (Oulu, Finland, Veroffentlichungen des historischen lnstituts der Universitiit Oulu, I990), I85. On Habermas, see Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jiirgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,I978); cf. Lawrence Kohl berg "The Claim to Moral Adequacy of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment," Journal of Philosophy 70 (I973), 630-46. It is thus highly distorting to term Weininger an "anti-Freud" as LeRider does. See his "Weininger als Anti Freud" appended to the text of Joshua Sobol's Weininger's Nacht, 135-40. I have criticized the explanatory power of the concept of "self-hatred" as well as its application to Weininger in my "Viennese Culture and the Jewish Self-Hatred Hypothesis: A Critique" in Oxaal, Pollack, and Botz, Jews Anti-Semitism and Culture in Vienna (London: Routledge & Kegen Paul, 1987), 75-88. It is seldom recognized that Weininger anticipates the notion of"the social construction of reality"-and therefore in a most curious way the sort of approach to antiSemitism later taken by Jean-Paul Sartre-later developed by such sociologists as Alfred Schutz and Peter Berger. This is hardly surprising when we consider that his Greek teacher and mentor at the Piaristen Gymnasium was none other than Wilhelm Jerusalem, who first explored the notion. See John Torrance, "The Emergence of Sociology in Austria," European Journal of Sociology XVII (1976), 185-219. Steven Beller's Vienna and the Jews eloquently and learnedly explores this theme. I take it that Hans Tietze and Stefan Zweig's positive attitudes to Weininger are to be accounted for on the basis of their recognition that he was very much part of Vienna's liberal Jewish culture. Tietze, Die Juden Wiens (Vienna: Atleier, 1987), 268ff; Stefan Zweig, "Vorbeigehen an einem unaffiilligen Menschen-Otto Weininger" in Weininger's Nacht (Vienna: Paulus Manker, 1988). Ibid., 29. Schorske, op. cit., 263; cf. n. 20. Cf. "Ebner Contra Wagner" in this collection. This is what I infer From Swoboda's letter to Weininger of25.X.l902 (in Rodlauer). On Kraus and Strindberg as admirers ofWeininger, see Erich Unglaub, "Strindberg, Weininger und Karl Kraus," Recherches Germaniques XVIII ( 1988), 121-50. To appreciate the common concerns of Strindberg and Weininger, one must read not only Strindberg's letters to Artur Clcrbcr hut also his preface to 'Miss Julie where he

254

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited treats the complexity of the concept of character. Seen. 70. See Moritz Rappaport's preface to the second edition of Otto Weininger, Uber die letzten Dinge (Vienna: Braumiiller, 1907), v-xiii. A pamphlet (presumably promotional) of some forty seven pages, containing more than two dozen reviews of Geschlecht und Charakter, was published under that name by Braumiiller in 1905 (the cover of the publication is simply a reprint of the cover of the fourth printing of the book: the publication, which I found in the Nachlaj3 of the philosopher Ferdinand Ebner in Innsbruck's Brenner Archives, contains no publication data at all). The materials contained within give us what is probably a representative sampling of the earliest reactions to Weininger. It is possible that the publisher slanted the perspective on Weininger positively, but having checked about eighteen contemporary American psychological journals containing reviews of the work in the Wellesley College Library myself, I am convinced that there is not much distortion in Braumiiller's selections. I shall refer to it simply as "Braumiiller." Cf. Marie Hertzfeld "Die meist gelesenen Biicher;• Wiener Zeitung, June 15th 1891 in Gotthart Wunberg, Dasjunge Wien (2 vols.; Stuttgart: M;!X Niemayer, 1976), II, 227. Allgemeine Wiener Medizinische Zeitung no. 8 (1904), Braumiiller, 33-34. On Weininger as a Tolstoy an advocate of chastity ibid., 38, 43. Westen und Daheim, 3 August 1903, Braumiiller, 41. Ferdinand Probst; Der Fall Otto Weininger: eine psychiatrische Studie (Wiesbaden: Bergmann. 1904), 39. Ibid., 3. lac. cit. For the best statement of this view of the evaluation of scientfic research, which is held by philosophers as different as Quine, Toulmin, Kuhn, and Feyerabend (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) see Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of Research Programs," Criticism and the Growth ofKnowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91196.

Notes

4.

5.

2.

3.

Such pathos seems to be implied in Jacques LeRider's way of referring to this passage, i.e., placing emphasis upon a phrase unemphasized in the original without noting that the emphasis is his not Weininger's, in his chapter on Weininger's antiSemitism, Le cas Otto Weininger, 197. For the discussion of the Third Empire see Keiser og Galilceer, in Henrik Ibsen, Samlede verker (2 vols.; Oslo: Norsk Gyldendal, 1993) I, 480 et passim. I refer to this edition as SV parenthetically with volume and page number. The locus classicus for the discussion of the "dritte Reich" by Ibsen is Brian Johnston's To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Drama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). For example, "Der jiidische Glaube ist seiner urspriinglichen Einrichtung nach ein InbegriffbloB statuarischer Gesetze, auf welchem eine Staatsverfassung gegriindet war.'· .das Letztere ist gar keine Religion," Immanuel Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloj3en Vernunft, Werke (Akademie Textausgabe, 11 vols.; Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902-42) VI, 125. Steven Beller argues nevertheless that Heinrich Jaques "was right to claim the support of Kant, Schopenhauer and F;ichte [for assimilation], despite their anti-Semitism," op. cit., 138-9. See for example Schlenther's introduction to Klein Eyolfin Henrik lbsens Siimtliche

Werke, eds. Georg Brandes, Julius Elias, Paul Schlenther (10 vols.; Berlin: S. Fischer, 1893-8) 9, xviii. One might be inclined to object that Weininger should have known better writing three years after the publication of Freud's Interpretation ofDreams. However, that view ignores the fact that Weininger alone outside of Freud's circle of disciples recognized that Freud's work represented a watershed in the development of our understanding of the human mind. See Geschlecht und Charakter, 358 et passim. Weininger in fact recognized Freud but not in a manner that we can easily appreciate after a century of Freudianism. Alasdair Macintyre, The Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958),

6. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

Chapter 3 1.

255

11. 12.

13.

Otto Weininger, Uber die letzten Dinge, 1-47. A more literal translation would be On the Four Last Things, the four being: death, judgment, heaven and hell or On Death and the Hereafter as we have translated it above. Since the title was chosen by Moritz Rappaport to reflect the state ofWeininger's thought after his suicide, the title we have chosen would seem more appropriate. I cite Weininger's Ibsen essay parenthetically in the text. Cf. my Kann Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1995, "Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems," Austrian History Yearbook 28 (1997). Weininger to Artur Gerber 26.8.02. Weininger's letters to Gerber are published as an appendix to the Matthes und Seitz edition of Geschlecht und Charakter, 637. Lac. cit. In jiingster Zeit ist zu jener friiheren gedankenlosen Unterwiirfigkeit ein ncucs Element hinzugetreten. Die leichtfiiBigen Tanzbeine der Zarathustra-Ideale, die IUssige Grazie des siiddeutschen Walzers, studentischer Stumpfsinnsang und kunstgewerblichen Lehnstuhlschwiirmerei muBten zusanunenkommen, urn cs nlll'lll deutschen, nordischen Ernste gegeniiber hervorzubringen und zu behauptcn. kh meine die Liige von dem "stilizierten Leben" der groBen Menschen, welchen jcnc Menschen zu Artistendegradiert.... One might be inclined to take the reference to "German-Scandinavian superiority" to be a reference to "Aryan superiority" and thus covertly anti-Semitic. I lowever, as Steven Beller points out in Menna and the Jews it was typical of liheral assimilated Jews in Vienna in 1900 that they were intellectually oriented towards Germany and "Schiller Culture" as well as towards Kantian ethics, 152-5 et passim. On this view, far from being a self-hating rejection of his own Jewry, Weininger's north German and Kantian orientation is an affirmation of it. Seen. 3. Ibsen appears to have had a certain familiarity with Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy, which was taught at the University of Oslo in his day. Weininger's reference to said journalist's "unglaublich flache Schonrednerei tiber die Literaturstromungen des 19. Jahrhunderts" can only be seen as an allusion to the author of Hovedstromninger i det nittende arhundredes literatur (Main Currents of 19th Century Literature, 1872-90). This point was not lost on Karl Kraus. Sec Die Fackel, 149 (Dec. 12, 1904), 22-3. Weininger does not mention Bernard Shaw in this context but Shaw's treatment of Ibsen in his Quintessence of lbsenism would seem to fit this description. Other likely candidates would be the Viennese aesthetician Emil Reich, author of an essay "Henrik Ibsen und das Recht der Frau" and Weininger's hete noire, the Swedish feminist, Ellen Key, for whom feminine love was the surest way to happiness for the individual and the race. An excerpt from Reich's essay is reprinted in Gotthnrt Wunbcrg. Die Wiener Moderne: Litl'mtur; Kunst tmd Musik zwischen 1800 tmd 1910 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 345-7. On Key sec Marie llcrzfcld, "lhsl'nund seine Landslcutc," Zeit 14, ( 19J. 9H) reprinted in Ootthnrt Wunhcrg, I Jasjtlll,l{t'

me

"1 256

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Wien, II, 831. Marie Herzfeld was particularly important for the reception of Scandinavian literature in fin de siecle Vienna. In Das junge Wien Wunberg reprints her influential essay, "Die skandina·•ische Literatur und ihre Tendenzen," which was originally a lecture before the "Allgemeinen Frauenverein" and later published in the Wiener Rundschau (1897) 736-51. 14. This phenomenological distinction forms the conceptual framework in which Weininger presents both Peer Gynt and its author. It would seem to be a development of Immanuel Kant's distinction between those who act in accordance with duty but principally on the basis of self-love or self-interest and those who act for the sake of duty. See Kant, Religion, 31-2. 15. Norwegians to this day somehow like to see themselves as satirized by Ibsen in Peer Gynt. Significantly this aspect of the play is precisely what Georg Brandes stressed in his introduction to the play in the revised edition of the authorized translation in 1902. Most of the commentators of the day followed Brandes' lead in reading the play that way. 16. Arne Garborg ( 1854-1921) was well-known in Norway and Vienna for his meditative religious novels. Garborg was a favorite author of Marie Herzfeld. 17. This judgment, which strikes today's reader as absurdly exaggerated, probably turns upon Hamsun's portrayal of jealousy as a way of projecting a way of thinking onto the person of whom one is jealous in a way that ultimately becomes selfdestructive (see below 13ff.). Stylistically Pan is distinguished for its extraordinary lyricism. Weininger would certainly have been impressed by Hamsun's central thought: " .. .it is within ourselves that the sources of joy and sorrow lie," Knut Hamsun, Pan, trans. James W. McFarlane (New York, Noonday Press, 1956), 12. 18. Subsequent scholarship has shown that Ibsen in fact meant When We Dead Awaken to be the epilogue to the four plays beginning with The Master Builder and continuing through Little Eyolf and John Gabriel Barkman and not his whole oeuvre. However, the elements of self criticism as well as the critique of aestheticism that Weininger finds in it is certainly there. Cf. Inga-Stina Ewbank, "The Last Plays," The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, ed. James McFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 126-54. 19. Irene: "Hva har du diktet siden? I marmor, menar jeg. Efter den dag jeg reiste fra deg?" Professor Rubek: "Intet har jeg diktet efter den dag. Bare giitt og puslet og modellert."- Ibsen, When We Dead Wake, trans. Peter Watts, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 247. (SV, II, 439). 20. Fritz Paul,"Peer Gynt," Kindlers Literatur Lexikon (Munich: DTV, 1974), 17, 7302. 21. Peter Watt, "Introduction," Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans. Peter Watt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 17. 22. This surely has a lot to do with Weininger's Kantianism: for Kant morality is identical with action on the basis of principles which are in accord with a universal respect for the idea of humanity, which demands that we respect humanity in ourselves as well as in others. 23. Shaw underscored the importance of precisely the constellation of Wagner and Ibsen that Weininger emphasizes inasmuch as 80 percent of his own anthology of what he took to be his most important essays, Major Critical Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) is made up of these works. 24. The importance of games in forming human knowledge had been stressed by G.H. Mead in America and their importance for aesthetics was emphasized by Weininger's Gret:,k teacher at Vienna's Piaristen gymnasium, Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was then a well-known philosopher in his own right. The Jew, Jerusalem, never acceded to a

Notes

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. Ill

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

.~

I .L

36. 37.

