WITTGENSTEIN'S VIENNA REVISITED
Mike
Essays illuminating philosopher's world
WITTGENSTEIN'S VIENNA REVISITED
By Allan Janik
Transaction, $49.95 287 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY STEPHEN GOODE
In the 12 magnificent essays that make up his new book,
"Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited," the Austrian historian and
philosopher Allan Janik divides Viennese culture in the years around
1900 into four parts. There was "Baroque Vienna" of the church and
monarchy whose politics, as a contemporary (and accurate) mot had it
was "absolutism mollified by slovenliness." There was liberal Vienna,
a cosmopolitan, progressive culture, that had existed only since the
1860s that had done much to industrialize the country and establish
modern finance.
And then there were the two cultures that most interest Mr.
Janik: Wiener Moderne, Viennese modern, a hothouse culture comprised
of poets, painters, and aesthetes that was aptly described by the
writer Hermann Bahr, one of its most vocal members, as a "romanticism
of the nerves" and, secondly, the culture that formed in reaction to
Viennese modern, which Mr. Janik calls critical modernism and was
represented by such thinkers as the social and cultural critics Otto
Weininger and Ferdinand Ebner, the satirist Karl Kraus, but most
significantly by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Nearly 30 years ago, Mr. Janik, along with co-author Stephen
Toulmin published "Wittgenstein's Vienna," a splendid read that placed
the great philosopher culturally and intellectually firmly in his
native Vienna and Austria