257

university chair because he refused baptism in Catholic Austria. Weininger seems to have been a favorite pupil of his. On Weininger and Jerusalem sec Hannelore Rodlauer, "Fragmente aus Weiningers Bildungsgcschichtc," in Otto Weininger, Eros und Psyche, ed. H. Rodlauer op. cit. I 5-6. Weininger makes this distinction in another context (33) but it is entirely appropriate here. Peer Gynt: "Jeg er ikke sa gal som I kanskje tror ... i verste fall kanjeg kalles en flynder,men slett ikke noen sa:rdeles synder." Knapperst¢peren: "Nei, deterjo nettop knuten, mann; du er ingen synder i h!ilyre forstand; ... der kreves bade kraft og alvor til en synd." -Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans. Peter Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), V, 197-8 (SV, I, 335-6). Det gyntiske selv,--det er den ha:r av !ilnsker, Iyster og begja:r,det gyntiske selv, deter det hav av innfall, fordringer og krav, kort alt som netropp mitt bryst hever, og gj!ilr at jeg, som si'tdan, lever. -Ibid., IV, 114-5 (SV, I; 313). Bin guter Mensch in seinem dunklen Drange ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuBt, J.W. Goethe, Faust, I, 328. Waltraud Hirsch and Steven Beller alone in the literature on Weininger have seen this point: W. Hirsch, "Una carraterologia immodesta: Ebraismo e cristianesimo come differenza spirituale in Otto Weininger," in Otto Weininger e Ia differenza, ed. Giovanni Sampolo (Milano: Guerini, 1995), 141.52; Steven Beller, "Otto Weininger as Liberal?" in Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, eds. Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 91-102. ... Darstellung der suchenden und kampfnden, irrenden und fehlenden, zum SchuldbewuBtsein gelangenden und nach Erlosung ringenden lndi vidualiUit.... On the relation between the human and the animal in Peer Gynt see Asbj!ilrn Aarseth Dyret i Mennesket (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1975). Aarseth's conclusions from his close study of the imagery in Peer Gynt would seem to support Weininger's view of the play: " .. .from the moment of his appearance and through the major part of the work Peer Gynt is dominated by the Beast. In the concluding scene he becomes himself as a total man, that is, without denying the bestial element," 278. Troll va:er dig selv-nok!, SV, I, 300. Ibsen, Peer Gynt, II, 69 (SV, 299). I have emended the translation according to Aarseth's suggestion, op. cit., 283. Ibid., II, 72 (SV, 302). Der "groBe Krumme" ist die ganze Kraft des empirischen lch, mit welcher es gegen das Intelligibile sich immer wieder erhebt....vordem Tode werden wir mit ihm nicht fertig. Weininger seems to have developed his concept of projection from Kant's Religion: "so sehr auch die Selbstliebe Ofters den bloBen Wunsch cines Gutes wozu man nichts thut oder thun kann in Hoffnung verwandelt, als werde sein Gegenstand, durch die bloBe Sehnsucht gelockt, von selbst kommen, in sich zu wege bringen," 11 7. Solveig ist die Virgo immaculata, die geliebt, aber nicht mehr begehrt wird, die Madonna, die Beatrice. ... nicht die lebende, leibhafte Solveig, die irgcnd ein beliebiges Ganschen sein mag; sondern es ist die Solveig in ihm, dil'se Moglichkl'it in ihm die ihm die Kraft dazu gibt...hal cr scin Leben lang vcrnchl!lssigt.

II

I

1]11

ll

I

I

1/'1

II

~

II

(1 1 r

1

II 111 I

I

I[

I

I

I

I

r1:

il I

I

:1l !

258 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited However, it is necessary to point out that to refer to Weininger's analysis of Peer Gynt as abstruse does not imply that it is implausible. His views are compatible with those of Brian W. Downs and Bruce Shapiro. Thus Downs writes, "Peer's redemption .. .is not effected by Solveign .. .it is something he works out for himself, though (admittedly) he could scarcely have worked it out but for Sol veig;' cited in Bruce G. Shapiro, Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 323. Shapiro endorses this view as implied by his Kierkegaardian analysis of the play, 206. The similarities between Shapiro's "Kierkegaardian" and Weininger's "Kantian" reading oflbsen's play are striking indeed, all the more so since Shapiro approaches Ibsen f;-om the theater and not from the history of ideas. Shapiro identifies Milton's Paradise Lost, Book II, as the source for the Boyg and well as Shakespeare's Macbeth as the source ofthe trollish concept of virtue; whereas Hamlet is parodied in the troll's motto, op. cit., 61,55-6 et passim. Ibid., IV, 132ff. Immanuel Kant, Religion, 31-2. Aber alles Verhiiltnis des Mannes zur Frau ist Enteignung, Entrechtung, soweit es erotisch ist. "Das eine sag mir noch, gehst Du mit mir, oder gehe ich mit Dir? ... Der Frage werden wir wohl in Ewigkeit nicht auf den Grund kommen." Rebekka: "Er det deg som fl')1ger meg? Eller er det meg som fl')lger deg?" Rosmer: "Det grunnar vi aldri ut til bunns."-lbsen, Rosmersholm, SV, II, 245. Krl')sus mellem Charlestowns redre, Ibsen, Peer Gynt, IV, 109. (SV, 311) Joseph Conrad, The Heart ofDarkness in Joseph Conrad's Greatest Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 215. Cf. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 106-11. For Trilling this work is "paradigmatic" with respect to the modem concern with authenticity. Das Ewig-weibliche zieht uns hinan, Goethe, Faust II, 7292-3. Plato, Republic, II, 359d f.; Symposium, 189b-193. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (Zurich: Artemis, 1946), 11. Jeg er reddjeg vardl')d lenge fl')rennjeg dl')de, Ibsen, PeerGynt, V, 220 (SV, I, 341). Irene: "Det uopprettelige ser vi fl')rst ml.r." Professor Rubek: "Nar- ?" Irene: "Nar vi dl')de vagnar." Professor Rubek: "Ja, hva ser vi sa egentlig?" Irene: "Vi ser at vi aldri har levet." -Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken, II, 278 (SV, II, 448). Weininger's relation to Wagner deserves far closer study than it has been given. There seems to be a good deal of irony in Weininger's insistence that Wagner's greatness epitomized in Parsifal consists precisely self-overcoming, i.e., in rejecting Eros for Agape, which for Weininger is tantamount to rejecting Judaism for Christianity. Der Mensch ist fiir Ibsen wie fiir Kant ein Mittelding zwischen Tier und etwas Hoherem, aus Dreck und Feuer, urn Goethe, er ist zugleich Lehm und zugleich Bildner, urn Nietzsche zu zitieren. The best introduction to Kant's ethical thought remains his Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten, Werke, IV, 385-464. Op. cit., 402-3. Ibsen, Peer Gynt, V, 168-75. Kant is emphatic in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blojJen Vernunft, Werke, VI, 34-5, that it is not our inclinations which are the radical evil in human nature but our disposition to egocentrism. Weininger seems to have followed Kant scrupu-

Notes

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 7.1.

259

lously on this point. There is no mention of our inclinations in the Ibsen essay. Plato, Republic, 521c. Kant, Religion, 51 et passim. George Schrader, "Kant and Kierkegaard on Duty and Inclination," Kierkegaard: a Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972) 324-42. Although Schrader falsely emphasizes the opposition between "inclination" and reason instead of "vanity" or "self-love" and rational duty, in Kant the article's point, namely, that, whereas Kant sees reason as a kind of policeman keeping control over our "lower self' and thus in some way as standing over against it, Kierkegaard has developed a strategy for bringing us to identify with them and thus integrating our personality despite the original opposition of our empirical and intelligible selves. This is nothing more than an application in practice of the insights Kierkegaard gleaned from Hegel's analysis of "Herr und Knecht" relationship in the Phiinomenologie des Geistes . For a brilliant analysis of how that relationship functions see George Armstrong Kelly's "Notes upon Hegel's 'Lordship and Bondage,"' in Hegel: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair Macintyre (Gorden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 189-218. However, this possibility cannot be rejected out of hand. Weininger could read Dano-Nowegian and thus had access to Kierkegaard in the original as well ns to the works of Georg Brandes, who first popularized him. Since writing the above I have read Habib Malik's excellent Receiving S¢ren Kierkegaard (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press; 1997) and have reason to believe that Weininger may have known Kierkegaard. Dr. Rodlauer (op. cit.) reports that Weininger was in close contact with Rudolf Kassner in the years 1901-2 (p. 38; 42); while Dr. Malik relates that Kassner had discover SK as early as 1899 and was reading him enthusiastically with friends in 1902 (Malik, 357ff. ). The matter cannot be established with certainty since Weininger seems to have grown disenchanted with Kassner in 1902. Rodlauer, op. cit., 42 et passim. DaB der Mensch in diesem Leben nie in volliger Wahrheit Ieben kann, daB ihn von ihr immer etwas trennt, diesen Rest von Ltige, lrrtum, Feigheit, Verstocktheit, hat Ibsen im Krummen mit angedeutet. For example Robert M. Adams following Koht's Life of Ibsen, "Ibsen on the Contrary," in Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck: A New Translation, the Writing of the Play, Criticism, ed. Dounia B. Christiani (New York: Norton, 1968), 189-99. The early Ibsen of the search for the "third Empire" seems to have been explicitly seeking an Hegelian synthesis of opposites in a higher unity; cf. Bjl')m Hemmer, "Ibsen and Historical Drama," Companion, 23f. This is Bruce Shapiro's thesis, op. cit., passim. It is worth noting that Shapiro reports that Ibsen's mother-in-law, Magdelene Thoresen, who had once met Kierkegaard, and thus knew both of them, insisted that she had never met two people with such a similar personality despite all physical differences. Shapiro, op. cit., 8-9. See for example, Brian W. Downs "The Wild Duck" in The Wild Duck (n.l63), 147-71. Cf. Inga-Stina Ewbank, op. cit, 130 et passim. Adam Mtiller-Gutenbrunn, "Ibsen in Wien," in "Henrik Ibsen: Gedanken zum Geburtstage," Biihne und Welt 12 (1903), 512-3. Alesandra Pertici, Ibsen a Vienna: La critica e il publico della drammaturgia ibseniana dal1876 al1906 (Pisa: Giardini, 1990), 76f. Cited by G. Wunberg, Moderne, 79. Lac. cit. Ibid., 202. The term "Moderne" may have first been coined by Eugen Wolff in 1890 as Wunberg

260

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

Notes

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited indicates, Modeme, 186, but the roots of program were already there in Bahr's essay three years earlier. Hermann Bahr, "Henrik Ibsen," originally published in Deutsche Worte (1887) reprinted in Wunberg, Das Junge Wien, 1-17. Bahr "Das unrettbare lch" in Wunberg, Mode me, 148. Bahr, "Die Modeme" ibid., 189. Herzfeld, "Die skandinavische Literatur," 741. Dies ist unser religiOser Gedanke: die Menschen zu Artisten zu zuchten, Bahr, "Gegen Tolstoi," Die Zeit (3.9.98) in Wunberg, Das Junge Wien 892 "Ibsen's first international success was Brand; but he spokt.; of the play with disgust and disappointment... saying that he had written merely a play when he wanted to produce an action, a moral deed," Adams, op. cit., 194. Herzfeld, op. cit., 737. It is worth quoting Shapiro on Brandes' Peer Gynt reception here at some length, for it bears out Weininger's view of the Dane. Brandes' reaction to Peer Gynt was hardly favorable: "He felt the poem sought to 'represent the moral nature of mankind from its seamy side' ... Brandes felt that Ibsen's poetic powers had been 'wasted on this thankless material!'. He called the poem 'witless in its satire', 'neither beautiful nor true', and 'an unlovely and distorting view of life' .... Brandes concludes his estimation of the poem by labeling Ibsen a moralist, 'a man who sets to work with a single ultimate object, moral improvement, in view, and therefore confines his attention wholly to a single side of life...The poet who continues so long to stare at falsehood, self-deception and fantasy, that at last he almost runs blindly amuck against it.. .is only a moralist."' op. cit., 10 (the texts cited by Shapiro are from Brandes' Henrik Ibsen: A Critical Study). It can hardly be accidental that it is precisely those qualities in Ibsen that Weininger finds so important. Bahr, "Peer Gynt," in Wilhelm Friese, Ibsen auf der deutschen Biihne (Tubing en: Max Niemeyer, 1976), 122-27. Here one should note the connection with Bahr's insistence upon the essential differences between "young Germany" with its naturalist rationalism and "young Austria," which was nothing other than die Wiener Modeme, with its sentimentalized symbolism, Bahr "Das junge Osterreich," Studien zur Kritik der Modeme (Frankfurt: Rutten & Loening, 1894), 73-96. Weininger, "Wissenschaft und Kultur," Ober die letzten Dinge, 167. Viewed in terms ofBahr's essay of 1887 Weininger's essay would seem to be a rehabilitation of the value of science (in the broad German sense of research in general) for culture in terms of a philosophical demarcation of science and culture which foreshadows Wittgenstein's preoccupation with the limits of science. It is important to point out that in Vienna 1900 Mach's positivism ruled the roost philosophically. Kantianism, on the other hand, was the philosophical position of assimilated Jews. See Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 138 et passim. Nur dem, der das Gluck verachtet, wird Erkenntnis Gefiihl in den Augenblicken totenahnlichen Seines: alle Menschen sind der Liebe Wert. Erwachnend fiihlst Du die Bittemis der Welt. Darin ist alle Deine ungeloste Schuld, Dein Gedicht eine unvollkommene Suhne. Georg Trakl, op. cit., I, 463. In general the literature on the relationship between Weininger and Trakl follows Alfred Doppler in concentrating on Geschlecht und Charakter, which was clearly in Trakl's possession, rather than Ober die letzten Dinge, which was not. However, this literature does not take the aphorisms into account. See Doppler, "Georg Trakl und Otto Weininger," in Die Lyrik Georg ,Trakls (Vienna: Bohlau, 1992) 84-93. Cf. Ursula Heckmann, Das verfluchte Geschlecht: Motive der Philosophie Otto Weiningers im Werk Georg Trakls

' Ill.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

261

("Literaturhistorische Untersuchungen" Vol. 21; Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992.). Loc. cit. "Nehmen Sie einem Durchschnittsmenschen die Lebensliige, so nehmen Sie ihm gleichzeitig das Gluck." Tar De levensl!llgnen fra et gjennemsnittmenneske, sa tar De lykken fra hammed det samme, Ibsen, The Wild Duck, SV, II, 202. Not only Peer's fear that he has been dead his whole life long and the title oflbsen 's "epilogue" attest to this: Gengangeme, the play whose title is normally translated into English as "Ghosts" and German as "Gespenster," translations that did not meet with Ibsen's approval. The literal sense of the Norwegian is "those who come back." Personal communication from Walter Methlagl, who discussed the matter with Ficker. . .. der Mensch, indem er die Menschheit in seiner Person bejaht, auch den Schmerz auf sich nimmt und auf das Gluck verzichtet... The evocation and transformation of images in the works of both poets is one point most worthy of investigation. Unsere Zeit sucht vieles. Gefunden aber hat sie vor allem etwas: den Komforl. I kr drangt sich in seiner ganzen Breite sogar in die Welt der ldeen und mnchl llllS so bequem, wie wir es nie haben durften .... Man lost Problcme, um l'im• Unannehmlichkeit aus dem Wege zu raumen .... die Menschen unscrer Zeit, dil'lll'lll' Moralgesetze aufstellen (oder noch Iieber alte umstoBen) konnen mit dcr Sl'1111ld nicht Ieben.' Aber Komfort denkt nicht an Selbstzucht, und so wird dil• Sd111ld abgewiesen oder zur Tugend abgehoben ... Der Denker, dcr suchl jedoch, 1111 du~ Gegenteil. Er zeigt, daB es Probleme gibt, und daB die ungelost sind ... wic Wcinhlj.tl'l' und alle anderen, die emsthaft gedacht haben. Arnold Schoenberg, "Komfort als Weltanschauung" in Wunberg, Motlt•mt•, 182-3. Waltraud Hirsch, the most knowledgable scholar with respect to Weiningl•r's lex Is internationally, assures me that this is true. Without considering the possibility that there could be a common histodcnl huckground I tried to point out a certain complimentary between the views of Popper nnd Ebner in "Popper und Ebner als Denker," Gegen den Traum vom Gt•isl eds, W. Methlagl, P. Kampits, Christoph Konig and F. J. Brandfellner ("Brenner Studien," vol. 5; Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1985), 25-32. A common ancestry in Weininger seems to explain it. Ebner's indebtedness to Weininger is well-known; sec Gerald Stieg, see n. 48, p. 250.

Chapter 4 l.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The family of words surrounding 'modem' and its opposites is the source of as much discussion as it is confusion these days. "Die Wiener Modernc" refers to Viennese aestheticism which was curiously close to what we term post-modernism although hardly equivalent to our contemporary version. It is characterized hy a distaste for Naturalism and the cultivation of ephemeral inner states as opposed 10 social engagement as the basis for literary expression. Richard Wagner, Beethoven, (Leipzig: Inset, n.d.), 8, ~3-4. Ibid., 38f, 52. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. tlcre again Schopcnhaucr gives us the right lend with his deep hypothesis with respeetto the physiological phenomenon of clairvoyanl'e und the theory of drcnms

262

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited that he bases it upon. Having attained that phenomenon, namely, that consciousness which is turned inward to the point of genuine clairvoyance, i.e., to the capacity of seeing, which our waking day-oriented consciousness only darkly senses the powerful ground of our passions of the will, the tone out of this night penetrates thus into genuinely wakeful perception as the immediate expression of the will. As the dream of any experience confirms there stands over against the world which we perceive by dint of the functions of the wakeful brain a second world, matching the first in distinctness and which is no less vividly perceived. This world cannot lie at any rate outside of us as an object. This must be brought to conscious knowledge from an inwardly directed function of the brain under its own forms of perception, which Schopenhauer here terms the dream organ. It is a no less definite experience that beside the world which presents itself as visible both wakefully and in dreams a second world which is only perceptible to the ear reveals itself through sound. Thus a world of sounds is present to consciousness alongside the world of light, of which we might say: it relates to the former as dreams to wakefulness. It is exactly so plainly perceptible as the former even if our knowledge of it is entirely different from that of the former. Just as the vivid world of dreams can only take form through a peculiar activity of the brain, music enters into our consciousness only through a similar activity. The latter alone is just as different from the activity, which is accompanied by seeing as that dream organ of the brain differentiates itself from the functions of the brain which are stimulated in the wakeful state by external impressions. Ibid, 12f. · Wagner's emphasis upon the vibrating core of nature is reminiscent of Jakob Moleschott and his Kreislauf des Lebens (Cycle of Life) in which Moleschott argued for the identity of matter and force emphasizing the notion that the essence of matter is motion, as well as Schopenhauer. Moleschott's book appeared in 1852, two years before Wagner read Schopenahuer for the first time. Apparently Wagner who had already been under the influence of the materialist Luwdig Feuerbach, read Schopenhauer through the eyes of the so-called "vulgar materialists" such as Moleschott. On Moleschott see Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (9 vols.; London, 1946-74), VII, 352f. Ibid., 13. How do I grasp you infinite nature? Now to this call responds most certainly music. Here the external world speaks so incomparably comprehensible to us because what it communicates to us via the ear by dint of the effect of sound is one and the same as what we ourselves from our own depths call out to ourselves. The object of the tone as heard collapses immediately with the subject producing the tone. We understand without the slightest conceptual mediation what the cry we have perceived says be it a cry for help, a wail of grief or a shout for joy and we respond to it immediately in the corresponding way. If our cry, moan or blissful sigh is the immediate expression of our passionate will, then we understand the same sound that has been in our ears as the uncontradictable expression of the same passion and no illusion of the sort that comes from shining light is possible ... Ibid., 16. Ibid., 12f. Ibid., 13. The message in the dream, which has been conceived by dint of this inner organ, could only be transmitted by a second dream, which immediately proceeds waking up. In this second dream the contents of the first are conveyed allegorically because, as the brain prepares itself for the wakeful state and external experience, the a priori forms of knowledge with respect to the world of appearance, i.e., space and time, have to be applied and thus an image related to the common experiences of life has to be constructed.-Now we compared musical composition to the clairvoyant

Notes

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

263

(hellsehend) somnambulist's sense of sight as the externally proclaimed immediate pictorial representation of his innermost dream as it is beheld in the fully aroused state of clairvoyance. We discovered that the channel to the latter of its message on the way to the genesis and formation of the world of sound.-To the latter, here analogically cited, physiological phenomenon of somnambulistic clairvoyance we hold now the other phenomenon of the visionary ( Geisterseher) and employ once more Schopenhauer's hypothesis according to which the latter would be a form of clairvoyance, which transpires when the brain is awake, namely, this proceeds from a disintensification of the wakeful sight, whose misty seeing now utilizes the inner compulsion to report to consciousness on the verge of wakefulness in order to display clearly to itself that form which has been revealed to it in the innermost state of dreaming. This form, which has thus been projected from our innermost being before our eyes belongs in no sense to the real world; yet, it lives in the presence of the visionary with all the characteristics of something real. In order to explain Shakespeare to ourselves as a visionary and exorcist, who knows how to evoke such images, we hold that his oeuvre is composed of images, which have heen beheld exclusively by him before the eyes of the wakening-something thutthc inner will succeeds at only in extraordinary and infrequent cases. This visionary capacity explains how he knows how to present human figures from all ages from the depths of his intuitions to his and our waking eye in such a way that they rcnlly seem to come to life before us. Ibid., 66f. We could apply this hypothetical explanation of an elsewhere unexplained physi· ological process from various points of view for the explanation of the neslhl'lk problem before us in order to arrive at the same conclusions. Shakespeare's l(hoNI N would be brought through the complete state of wakefulness of the inner llHINiL'III organ to the point of resounding. Another case in point is Beethoven. I lis tllolii'N would enthuse disintensified sight to the point of clear consciousness of Ihost! forms in which they move now incorporated before our clairvoyant eyes. In one liN in the other of these basically identical cases the huge force, which moved here against the order of natural laws in the designated sense of the formation of the phenomenon from inside outwards, produce themselves out of deep necessity und it would probably be this very same necessity, which brings forth in the common life process the cry of anxiety of the person who suddenly awakes from a deep sleep threatened in his dream. Only here in a case which is extraordinary, immense and formative of the life of the genius of humanity the necessity of awakening leads to a new world of the clearest knowledge and the highest capability, which is only accessible on the basis of that awakening. /bid.,68. Jbid.,21. On Max Weber see Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage (New Brunswick, NJ: Trans· action Publishers, 1985). Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983 ), 339. On Schoenberg see the essay above, "Schoenberg's Vienna: The Critical Modern· ism of a Viennese Composer," On the Salzburg Festival see Michael Steinberg, op. cit., cf. my review "Neuerscheinungen tiber die Kultur der Jahrhundertwende," Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner Archiv IX ( 1990), I 00-1. Cf. David Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture (Berkeley: Uni· versity of California Press, 1980), 190f. et passim. Wagner, op. cit., 9. Cf. Stanley Wells, Introduction, Shakespeare, King Richard the Sl'Colld (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 29. Sec Martin-Gregor Dell in's Preface to Richard Wagner, Meilllknk('ll, ed. Dell in MUnchcn: Piper, 1982), 19; cf. Wagner, "Das KOnstlertum der Zukunft," I 6.1-71.

264 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Magee, op. cit., 352f. Wagner, op. cit., 65-9. Ibid., 75-84 For that reason the Christian element in Parsifal pace Steinberg (n. 75) has more to do with the moral of the story, continence inspired by love of neighbor, than with its symbolism. Carl E. Schorske, op. cit., 254. Peter Vergo, "Gustav Klimt's Philosophic und das Programm der Universitatsgemillde," Mitteilungen der osterreichischen Galerie XXII/XXIII (1978-9), 94.7. Schorske, op. cit., 228. Ibid., 230, 274. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950). Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche Biographie, 3 vols. (Munchen: DTV, 1981). See Herbert Josephs, Le neveu de Rameau: Diderot's Dialogue of Language and Gesture (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1969); cf. my "Rameau's Nephew: Dialogue as Gesamtkunstwerk for Enlightenment" Kontroversen 6, 91-113. Schorske, op. cit., 263. Karl Kraus, for example, emphasizes the opposition between Klinger and Klimt in the Fackel, IV, 117 (Sept. 1902), 27f. Alexander Duckers, Max Klinger (Berlin: Rembrandt, 1976), 98. Cf. Jean Paul Boullion, Klimt: Beethoven, trans. Hanna Wu1f (Genf-Tubingen: Sikra, 1988), 88. Ibid., It is also clear that Klinger identified Wagner with Schopenhauer: "Richard Wagner, that is our out poet if need be;• cited by Duckers, op. cit., 8. Renate Hartleb, Max Klinger, Berlin: Henschel verlag, 1985), 88f. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl Sch1echta, 3 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1969), II, 901-938. Cf. Allan Janik, "Die Post-Modeme bei Sankt Offenbach," Die Wiener Schute und das Hakenkreuz, ed. Otto Kolleritsch ("Studien zur Wertungsforschung," vol. 22; (Vienna & Graz: Universal Edition, 1990), 145-55. Reprinted in this collection. Gerald Stieg, Der Brenner und die Fackel ("Brenner Studien" III; Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1976), 203-34. Each of the four is crucial for Ebner as a critic of the preceeding figure. Ebner's own Christian "pneumatological" critique of Krausian satire is, then, the culmination of his confrontation with Viennese modernism. A full analysis here would take us too far afield. See Stieg, "Ferdinand Ebners Kulturkritik" (n. 48, p. 250), for the story of how Ebner's views became the basis of a powerful critique of Austrian culture in the Innsbruck periodical Der Brenner. Klaus Dethloff, "Ferdinand Ebner und die Psychoanalyse oder Traum vor und nach dem Einschlafen," Gegen den Traum vom Geist, eds. W. Methlagl, eta!. "Brenner Studien," vol. 5 (Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1985), 162-73. However, it is clear that Ebner shared his friend Josef Matthias Hauer's aversion to "Wagneritis." See Werner Schultze, "Josef Matthias Hauer in der Sicht Ferdinand Ebners," Gegen den Traum vom Geist, 49. For the attitude of the inventor oftwelve tone composition to Wagner we need merely look to Hauer's unpublished letter to Huttl (Innsbruck, Brenner Archives): Folk music, natural music, is an expression of this feeling. If an ox bellows, it probably has "feelin"' and if Wagner has a mating sentiment, he turns it into noise (you cannot call the result music) and writes an opera. Such people, who are dominated by their feelings, cultivate their passions formally inasmuch as they endeavor to continually to renew and to intensify themselves on the basis

Notes

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54.

55.

265

of every conceivable means of stimulation. Feelings are very real in character and are based chiefly on the secretions of certain glands. That they are willingly expressed through music (noise) is also conceivable. Even animals feelings are turned into sounds (the belling of the stag, the mating song of the birds etc.) Human beings transpose that into music and "bell" similarly, i.e., they sing. A boundary, where "feelin"' ceases and "music" begins cannot be identified. One feels whether it comes from "feelin"' or from "music" only for the motion ... .If Beethoven fails to be musical he merely imitates nature theatrically with his sounds. Sounds and music, the physical and the intellectual ear; feelings and intelligence, they are continually at war with one another. None of them are conceivable without the other. ... Musicians are by their nature men of feeling but most of them arc intellectually stunted in an uncritical manner. In all seriousness! Feelings arc momentary phenomena, the mind is above time .... Ebner knew everything that I have written here long ago .... Ebner an Luise Karpischek 26.XI.16, Schriften, III, 126. Walter Szmolyan, Josef Matthias Hauer (Osterreichische Komponisten des XX. Jahrhunderts, vol. 6; Vienna: Lafite, 1965), 14. J!llrgen I. Jensen, "Ferdinand Ebner and Josef Matthias Hauer," Untersuclu/1/Ht'll zum Brenner, eds W. Methlagl eta!. (Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1981 ), 242· 72. The word "Geist" and its cognates are notoriously difficult to translate from ( lt•rman because it has both the intellectual and spiritual connotations that cnnnotlw captured in a single English word. Ferdinand Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitiiten (Frankfurt: Suhrknntp, 1980), 21, cf. 110-16. The interiority [Innerlichkeit] of musical life is egoless-like the mystical 'cxpt•rience of God'. In musical intuition the ego-encapsulated [Icheinsamkeitl pcrso11 is not conscious of his existence. In that conditon he knows nothing of the cxislctwt• of the Thou. True interiority in human life is not musical in nature-which likt~ everything aesthetic is principally a matter of being 'beside oneself' -but of' The Word. In The Word human beings first emerge out of the ego-isolation of thdr existence to a relationship with a Thou and in this relation humans enter into the lnle spiritual life. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 93f. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 14-6. Ibid., 73f. On the role of music in Kierkegaard's thought see Nelly Viallancix, S¢rt'fl Kierkegaard: Hiite-toi d' ecouter (Paris: Vrin, 1970). Stieg shows clearly how Ebner identified everything that was problematic with respect to Wagner with the then newly founded Salzburg Festival. In his eyes as in those of Karl Kraus what Hofmannsthal, Reinhardt, and Strauss created there al'lcr World War I was certainly "sick" but anything but a childhood disease. Sec Gcruld Stieg, "Ferdinand Ebners Kulturkritik," 237-47. In this context two books are especially noteworthy: J.P. Stern, Hitler: The Fillll'c'r and the People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) as an account of Hitler's exploitation of German and Austrian cultural traditions and Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hilter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universtiy Press, 1982) for its account of Hitler's concrete electoral strategy. Fritz Stern The Politics of Cultural Despair(Gardcn City, NY: Doubleday, I %5).

266

Chapter 5

20.

The literature on this transition is as enormous as it is diverse. Two particularly noteworthy books dealing centrally with these matters are Walter Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Stanford, MA: Stanford University Press, 1959) and J.P. Stem, op. cit. Harold Stahmer, Speak That I May See Thee: The Religious Significance of Language (New York: Macmillan, 1968) presents a comprehensive picture of the philosophers of dialogue. On Ebner's relationship to Karl Kraus see Gerald Stieg, Der Brenner und die Fackel, 203-234. Ferdinand Ebner, Schriften, ed Franz Seyr, 3 vols. (Munich: Kosel, 1963-1965), II 410. For an account of how Ludwig von Ficker came to choose to publish Ebner's book and reject Wittgenstein's Tractatus in fall1919 see my, "Wittgenstein: an Austrian Enigma," Austrian Philosophy, ed. J.C. Nyfri (Munich: Philosophia, 1981), 75-89 and "Discussing Technology: Breaking the Ground," in Is the Computer a Tool?, ed. Bo Sundin (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1979 ), 70-80. Ferdinand Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitdten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 9 et passim. Ibid., 11-12. I have developed this line of criticizing Ebner in "Popper und Ebner- Symptome Verworrener Zeit," Gegen den Traum vom Geist, 25-32. Ebner, op. cit., 14 et passim. For the most important places where he discusses Traum vom Geist see Ebner, Das Wort, 61, 72, 118, 122, 124-125, 145, 149-150,218,232,239-240,255-261. On the general problem of translating Geist as well as the special problems the term presented at the tum of the century see Roy Pascal, From Naturalism to Expressionism (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 238. Klaus Dethloff, "Ferdinand Ebner und die Psychoanalyse oder Traume vor und nach dem Einschlafen," Gegen den Traum vom Geist, 162-172. On Nietzsche as a precursor of Freud in dissolving the distinction between sleep and wakefulness see Walter Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, (New York: McGrawHill, 1980), II, 55-57. Ebner,op. cit., 140-171. August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Six Plays ofStrindberg, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 261. I have altered the translation slightly. For Strindberg's view of Weininger see the two letters he wrote to Weininger's friend Artur Gerber immediately after Weininger's death, Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Munich, 1980), 650-651. Cf. Erich Unglaub, "Strindberg, Weininger and Karl Kraus," Recherches Germaniques XVIII (9188), 121-50. Ludwig von Ficker, who published Ebner's work revered Strindberg's Dream Play. Personal communication Walter Methlagl. Jjl!rgen I. Jensen, "Ferdinand Ebner und Josef Mattias Hauer," Untersuchungen zum Brenner, ed. W. Meth1agl, E. Sauermann, S.P. Scheichl (Salzburg: Otto Miiller, 1981), 242-272. I am indebted to Jjl!rgen Jensen for information about Hauer. Sigfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976). Debussy cited in the progratni3f Folies d 'Offenbach, Theater am Auersperg, (Vienna,

21.

Kracauer, op. cit., 50-51.

1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

Notes

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

19~4).

I

22. 23.

I

24. 25. 26.

• •

27. 28.

267

David Rissin, Offenbach ou le Rire en Musique (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 95-128. This often quoted phrase has been attributed to Rossini by Anton Henseler in his Jakob Offenbach of 1930. Georg Knepler has pointed out that it was cited by Henseler without a source. He further emphasized that Henseler originally stated that Rossini was being ironic. Knep1er, Karl Kraus liest Offenbach (Vienna: Locker, 1984), 200. Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (Ziirich: Atlantis, 1982), 71. Rissin, op. cit., 149-160. For the notion of two parallel but independent nineteenth century developments of the Renaissance idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, that of Wagner and that of Mallarmc, see E.T. Kirby, "Introdqction;' Total Theater (New York: Dutton, 1969), xii-xxxi, Offenbach, with his preference for the small over the large and his reliance upon ambiguity, is clearly more closely related to Mallarme. It was Karl Kraus who first suggested that Offenbach had produced the most authentic Gesamtkunstwerk in his "Grimassen tiber Kultur und Biihne," Die Fackel210 (19.1.09). Rissin, op. cit., 247-281. Rissin's chapter on ?erichole is reprinted as the cunuucutary in the issue of L'Avant Scene Opera devoted to it (August, 1984). Egon Voss, "Der Realismus der phantastischen Oper 'Hoffmanns Erz!lhhlll~t'll,"' Jacques Offenbach, Ho.ffmanns Erziihlungen, ed. Attila Csampai and I>ict mnr I luiland (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984), 9-40.

Chapter 6

•

'-

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

I cite Nietzsche according to Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studic•!ll/U,\'Rflht' l'd~.
/hid .• 31!0.

268 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

Notes

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited The fact that Nietzsche either failed, was incapable of or did not want to articulate just what he understood under the crucial rubric "life" which is always positively emphasized in his writings insured that they remain banished in the (not unimportant) realm of cultural criticism (moralism?) and cannot be integrated into the mainstream of Western philosophical discussion except by proclaiming Nietzsche, as he clearly did not proclaim himself (except ironically), the center of that tradition. To grasp his position in the western tradition one must merely look at the figures he admired. Thus it was left to Wittgenstein to confer philosophical significance upon "life," something he did by showing us how it is possible to "dissolve" traditional philosophical problems on the basis of an accurate description of the natural history of an animal that speaks. See Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood For the Ghosts. Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p.175. Curt von Westemhagen, "Wagner as a Writer," in: The Wagner Companion, 359. The unmusical Kraus showed little interest in Wagner except inasmuch as the composer was pilloried by superficial critics in the press. I am grateful to the distinguished Kraus scholar Sigurd Paul Scheichl for this information. Michael Tanner, "The Total Work of Art, "in: The Wagner Companion, 146. See Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 214-230. See Tanner, in: The Wagner Companion, 189. Curiously, or maybe not, Tanner's defense of Wagner is compatible with almost all the things I take Nietzsche and Offenbach to find offensive in his work. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespriiche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by F. Bergemann, Vol. 2, 676-77. (14. March 1830). See Ferdinand Ebner, Schriften, I, 965. In 1864, 1867,1866 and 1868 respectively. The fullest list of Offenbach's works to appear in this writing is that of Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach, London: Faber & Faber 1980, herein cited after Ken W. Bartlett's German translation, (Zurich: Atlantis Musikbuch 1982), 255-250. Antonio D' Almeida is preparing a definitive catalogue of Offenbach's works. Jane Rhodes, "Ma Perichole, "in: Offenbach, La Perichole, p.1 01 (L'Avant-scene Opera 66, August 1984). Peter Gammond, Offenbach. His Life and Times (London: Midas, 1980), 43 et passim. Ibid.,41. Faris, op. cit., 212. See Richard Wagner, Das Judentum in der Musik, in: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. by W. Golther, Berlin n.d., vol. 5, pp. 66-85; Aufkliirungen iiber das Judentum in der Musik, ibid., vol. 8, pp. 238-260. The publication of the latter "seemed no less than a willful attempt to kindle ugly passions, to arouse divisive hatreds" even to Cosima (Peter Burbidge, "Richard Wagner: Man and Artist" in: The Wagner ComRanion, p. 27). Karl Marx, "Bruno Bauer: Die Judenfrage. Die Fiihigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen frei zu werden," in: Die Friihschriften, ed. by S. Landshut (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1971), 199-207. Sigurd Paul Scheichl has shown how by the tum of the century the rhetoric of antiSemitism could be employed by serious cultural critics of a peculiar type as well as racist bigots. See Scheichl, "Aspekte des Judentums im 'Brenner"' in: Untersuchungen zum Brenner, ed. by W. MethlaglJE. Sauermann/S. P. Scheichl, (Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1981), 70-121; cf. his "The Contexts and Nuances of Anti-

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

269

Jewish Language: Were All the Anti-Semites Anti-Semites," in: Jews and Antisemitism in Vienna, "ed. I. Oxaal/M. Pollak/G. Botz, (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) 89-114. Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach und das Paris seiner Zeit, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 233. Faris, op. cit. 22. Kracauer, op. cit., 210. Wagner, Das Judentum, 75. David Rissin has emphasized this. Rissin, Offenbach ou le rire en musique, Paris 1980, 295-299 et pasim. Rissin, op. cit., 135-137. Rissin, op. cit., 150. Kracauer, op. cit., 155-158. Ibid. 151. P. Walter Jacob, Jacques- Offenbach in Selbstzeugnissen und /Jilddok/11111'11/t'll, Reinbek 1969, 111. Gammond, op. cit., 59. Kracauer, op. cit., 200. Rissin, Offenbach, 139. I am indebted to Henrik Marcussen for informutionnhuut Verdi's knowledge of Wagner. Jacob, op. cit., 83-85. Faris, op. cit., 81. Lac. cit. Ibid., 116. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Cosifan tutte. Texte, Materialien, Kmllllll'/1/lln', l'tls. A. Csampai u. D. Holland (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984), 298. See Jean Perisson, "Commentaire litteraire et musical," in: Les Contes d 'II ~~ffmcl/111, 21-93 (L'Avant-scene Opera 25, Jan./Febr. 1980). Perisson also finds traces of nml allusions to works by Berlioz, Schubert, Schumann, Massenet, and even Wn!(lll'l''s Der Fliegende Holliinder,(the latter would be very interesting given Offenhnch's slight knowledge of Wagner. It is more likely that the allusion in question is to Freischiitz). I owe this point to Walter Methlagl. Rissin, op. cit., 247-281. Rissin's chapter on Pirichole is reprinted as the commentary in the volume of L'Avant-scene devoted to it. Rissin, op. cit., 128. Richard David, "Wagner the Dramatist," in The Wagner Companion, 124. The "Italian" character of Offenbach's art see Rissin, op. cit, 69. Rissin reproduces the "manifesto" with which Offenbach opened the competition (won interestingly by Bizet and Lecocq) designed to enrich the repertoire of Bouffes-Parisiennes, in which he summarizes his own aesthetic values and their rootedness in the theatre of Cimarosa. Contrary to Wagner, Offenbach insists upon a small orchestra because mistakes and inexperience show up in it easier than in a large ensemble (Rissin, op. cit., 79-80). lise Barea, op. cit., 89-110. Faris, op. cit., 113. It is also significantly alluded to on the frontispiece of the Maxime.1· of I.a Rochefoucauld and thus from the start in the center of the aphoristic tradition of Western practical philosophy. I have sketched the relationship between the development of dialo~ue and the dialectics of self-knowledge in early modern practical philosophy in "Monlui~ne: dialog som in nrc tenter," Oialo~owr 21 (I 992), 22-.B (in Swedish) as well as in

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

270

Notes

"From Montaigne to Diderot: Pascal, Jansenism and the Dialectics oflnner Theater" and "Rameau's Nephew: Dialogue as Gesamtkunstwerk for Enlightenment (with constant reference to Plato)" in Skill, Technology and Enlightenment, ed. Bo Goranzon (London: Springer, 1995), 19-36, 57-75. The history of the impact of Diderot's dialogue on Western thought from Hegel to Karl Kraus remains to be written.

Chapter 7 1. 2.

Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London, Allen & Unwin, 1959), 261f. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), 264-

5. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Allan Janik, "Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method," reprinted in this volume. Heinrich Hertz, Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1894,9. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as PM with the appropriate page number).Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Professor G. H. von Wright emphasized this to me in conversation in 1965; cf. von Wright, Wittgenstein, trans. J. Schulte, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 29. Brian McGuinness emphasizes how it was the boldness of Hertz (and Boltzmann), as opposed to Mach's less daring way of thinking-and of presenting his thoughtsthat impressed Wittgenstein so deeply, Young Ludwig (London: Duckworth, 1989) 39; whereas Ray Monk writes, "throughout his life, Wittgenstein regarded Hertz's solution to the problem [of force in Newtonian physics] as a perfect model of how philosophical confusion should be dispelled," Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London Jonathan Cape, 1990), 446. Monk sees a Hertzian element in Wittgenstein's wartime suggestion to the doctors with whom he worked at Guy's Hospital that they always write the word "shock" with a line drawn through it to remind themselves of how many different things it was used to refer to and thus of its dubious classificatory value. G.P. Baker & P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 16. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem ofKnowledge, trans. W. Woglom and C. Hendel (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1950), 85 et passim. See Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, trans. C.M. Williams (New York: Dover, 1959); The Science of Mechanics, trans. T.J. McCormack (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1960); Erkenntnis und lrrtum (Leipzig, J.A. Barth, 1905); cf. A Janik and S. Toulmin, op. cit., 132-45. In Wittgenstein 's Vienna the opposition between Mach and Hertz is exaggerated; moreover, the crucial role of "appropriateness" in Hertz is all but u~cognized. I am grateful to my Innsbruck student, Walter Klingsbigl, for pointing out that already in The Analysis of Sensations Mach's "elements" are only perceptible in terms of a syntactical framework, which confers a coherence upon them. For Mach this means that ordered perception is only possible on the basis of mathematical models (which is precisely what rules out an "impressionist" reading of his notion of the "elements" of experience). This is not very different from Hertz's requirement that models be "correct" and "permissible." What makes Hertz different from Mach only really becomes apparent when we begin to consider the various roles that the "appropriateness" of models plays in his philosophy of science. Leszek Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, trans. N. Guterman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), I 02; 120. Mach steadfas"tly disputed being termed a positivist. However, the associations he rejected are

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

271

with nineteenth century positivism, not "logical positivism." Nineteenth-century positivism was unacceptable to Mach for at least two reasons: its ontological commitment to materialism and its epistemological commitment to Newtonian mechanics as the ideal to which all rational enterprises should aspire both of which were under fire within the community of scientific philosophers. See Cassirer, loc. cit.('( passim. As the principal inspiration for the Vienna Circle nobody has a better clai Ill on the term in the twentieth century. In fact the official organ of the group of philosophers who have come to be termed the Vienna Circle was the "Ernst Mach Verein." Moreover, if by positivism one understands strict rejection of all forms of unobservable entities in explanations of the world order, nobody better deserves the title than Mach, although, given his efforts to distance himself from nineteenth century positivism the term "nco-positivism" (which was previously often used) is perhaps the most appropriate description of Mach's phenomenalist position. For 11 defense of Newton's Platonizing against Mach's positivist critique sec Stephcn Toulmin, "Criticism in the History of Science: Newton, Time and Motion," 1'/ti/osophical Review LXVIII (1959), 1-29,203-27. Mach, The Science ofMechanics, 577. "A sign or representamen is something which stands to somebody for somclhln~o~ln some respect or capacity" C. S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Tlwory of Si!lllN," Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. J. Buchler (New York: Dover, It)~~), 1)1) II follows from this definition that we never know the meoning of 11 si~n till Wt• understand it in the sense of the person or persons for whom it flllwtiuns ns 11 sl~o~n RobertS. Cohen, "Hertz's Philosophy of Science: An lntrodut'lory I !ssny"lnllrrll, The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form, trans. I >.J !. Jum·s ruul J .T Walley (New York: Dover, 1956), section 4 (unpaginated). I have benefited from conversation with Kelley Hamillon on llcrtz ~I'IINIIIIy nrul particularly on the question of how successful Hertz's pmgram for nx ionutll/.iltj,l mechanics really is. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu jener kunftigen Metaphysik, wt·rkr, -~ voiN. (Bcrlin: Knauer, n.d.), II, 353. William Shakespeare, King Lear, I, 4, 88. On problems surrounding the notion of"influence" as they bear upon Wittgenstt'ln see my, "Wie hat Schopenhauer Wittgenstein beeinfluBt?," Sclwpenlulllt'r.lllhrhudt, 73 (1992),75-6. On Wittgenstein's relationship to Freud see Brian McGuinness's excellent "Freud and Wittgenstein," Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. B.F. McGuinness (Chicugo: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27-43; cf. "Wittgenstein on Madness" reprinted here. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen: Fruhversionl937-38,l~ds. G.H. von Wright & H. Nyman (Helsinki: privately printed, 1979), I, I 06. I have benefited from conversation with Prof. M. Louren"o concerning Wiugcnstein's relation to Hertz. He, too, has emphasized the striking similarities in tone between Wittgenstein and Hertz, by which he understands (I) verbal expressions of the torments that the mind brings upon itself as it runs up against the limits of language, and (2) the idea that philosophy does its job without producing new information, but on the basis of what we already know. On his view there is much to he learned about Wittgenstein's later philosophy as well on the basis of a comparision with Shannon's reformulation of Boltzmann's statistical account of en! ropy. Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Harrnondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 33. Fregc to Wittgenstein, 30.X.I9, "Gottioh Frege: Bricfe an Ludwig Willgcnstein," eds. Allan Janik and C.P. Berger, Gmu•r Philosoplti.l'dtl' Suu/il•11, vol. .B/34 ( I1J!N), J•.n

272

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Notes

273

,I 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

See John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, Duckworth, 1957), 154. In a sense the difference between Wittgenstein and Frege with respect to clarity could be formulated as a difference of opinion with respect to the value axiomatization as an aspect of the permissibility or appropriateness of a theory. In any case both of them could have appealed to aspects of Hertz in defending their particular notions of clarity. However, "philosophical thinking began for him with 'painful contradictions' (and not with the Russellian [and Fregean] desire for certain knowledge," Ray Monk, op. cit., 26. Moreover, it is altogether too little recognized that the truth table method of showing the distinction between empirical propositions and tautologies is for Wittgenstein simply a way of getting clear about things that we already know in practice, i.e., with respect to things that "show themselves" in practice: in the Tractatus emphasizes that the mark of a tautology is that you can do anything with it in reasoning, nothing with a contradiction. Everybody knows this. The problem is that we cannot always distinguish between the different types of propositions. Thus the value of the truth table method of representing them, T, 6.1262. FregetoWittgenstein, 16.IX, 19. Lac. cit. Kenny, Wittgenstein, 42. The similarities between Wittgenstein's mature concept of philosophy and R.G. Collingwood's view of metaphysics as the analysis of the unquestioned elements inscientific inquiries, i.e., their "absolute presuppositions," are particularly striking. See my Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, xiii et passim. On Heidegger see A. Janik, "Carl Dallago und Martin Heidegger: Ober Anfang und Ende des Brenner," Untersuchungen zum Brenner: Festschrift for lgnaz Zangerle, eds. W. Methlagl, E. Sauermannn & S.P. Scheichl (Salzburg: Otto Miiller,l981), 28-9. Alois Pichler, "Wittgensteins spatere Manuskripte: einige Bemerkungen zu Stil und Schreiben," Mitteilingen aus dem Brenner Archiv 12 (1993), 8-26. Jorg Zimmermann has brilliantly explored the hermeneutic moment in Wittgenstein in Wittgensteins Sprachphilosophische Henneneutik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975). For example Hans-Georg Gadamer, the most distinguished contemporary hermeneuticist, only reluctantly and very late (thanks to the persuasive efforts of Patrick Heelan) came to see that natural science was relevant to hermeneutics and vice versa See Gadamer, "Naturwissenschaft und Hermeneutik," Filosofi och Kultur 3 (Lund, Sweden, 1986), 39-70. So far as I have been able to establish the standard works on hermeneutics barely mention natural science at all except as a stalking horse. I have found no reference to Hertz in any work on hermeneutics that I have consulted. Maurice O'C. Drury, The Danger of Words (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), ix. K.T. Fann, Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 42-3. It might be objected that my emphasizing Wittgenstein's debts to Hertz ignores the role that Boltzmann the first figure on his list, played in his development. I take it that Wittgenstein would not have had to mention Hertz at all were he only influenced by the (considerable) elements in Boltzmann's thinking that the latter shared with Hertz. IfWittgenstein found Hertz worth mentioning, then he got something from him that he could not find in Boltzmann himself, namely, the importance of "appropriateness" in philosophical analysis. Boltzmann took Hertz principally as contributing to the logic of science in suggesting a program for mechanics in the distant

34.

future. For Boltzmann's views of Hertz see the essays "On the Development of the Methods of Theoretical Physics in Recent Times," and "Lectures on the Principles of Mechanics" in Boltzmann; Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, trans. P. Foulkes, "The Vienna Circle Collection," vol. 5 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1947), 77-100,223-254. See Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: a religious point of view?, ed. Peter Winch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) for a provocative exploration of the importance ofWittgenstein 's "religious point of view" for his philosophizing.

Chapter 8 I.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

The terms "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy are, of course, cliches origi noting in later twentieth-century American philosophical polemics. No such distinction can be made systematically, which reflects the actual historical development or philosophy in the twentieth century. On the paradoxes of the Austrian Wittgenstein reception see A. Janik, "Wi ttgenstci n: An Austrian Enigma," Austrian Philosophy: Studies and Texts, ed. J.C. Nyfri (Munich: Philosophia, 1981),75-87. "I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from u rclil(ions point of view," cited by M. O'C. Drury "Notes on Some Conversutions Wllh Wittgenstein," Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhl'l'S (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981 ), 94. See Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes, The Modes ofSkepticism: Ancien/ 'I hi.\ 1111d Modem Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19H~).olll'l[lll pollence, 24f. Brian McGuinness, Young Ludwig , 4. I have profited from conversations with the historians of physics Kdil'y llllllllllon and Prof. Gerd GraBhoff on this subject. Prof. GraBhoffis preparing a lnllll'lllllh study of the importance ofWittgenstein's scientific education for the inlerpll'llltion of the Tractatus. It is standard procedure in literary studies to distinguish sharply betwel'll ll~XIs which are in principle designed for a "public" and those which arc in pl'illl'ipll• private. Wittgenstein was clearly fastidious in such matters. So it should he tnkcn to be highly significant that he would "go public" with thoughts which had previously been "private." I am grateful for Walter Methlagl for helping to clarify my thinking on these matters on the basis of analogies with the "public" and "private" dairies nl" the Austrian religious philosopher, Ferdinand Ebner, who bears some similarity to Wittgenstein in this respect. Cf. his question about the kind of"philosophy" that would help his brother, Paul, after losing his profession with the loss of his right arm (GT28.1 0.14). The role of James as a background figure to Wittgenstein's philosophizing has been highly neglected. The influence of The Varieties of Religious Experience is cleur from Wittgenstein's letter to Russell of (22.VI.l2, R 2,) where he claims to he reading James to improve himself morally. His sister Hermine's letter or IS. IV. I (l (unpublished, Brenner Archives, Innsbruck) in which she implores Ludwig to accept the opportunity of becoming an officer and put off his project to be a "James Mensch" until after the war seems to indicate that his resolve to go to wur as un ordeal by fire for his character had something to do with James. Russell wns, course, also preoccupied with other aspects of James's thought, namely, his socalled "neutral monism" as is clear from his article "On the Nature of /\cquaintuncc" Logic and Knowledge; /:'s.wy.1· 1901-1950, ed. R.C. Marsh (London: /\lien & Unwin, 19H4), 125-4.

or

274 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited I have drawn the parallels between them in my "Schopenhauer and the Early Wittgenstein," Philosophical Studies XV (Maynooth, 1966), 76-95. GT, passim. Wilhelm Baum's article "Wittgenstein und die Religion," Philosophisches Jahrbuch 86 (1979) 272-99, contains an excellent discussion of Tolstoy's importance for Wittgenstein. Otto Weininger, Uberdie letzten Dinge, 115-21. Prof. G.H. von Wright called my attention to Wittgenstein's profound interest in this text during our first meeting in 1966. It is only now that we understand Wittgenstein's relation to Hertz that we can appreciate the full importance of Weininger's work for his development. Intertextual evidence that the breakthrough of July 1916 was connected to reading Weininger can be found in the following passages: what is it to be happy? To live without fear and hope (14. VII.16); the subject is a limit of the world (2. VIII.l6; 2.IX.16); man is the microcosm (12.X.l6); the spirit of animals is your spirit 14.X.16); I have to judge the world (2.1X.16). Ray Monk, The Duty of Genius (London: Johnathan Cape, 1990), 140. Osterreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, edited by Bundesministerium fiir Heereswesen und Kriegsarchiv, VIII vols. (Vienna: Verlag der Militiirwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen, 1931-1938), IV, 446-666. John Terraine, The Great War (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 115. McGuinness, Young Ludwig, ch. 4, 204-266. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 245. This is less clear in the more frequently read ethical works such as the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft and the Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten that it is in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloflen Vernunft. It is clear from Weininger's essay on Ibsen's Peer Gynt, upon which the section on "The criminal" in his "Tierpsychologie" is a commentary, that Kant's Religion is the crucial work for understanding Weininger's Kantianism. Weininger does not use the expressions "I" and "Thou" in Uber die letzten Dinge but they do figure centrally in his major work Geschlecht und Charakter (Vienna: Braumiiller, 1903; reprinted Stuttgart: Matthes und Seitz, 1980), 233 in precisely this context. So there is no reason for not using them here. This text certainly bears examination in the light ofWittgenstein's injunction to silence at the end of the Tractatus and vice versa. Weininger, op. cit., 119. At this point as well as several other Miss Anscombe's translation is misleading: "Stellungnahme" refers to a position, taking a stand, making a commitment. "Attitude" only catches part of the words sense. Similarly, "das erlosende Wort" is more than merely "the key word," "the redeeming word" or the "saving word" would be closer. Weininger, "Tierpsychologie," 116. See Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 42. Kenny himself explains later that the matter is not altogether simple, 92f. David Pears The False Prison, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), I, 161ff. See Karl Jaspers, The Way to Wisdom, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954). M. O'C. Drury, "A Symposium," Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy, ed. K.T. Fann (New York: Dell, 1967), 69. See A. Janik, "On Edification and Cultural Conversation: A Critique of Rorty," in Janik, Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, 80-92. On "die Pracht des Einfachen" see A. Janik "Carl Dallago und Martin Heidegger: ( Uber Anfang und Endes des Brenner, Untersuchungen zum Brenner, 21-34.

Notes 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

275

Hans Limbach, "Begegnung mit Georg Trakl," Erinnerung an Georg Trak/ (lnnsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1926), 106. See A. Janik , "Wittgenstein on Madness, Mistakes, Metaphysics and Method," below. G.H. von Wright, "Biographical Sketch," Norman Maclolm, Ludwig Wittgenstf'in: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 21. Blaise Pascal, "Preface pour le traite du vide, CEuvres completes , ed. J. Cheval icr (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 529-35; cf. Albin Krailsheimer, Pascal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 23. See A. Janik, "From Montaigne to Diderot: Pascal, Jansenism and the Dialectics of Inner Theater," Skill, Technology and Enlightenment (London: Springer-Vcrluj.t, 1995) 19-36. The volume Wittgenstein and His Times ed. B. F. McGuinness (Chicago: llniVl'rsity of Chicago Press, 1982) contains a number of important contributions to lht' discussion ofWittgenstein's attitude to science. Rush Rhees analysis ofWi1t!(t'IINil'ln'~ comments on Frazer "Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual" arc pari iculnrly vnht able for understanding his mature view of religion, 69-107.

Chapter 9 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (London: I htrk wollh, 1988), 37. Personal communication from the late RudolfKoder. I have dealt with the problem of influence generally in "flow Nollo Wtllt' All Nil hut Intellectual History- Again," Essays on Wittgenstein and Wt•ifiiiiJ.(t't, "Siudlrn 1111 osterreichischen Philosphie," vol. 9 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, I ')H4il, •1H ftlnnd wllh the problem of influence as relates to Wittgcnstcin in pnrtit•ulm In "Wir hnl Schopenhauer Wittgenstein beeinfluBt?," Schopntlwut•r .lul11-h11r ·II 7 I ( IW.Z 1 (Ill 77. Georg Henrik von Wright, "Wittgenstein in Relation to I lis 'l'inws," Witll(t'll.\"trin and His Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Chicago: University of <'hknj.tu, l'rt's~. 1982), 116. McGuinness, op. cit., 37. Englemann, "Memoir," 123. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Wittgenstein with a Memoir, !runs. 1.. Jlurlm!lllcr (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967). Engelmann's account seems to reflect his own views as much as it documents Wittgensteins. See Christoph Lcitgch "Engelmann erinnert sich nicht nur an Wittgenstein's: Nationalitatenkampf, Assimilation untl Philosophic in Olmiitz nach dem ersten Weltkrieg," Mitteilungen aus dt•m /Jrt'llllt'l" Archiv No. 17 (1998), 32-46. Edward Timms, op cit., 206 (n. 4). Kraus, "Grimassen tiber Kultur und Biihne"; "Lob der verkchrten Lchcnswcisc," Die chinesische Mauer; Schiften 2, 141-156; 167-170. Cf. "Die weiBe Kultur oder warum in die Feme schweifen," Die chim•sischt• Mctllt'l; Schriften, II, 211-214. ...eine Welt idyllischer Naturhaftigkeit und reiner Gcistigkcit, Sigurd Paul Schcichl, "Politik und Ursprung," Wort und Wahrheit, XXVII (1972), 45. The translation is that of Timms, see Timms (n. 4), 232-3. Cf. Jean Lafond (ed.) Lesfonnes breves de Ia prose et le disco11rs di.I"COII/c'/111 (XVIt> -XVI/e siecles) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984). Cf. My "From Montaignc lo Didcrot: l'uscul, Jansenism and the Dialectics of Inner Theater," in Skill, Teclmologv mulll'tlllr'atioll: On Practical Philo.\"OfJhy, cd. B. (H\ranzon (I ,ondon: Sprin~o~cr, I ')95), 57-74.

276 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited J.P. Stem, Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (Bloomington: University oflndiana Press, 1959), 191-220. Kraus, "Spriiche und Widerspriiche," Spriiche und Widerspriiche, Schriften, 8, 161. Wittgenstein, Ms 110, 18.1.1931. Kraus, "Stimmungen, Worte," Spriiche und Widerspriiche, Schriften 8, 155. Kraus, "Spriiche und Widerspruche;· Spriiche und Widerspriiche, Schriften 8, 179. Kraus, "Von der Gesellschaft," Pro domo et mundo, Schriften 8, 193 Die Fackel, 331-332,30.9.1911,57. Joseph Owens, A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1959), 38. Cf. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 115-17. Cf. Allan Janik, "On Edification and Cultural Conversation: A Critique ofRorty," Style, Politics and the Future ofPhilosophy (n. 37), 80-92. Kraus, "Kunst;' Nachts, Schriften 8, 326. K. T. Fann, Wittgenstein 's Conception ofPhilosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 109. The similarity of the tone in Wittgenstein's questioning to that of St. Augustine in his Confessions is as striking as it is generally unobserved in the literature on Wittgenstein. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 29. Normal Malcolm assured me that the example was a real one bearing upon one of Wittgenstein's conversations with Moore. Kraus, "Vom Kiinstler," Pro domo et mundo, Schriften 8, 235. Kraus, "Maximilian Harden," Die chinesische Mauer, Schriften 2, 55. Kraus, "Die chinesische Mauer," Die chinesische Mauer, Schriften 2, 280, cf. "Spriiche und Widerspriiche;· Schriften, 8, 165.

4.

5.

Chapter 10 1.

2.

3.

Otto Neurath, "Sociology and Physicalism," Philosophical Papers, eds. R.S: Cohen and M. Neurath, "The Vienna Circle Collection," vol. 16 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 60. It should be clear from the outset that full bibliographical references to the matters treated here would require an article considerably longer than this. I have therefore chosen to mention those studies that are of particular value in approaching my subject as well as those with particularly useful bibliographies. The definitive history of analytic philosophy remains John Passmore's A Hundred Years ofPhilosophy (London: Duckworth, 1957). It is indispensable for serious discussion of any aspect of the subject. Rudolf Haller's Studien zur osterreichischen Philosophie, "Studien zur osterreichischen Philosophic," vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1979) and his Fragen zu Wittgenstein "Studien zur osterreichischen Philosophic," vol. 10 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986) offer a view of the Vienna Circle from an Austrian perspective, which corrects one-sided Anglo-Saxon views of the subject (but in no way supplants Passmore). I have benefited greatly from numerous discussions of the subjects treated here with Professor Hailer-which is not to say that we are in agreement on the matters discussed here. Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn and RudolfCarnap, "Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung" in Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, eds. M. Neurath and R.S. Cohen, "The Vienna Circle Collection," vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 299-318. It lists Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Godel, Hans Hahn, Viktor Kraft, Karl Menger, Marcel Natkin, Otto Neurath, Olga Hahn-Neurath,

6. 7.

8.

9.

277

Theodor Radakovic, Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann as the members of the circle along with a number of quasi-official "sympathisers" and the three leading representatives of the scientific conception of the world: Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This document remains the classical statement of what A. E. Blumenberg and Herbert Feigl christened "logical positivism" in 1931. The historical introduction is noteworthy for the way it claims legitimation on the basis of a common ancestry in the work of figures like Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann whose ideas were not congenial to one another during their lifetimes. There are a number of useful anthologies of writings from the Vienna Circle. Two useful anthologies are Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: Macmillan, 1959) and Hubert Schleichert, Logischer Empirismus-Der Wiener Kreis (Munich: Fink, 1975). There is certainly much more to the Vienna Circle than is summarized here. In general the effort to make philosophy scientific produced works on epistemology that delved deeply into minute aspects of problems like, say, formalization of natural language, whose very acribic character lends a certain obscurity to them when approached by the general reader today. They are clearly works of philosophers who consider philosophy a field of professional activity. In the end this profession· alism tended to clash with the campaign against metaphysics inasmuch us till' positivists tended to simply replace metaphysical theories with so-called scient ilk theories which were often just as metaphysical, but now metaphysical in the IHIIIlt' of science. Quine's "naturalism" is one such program. In any case, emphnsis on logical with the ranks of logical positivism made it particularly suitable for tlw organization of philosophy as a profession in say the United States. For a full account see J!llrgen J!llrgensen, The Development of Logical Po.l·itil>i.l'l/1, "Foundations of the Unity of Science," vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicn~o Press, 1951 ). For an up-to-date bibliography of the movement see Friedrich Stt1dler, Studien zum Wiener Kreis: Ursprung, Entwicklung und Wirkung des logi.l'l'ht'll Empirismus im Kontext (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997). The publications lmd colloquia of Stadler's "Institut Wiener Kries" in Vienna are the indispensable sources fur understanding the contemporary impact oflogical positivism. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London, 1958). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (OX· ford: Oxford University Press,1953), Part I is the most polished statement we have of his mature philosophical views. The literature on Wittgenstein has grown to n point that it is scarcely possible to obtain an overview. There are three Wittgenst.cin bibliographies but they are either sadly out of date or otherwise incomplete: Fron~ois LaPointe, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), V.A. and S. G. Schankar, A Wittgenstein Bibliography (London: Routledge, 1986) and Peter Philipp, Bibliographie zur Wittgenstein-Uteratur, "Working Papers from the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen," no. 13 (Bergen: The Wittgenstein Archives, 1996). See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin,loc. cit. Gordon P. Baker, "Verehrung und Verkehrung: Waismann and Wittgenstein" in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C.G. Luckhardt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 280ff; cf. Ray Monk, The Duty <~f Genius (London: Duckworth, 1990), 324f. In certain circles it is widely believed that in their controversies over priority with respect to the term "physicalism" Carnap, the professional logician, expressed clearly what Wittgcnstein,the philosophical primitive, could not adequately put into words. WiUgenstein's ire aside, t.his view discounts deep-scat~d differ~nces between Wittgcnstein and all logical positivists going hack to his ~arly encounter with I l~inrk-h I lertt.. From the stnrt WittJ.(~nst~in had a ''ompil'tl'IY difk•r-

278

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited ent conception of philosophy from theirs-that despite proceeding from the same sort of problems. Kjell S. Johannessen has developed this thesis in his Tradisjoner og skoler i modeme vitenskapsfilosofi, 2nd ed. (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1987). The classical criticisms of strong physicalism are Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), Stephen Tou1min, Foresight and Understanding (London, Hutchison, 1961 ), Thomas Kuhn, op. cit. The discussions around Kuhn's work are particularly relevant to the critique of strong physicalism. Toulmin's Human Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), for example, contains, inter alia, a rehabilitation ofNeurath's "weak" physicalism restated as an argument against positivism. This term has caused much confusion inasmuch as it sometimes leads superficial readers to think in terms of mere games-now we play one, now another-whereas Wittgenstein wants to emphasize that it is in games that we first learn to interweave words and symbols as we come to master our mother tongue (Philosophical Investigations, I, 7). On "liberal" and "decadent" Vienna see Carl E. Schorske, op. cit. (n. 8, p. 247). Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews. See n.2. On the Wittgensteinian tradition in Bergen see my "The Bergen School of Aesthetics," Wittgenstein and Norway, eds. Kjell Johannessen, Rolf Hansen, Knut Olav Amas (Oslo: Solum, 1994), 197-216. Seen. 4. The international symposium "Culture, Language and Artificial Intelligence" held at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 1988 addressed this problem centrally. Papers form the conference and other contributions to the contemporary Swedish critical modernism can be found in Springer Verlag's series "Skill and Technology;' ed. Bo Goranzon. I have myself participated in these debates in Sweden intensively since 1986.

Notes

7. 8. 9.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

See my "Psychoanalysis: Science, Literature or Art. "Austriaca 25 (Rouen, 1985), 39. I have drawn heavily here upon Brian McGuinness's excellent "Freud and Wittgenstein," Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1982), 27-43. Alasdair Macintyre, The Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958). Cf. Wittgenstein. See, for example, Nancy Mairs, Plaintext (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). There has been much discussion of Alice James, sister of Henry and William, in this context. On this point see my "Myth and Certainty," Style, Politics and the Future ofPhilosophy (n. 37), 159-172. Many ofthe points I gloss over here hastily are developed in this volume at length. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986) develops the depth ofTolstoy's position in ways that clearly invite comparison with Wittgenstein. Given Wittgenstein's interest in Tolstoy this is hardly accidental. Berlin's analysis of Tolstoy makes this part of the Russian master's work available for philosophical discussion in ways that it had not been hitherto, which are of central importance for Wittgenstein's philosophy. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). For example two ideas that bind Laing to Wittgenstein are the idea that the patient is schizophrenic

(rather than "has" schizophrenia) and the notion that what is normal is anything but self-evident to us. I have developed this point in my essay, "Self-Deception, Naturalism and Certainty." in Style, Politics and the Future ofPhilosophy. The late Professor Norman Malcolm told me that this text in fact refers to an actual conversation with Moore. McGuinness, op. cit., 27.

Chapter 12 1.

2.

This is not to say that they should not perhaps have had some second thoughts about making this a central claim, if not the central claim, in the Tractatus. The very parenthetical character of the remark in context should serve to remind us that it is a consequence following from other ideas in the book and not a central thesis. The two were not personally acquainted. However, Wittgenstein, one-fifth of whose donation to "worthy young artists" was given by Ludwig von Ficker to Trakl, wns impressed enough by Trakl to want to meet him in November of 1914 when they were both serving on the Galician Front. Wittgenstein arrived at the military hospilul in Cracow on the sixth of November he discovered that Trakl had died three UliYS prior. I have always found it surprising that no one has to date produced a lictionul meeting Ia Tom Stoppard between these two extraordinary personalities. The answer to this question has a lot to do with their respective unorthodox hut nonetheless extraordinary, conceptions of precision as the facsimile editions ol' Trakl and Wittgenstein currently being prepared at the Wittgenstein Archiws in Bergen, Norway and the Brenner Archives in Innsbruck. Georg Trakl, op. cit., I,. 463. To dispel misunderstanding from the start it must be emphasized that to speak of lhl' world as constructed by us is not to say that we constructed it ex nihilo hut to emphasize in the spirit of Heinrich Hertz, Ludwig Boltzmann and pragmutists generally that there can be a plurality of of true representations of the world us the early physicist philosophers were the first to point out. To make a long story short. in order to discover novelty in the world we must invent a new way of spcuking about it. See the essay on Hertz above. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Ti.ibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag: 1977) §29, 134-40ff. GeorgTrakl, Zoe. cit. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, trans. L, Furtmi.iller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 6. Wittgenstein to Ficker,12. See, for example the pioneer essay "Die Trakl Welt" by Josef Leitgeb in W¥>rt im Gebirge 3 (1951). Trakl, op. cit. I, 34. Ibid., 96. The resultant picture is remarkably similar to Oskar Kokoschka 's gruesome "Pi~tu" on the poster for his 1909 play "Morder-Hoffnung der Frauen." The poem is divided systematically into unequal parts in the manner of a "Golden Section." Ibid., 51. Cf. Willgenstein 's Vienna, 113f. On Trakl's life sec Hans Wcichselbaum's dclinitive, 0l'org Trakl (Sal~.hurp,: Olio MUller Verlag, 1994). Will~e11.vtl'i11 '.1· Vil'lllla, 191 f.

a

3.

4. 5.

Chapter 11 1.

279

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

280 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited See my "Wittgenstein, Ficker and Der Brenner," Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. Grant Luckhardt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 166. Ibid., 123. Gerald Stieg, Der Brenner und die Fackel, 261-264. Karl Kraus, Briefe an Sidonie Nadhimy von Borutin, ed. F. Pfafflin (Miinchen: Kosel,1974), 83. Ibid., 40. On Trakl and Loos see Christian Paul Berger, "Geist und Konstruktion," Das Fenster 42 (1987), 4122-29. I am grateful to Dr. Berger as well as to Professor Walter Methlagl for fruitful discussions about Trakl 's life and works. Georg Trakl, op. cit. I, 465. Walter Methlagl developed this theme at length in a seminar that we held together in Innsbruck on Wittgenstein and Trakl in 1985. Hermann Bahr, "Die Vierte Ausstellung 1899 ,"Die Secession, Wien 1900, 122-4. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "In ein Stammbuch," Gedichte und Dramen I, Gesammelte Werke, eds. Schoeller und Hirsch, 10 vols. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979), 205. Claudio Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos in der osterreichischen Literatur (Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1966). Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Ark, 1983), 50. Trakl, ibid., I, 365. Ibid., 51. R.J.W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 44. Evans's The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy (n. 18) describes the transition from Renaissance to Counter-Reformation with its concomitant transformation of Hermetic magic into a politically permissible, sacramental, "white" magic, which was the exclusive property of the ruling house and a forbidden "black" magic. On Archimboldo see the exhibition catalog The Arcimboldo Effect (Milan: Bompiani, 1987). Ibid.,165. Boyer, op. cit., 363. Ernst Hanisch and Ulrike Fleischer, Im Schatten berilhmter Zeiten ("Trakl Studien," vol. 14 [mistakenly printed as 13]; Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1986), 52. On the Salzburg Festival see Michael Steinberg, The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology, 1890-1938. For the reaction of Kraus and the Brenner Circle to the founding of the festival see Gerald Stieg, "Ferdinand Ebners Kulturkritik," 237-45. Georg Trakl, op. cit., I, 519. See the exhibition catalog, Monumental: Minimal: Der Bildhauer und Holzschnitzer Ottmar Zeiller ( 1868-1921), ed. Erika Wimmer (lnnsbruck: Skarabaus, 1996). Heidegger, "Die Sprache im Gedicht: eine Erorterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht" Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 35-82. Ficker to Karl Emmerich Hirt, Brenner Archives, Innsbruck.

I IJ ~~

"J:j ~'\

~~

:~

'·*

•IX

.i I~

J

Index Abraham a Santa Clara. See Ulrich Megerle Alfredson, Hans, works of, 117 Angell, Norman, 105 Avant-gardism, 22 Bahr, Hermann, 20, 22 modernism writings of, 78-79 romanticism vs naturalism, 77-78 vs Ibsen, 77-78 Bauer, Otto, Vienna Circle and, 210 van Beethoven, Ludwig, 24 Vienna's treatment of, 28 Wagner' essay about, 86 Beller, Steven, 11 Viennese values Haskalah approval, 208 Bernhard, Thomas, cultural integrity goals, 22 Bisexuality cause of, 52-53 meaning of, 48-49 universal appeal of, 60, 60-61 Bizet, Alexandre Cesar Leopold vs Wagner criticism, 128, 142-143 Carmen's adaptation, 130 public recognition of, 130-131 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 146 Brahms, Johannes, 2 Brandes, Georg, 78 Brenner, Des (periodical), 17, 233 Broch, Hermann, 1, 16, 21, 75,209 critical modernism, 21 Bruckner, Anton, 25 Burber, Martin, 106 Buschbeck, Erhard, 235 Canetti, Elias, 1 Carnap, Rudolf, 146 fundamental humnn knowledge, 205 Cassirer, Ernst, 169 Cavel, ~Hunley, I (L'i

Critical modernism Bahr's writings on, 78-80 characteristics of, 21 cultural paradigms, 208-209 goals of, 21-22 grandfathers of, 81 Ibsen's interpreting, 80-81 Ibsen's philosophical dim~~nsions, 62-63 Ibsen's philosophical variations,!! 183 Ibsen's self-destruction, 77-7!! Kant's moral philosophy, 71-74 Kierkegaard's achievements, 74-75 leader of, 22 origins of, 20-21 Peer Gynt and, 61-62 understanding of, 61 vs narcissistic solipsism, 21 Weininger and, 59-61 Dallago, Carl, 75 Debussy, Claude, vs Offenbach's wurk, 113-114 Decadence, vs tragic knowledge, 127128 Wagner's modernist traits, 127-12!! Dialogue characteristics of, I 12-1 13 concern for, I 05 first philosopher of, I 06 human life and, I 05-106 intellectual fantasizing, I 09-112 meaning of life, I 06 monological existence, I 09 musical theater and, I 13 philosophy of, I 06-1 OK vs Freud, II 0 Se(' also OJTenbuch Dilthey, Wilhelm, 51 Drury, Mnurice, I 67 I>O,·kcrs, Alexander, 'J4

rr 282

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Duhem, Pierre, 159 Durer, Albrecht, 239 Dworkin, Andrea, 48 Ebner, Ferdinand, 75 art's purpose, 111-112 central thought of, 107 dialogue problems, 108 dialogue's first philosopher, 106 dialogue's philosophy, 107 intellectual fantasizing, 109-110 metanoia and, 111 monological existence concepts, 109 as religious thinker, 85 vs agreement, 108-109 vs Freud, 110 vs Strindberg, 111 vs Wagner, 103-104, 130 works of, 109-111 Ecstasy, 134-135 Ellis, Havelock, 48 Engelmann, Paul, feuilleton art and, 24 von Esterle, Max, 241 Ethics as aesthetics happiness defined, 229-231 interpretations of, 227-229 Trakl and, 226-227, 245 Wittgenstein and, 225-226 European culture cultural paradigms, 207-209 European Union's power, 210 history making approaches, 210-211 Leibnizian language projects, 198 liberalism vs modernism, 209-210 logical positivism and, 199-201 Mach's Newtonian physics project, 198 philosophy's role, 201 political climate, 201-202 rational vs modernism, 209-210 Russell's classic rationalism project, 198-199 • science revolution origins, 206 science unity, 207 Vienna Circle and, 197-198 Fackel, Die, (periodical), 18, 107 Fann, K. T., 167 Feuilleton art, defined, 23 von Ficker, Ludwig, 161, 231, 244 writings of, 107 Frank, 1osef, Vienna Circle and, 210

Index Frank, Philipp, Vienna Circle and, 210 Fraus, Karl critical modernism leader, 22 cultural integrity goals, 22 feuilleton art and, 23-24 public misunderstanding, 33-34 writing themes, 22-23 Frege, Gottlob, 187 .Leibnizian project, 198 Wittgenstein correspondences, 160161 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 210 psychology's future and, 51-52 Weininger's use of, 50 Wittgenstein relationship, 214-217

philosophy and Wittgenstein, 148149 questions to Mach, 151-152 scientific concept understanding, 152-153 simplicity questioned by, 151-152 Herzfeld, Marie, 79 Herzl, Theodor, mass movement of, 39 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 43, 48 Hitler, Adolf, 11 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Vienna's treatment of, 27, 242 Holderlin, Friedrich, 217 Holderlin, Lieder, 112 Homosexuality biological theory, 43-44 hereditary explanation of, 44 Weininger and, 43-45 Husser!, Edmund, 51

Gellner, Ernest, Wittgenstein and, 147148, 165-166 Gerber, Artus, 61 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 44 Gould, Glenn, 15 Graves, Robert, writings of, 105 Gray, Dorian, I, 95, 183 Grieg, Edvard, 63 Grillparzer, Franz, Vienna description, 17 "Habsburg Myth," 239 Haecker, Theodor, 75 Halevy, Ludovic, 130, 137 Handke, Peter, cultural integrity goals, 22 Hanslick, Eduard music composition, 29-30 musical aesthetics, 29 newspaper critic, 29 Hanson, Norwood Russell, 165, 205 Hauer, Josef Matthias critics view of, 112 Klangfarblehre theory, 112 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 24 Vienna's treatment of, 28 Hertleb, Renate, 94-95 Hertz, Heinrich, 146 goals of, 172-173 grammar presentation, 152 mechanic axiomatization, 154-156 metaphysical problems, 149-150, 154 models of nature characteristics, 153154 Newton's physics and, 150-151

Ibsen, Henrik, 177 misconception reasons, 62-63 Weininger use of, 59 works of, 59-60 ltten, Johannes, 112

'r

j,

'

~I

l

~

·J

\~a

~

{t. lli

lli

James, William, 51 Janacek, Leos, 134 works of, 116 Jaspers, Karl, 42, 179 Jensen, Jprgen, 112 Jew. See Judaism Jodi, Friedrich, 48 Judaism cultural "Jewishness", 52-54 Mahler's choice of, 207-208 Offenbach and, 113, 131-132, 140141 Viennese values approval by, 208 Wagner's understanding of, 131-132 Weininger's attitudes, 38, 41-42 Kafka, Franz, 1 Kant, Immanuel autonomous human being, 176 change of heart achieving, 73-74 rationalist enterprise of, 71-72 Weininger's use of, 50-51 Kassner, Rudolf, 75 Key, Ellen, 79 Kierkegaard, Spren moral philosopher of, 74-75

283

narcissism analysis, 75 Klangfarblehre Theory, 112 Klimt, Gustav, 85 Klinger, Max, 94 Kokoschka, Oskar, 235-236 Kracauer, Siegfried, writing of, 113 Kraus, Karl, 1, 95, 183,209,235,235236 accomplishments of, 18 anti-Viennese, 2 aphorism development, 189-190 art's moral dimensions, 19 critical modernism and, 20-22 criticism of, 111 dialogue influencing, 106-107 Frankfurt School and, 113 Ibsen's philosophical variations, 8 I influence of, 185, 187-188 language role, 192-193 Loos and, 18-19 political views of, 18-19 style and, 191 Trakl and, 20 value origins of, 189 vs Lueger, 8-9 vs Offenbach, 115 Weininger and, 19-20 Wittgenstein and, 20 word play, 191-192 words used by, 134 works of, 105, 107 World War I causes, 19 writing transformation of, 18H Kuhn, Thomas, 37, 165, 205 Kulka, Julius, 77 Laing, R. D., 222 normalcy, 218-219 Language philosophy aphorisms, 190 humor role, 194 influence defined, 186 language role, 192-193 natural histories, 195-196 style, 191 Wittgcnstein influences, I HS-1 H7 wordplay, 191-192 Lecher, Ernst, 146 Lipsius, Justus, 210 Logical positivism, Wittgenstcin's nt.ti-

tudes, 209 I.omhmso, Ccsnrc

n

.· I

284

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

criminals and, 45-46 normalcy criteria, 46 Weininger's influencing, 45 women assumptions by, 46-47 Loos, Adolf, 209, 235 art's moral dimensions, 19 functional architecture of, 18-19 Ibsen's philosophical variations, 81 public misunderstanding of, 33-34 revolution against revolutions, 19 Trakl friend of, 236-237 Lubitsch, Ernst, works of, 115 Lueger, Karl anti-Semite, 17 mass movement of, 39 vs Kraus, 8-9 Lukacs, Georg, 75

r"'

McGowran, Jack, 56 McGuinness, Brian, 176, 185, 188-189 Mach, Ernst, 85 Hertz's simplicity questions, 151152 Newtonian physics project, 198 philosophy of science founder, 150 scientific concepts understanding, 152-153 vs models of nature, 153-154 vs Newton, 150 MacKinnon, Catherine, 48 Madness character and, 218-219 mental disorders, 221-222 mistakes vs truth, 220-221 psychoanalysis and, 214-217 vs mistakes, 213-214 Wittgenstein understanding, 219-220 Magris, Claudio, 239 Mahler, Gustav, 25 Catholic vs Jewish religion, 207-208 Schoenberg influences on, 32-33 Vienna's treatment of, 27 Makart, Hans, 242 Marcel, Gabriel, 42, 222 Marx, Karl, 210 Mauthner, Fritz, 227 Megerle,Ulrich, Vienna's rhetorical tradition, 8-9 Meilhac, Henri, 130, 137 Metanoia defjned, 111 purpose of, 111

Index vs Wagner, 132-133, 135-141 words used by, 134 works of, 111-117, 112 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 155, 172

Models of Nature, 153-154 Moore, G. E., 213,219 Morton, Fredrick, 2 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 24 Vienna's treatment of, 27-28 Mtiller, Robert, 236 Mtiller-Guttenbrunn, Adam, 76 Musical dramas Offenbach's use of, 134 Wagner's rejection of, 133-134 Musical theatre ambiguity in, 114-115 critics of, 113-114 purpose of, 113 See also Jacques Offenbach Musil, Robert, 1, 208 cultural integrity goals, 22 "other condition" defined, 90

Pears, David, 179 Peer Gynt critics today, 64 development of, 61-62 Norwegian's distortion of, 63 Weininger and, 64-65, 67-71 Peirce, C. S., 151 Popper, Sir Karl, 38, 81 Positivism, Enlightenment values and Wittgenstein, 147-148 Postmodernism Nietzsche's critique of, 120 Offenbach's place in, 120 Wagner's art, 121 Probst, Ferdinand, study by, 55 Prostitution preventing, 47 women victimless in, 47 Putnam, Hilary, 165

Nadherny, Sidonie, 188-189 Narcissistic cultures sexual activity in, 48-51 understanding difficulty of, 37 vs Weininger's attitudes, 38 Neuefreie Presse (newspaper), 24, 29 Neurath, Otto, 159, 197 Nietzsche, Fredrich, 85 art concept of, 123-124 Dionysian concepts of, 93 modernism criticism, 120 music drama and, 134 Schorske's views of, 93-94 Wagner's criticism, 121-122, 125127 Weininger's use of, 50 Offenbach, Jacques achievements of, 141-142 ambiguity function, 114-115 brilliance of, 117-118 composition mode of, 137 critics of, 113-114 Italian music links, 141-142 Jewish themes in, 113-114,131-132, 140-141 Jove concepts, 144-145 musical challenges of, 136-137 musical theatre and, 113 Nietzsche and, 144-145 repetition use by, 140 success criteria of, 145 understanding, 115-117

Quine, W. V. 0., 159 Rapture, composer's goal, 89 Ravel, Maurice, 131 Reinhardt, Max, 242 Remarque, Erich Maria, writings of, 105 Rosenstock-HUssey, Eugene, 106 Rosenzweig, Franz, 106 Rubek, Arnold, 63 Russell, Bertrand, 213, 219 classic rationalism project, 198-199 fundamental human knowledge, 205 Wittgenstein and, 147-148, 178-180

"'

!

_..1..

Schiele, Egon, 20, 209 Schnitzler, Arthur, 6, 22 criticism of, 111 psychoanalysis and, 214-217 Schoenberg, Arnold, 112, 209 composition origins, 30-31 goals of, 35-36 Ibsen's philosophical variations, 81 identity concerns of, 34 Mahler influencing by, 32-33 moral renewal goals, 31-32 popular music and, 35 public misunderstanding of, 33-34

285

style vs idea, 30 Vienna's treatment of, 27-28 vs advant-gardism, 22 vs elitism, 34-35 works of, 30 Schonerer, Georg von, mass movement of, 39 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 146 art form value, 87-88 creative origins of, 87-88 music importance of, 87-88 philosophical foundations of, 8C1 Schorske, Carl, 3, 17 collective narcissistic ohservathlllH, 91-92 feuilleton art defined, 23 Gesamtkunstwerk origins, 1)].112 Nietzsche and, 92-93 Vienna's artist sources, '11-'1.2 Vienna's scenarios of, tJ2.11 I Vienna's view of, .H!-.\11 Schubert, Franz, 24 Scientific knowledge, I 'Ill Secession Exhibition, iiiiiHlllnnn• or, 101-103 Semprun, Jorgl!, 21 0 Sexuality Weininger nml, 42-4.1 Weininger's "idrnl type," 4H 'II Si'e tll.l'o llonHINexuullly; UINCIIIIIIIity Shaw, Bernard, M Strauss, Juhaun Jr.• 2. 2fl Strauss, Richard, 2'1, .i I, 242 Vienna's treat mcnt of, 27 Strindbcrg, August, 17 goals of, 117-118 intellectual fantasizing, 110-111 vs Ebner, Ill Weininger criticism, II I works of, 11 0 Swieten, Gerard van, 6 Swieten, Gottfried van, 7 Taylor, Charles, 165 Theresa, Maria, 6 Timms, Edward, 188-189 Toulmin, Stephen, 165, 205 Trakl, Georg, 181, 209 accomplishments of, 226 as critical modernist, 235 ethics commitment, 245

-1 286

Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

"Habsburg myth, 239-241 Ibsen's philosophical variations, 81 Loos friend of, 236 normalcy and, 217 poetry's tone, 231 Salzburg influence, 241 silence element, 244 Vienna's life, 238 Viennese modernism, 238-239 Wittgenstein and, 226-227, 231 writings of, 20, 227, 233-235, 237238,242-243,245-246 Vergo, Peter, 95 Vienna art status in, 23 artist treatment in, 27 creative milieu in, 11-12 cultural creativity conditions, 12-13 factors explaining, 3-6 genius abusing, 1-3 lessons from, 12 literature richness of, 1-3 medical science of, 6 music of, 24-25 musical forms from, 25 musical heritage and, 7 musical past of, 24-25 re-Catholicization, 9-10 talent-fostering traditions, 6 theatricality of, 7-8 Ulrich's influences on, 8-9 "whole society" and, 10-11 Vienna Circle development from, 209 European union, 197-198 group phenomenology, 202-203 logical positivism goals, 199-201 origins of, 199 as outsider group, 209 political climate, 202 scientific investigation and, 201 vs metaphysics, 201 "wissenschaftliche, Weltauffassung," 199 Wittgenstein's disdain of, 182 Wittgenstein influencing, 203-204 Vienna's composers complacency challenging, 17-18 critical modernism and, 22-23 goals of, 16-1 7 Schoenberg and, 15-16, 24

Index

"value vacuum" and, 17 vs avant-gardism, 22 Wagner, Richard, 25 aesthetic creativity views, 86-87 aesthetic ideal, 90-91 artistry of, 135-136 Beethoven essay, 86, 98 biological nature and, 100-101 composer's role, 89-90 dreams importance of, 88-89 hearing vs seeing, 88 idea origins, 95-96 overlooking of, 85-86 unconscious life idea, 98-99 Vienna overlooking of, 85 views of, 97-98 vs Ebner, 96-97, 99-100 vs Offenbach's work, 113 Wagner's modernist traits, 124-125 animal sounds, 133 decadence, 127-128 ecstasy evoking, 135 musical dramas, 133-134 Nietzsche vs, 142-145 Offenbach's music vs Wagner, 131132 pathos of, 128 vs Offenbach, 135-142 Wagner's defenders, 128-131 Weber, Max, 89-90 Webern, Anton, 236 Weininger, Leopold, 55 Weininger, Otto, 17, 97,209 acceptance of, 54-56 achievement magnitude of, 76-77 Bahr's writings and, 79 bisexuality appeal in, 60-61 Chamberlain contributions to, 50 character-centered thinking, 20 cultural "Jewishness", 52-54 "eternal feminine" theme, 70-71 Freud contributions to, 50 homosexuality, 443-45 Ibsen's discussions, 80-81 Ibsen's philosophical dimensions finding, 62-63 "ideal type," 48-51 interpreting problems, 60 Judaism understanding of, 41-42 Kant's contributions to, 50-51 Kant's moral philosophy, 71-74

Kicrkcgnord nnd, 74-76 loving phenomenon and, 65-66 mental status of, 55 misunderstanding of, 19 modernity spirit of, 41 moral philosophy of, 52, 52-53 Nictr,sche contributions to, 50 Peer Gynt and, 61-62, 64-65,67-71 philosophical views of, 19 plasms theory, 51 psychology's future, 51-52 reactions to, 63-64 reception of, 54-55 sexuality, 42-43 sexuality views of, 47-48 social attitudes of, 38 social reform reasons, 42-43 theory of plasms, 51 understanding of, 61 women's view by, 40-41, 45 Whitehead, Alfred North, 199 Wien, Jung, 22 Wiener Moderne, 208 Wilde, Oscar, 28 Winch, Peter, 165 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 38, 209 character and, 147, 218 Enlightenment values, 147-148 ethics view of, 204 European historic approaches, 210211

fictive natural histories, 195 Frege's correspondences, 160-161 Freud's relationship, 214 Gellner and, 147-148, 165-166 Hertz's influence on, 158-160, 163165 Hertz's philosophy and, 148-149 humor's role, 194 Ibsen's philosophical variations, 81 influence of, 20, 186 Kraus influence, 185, 187-188, 195196 language limits, 20, 204-205 language philosophy, 185-187 language's role, 192-193

287

madness vs mistakes, 213-214 people influenced, 185-187 philosophical achievements of, 186187 philosophy conception of, 156-158 philosophy strategy, 193-195 on psychoanalysis, 214 public misunderstanding, 33-34 publications of, 20 Russell and, 147-148, 178-180 science beliefs, 148, 166-168 style of, 204 tractarian views, 160 Tractatus importance, 161-163 Trakl and, 231 understanding of, 219 Vienna's circle influence, 203-204 Wittgenstein's religious views Cartesianism critics vs, 180-181 criminal's world in, 167-167 ethics and, 176-180 Hertz and, 172-1 74 origins of, 182-183 philosophical notebooks of, 174-175 philosophical views of, 179-180 philosophy of, 171-172 questioning of, 174-175 religious origins, 181-182 science vs, 172 self vs world, 175-176 vs twentieth-century philosophy, 171 vs war, 174-175 wartime notebooks, 178 Wolf, Hugo, 2, 25 Women education for, 40 "eternal feminine" theme, 70-71 Lombroso's assumptions on, 46-47 prostitution, 4 7 Weininger's emancipation views, 4041,45 See also Prostitution Zeiller, Ottmar, 243 Zettel, 194-195 Zweig, Stefan, 40, I 05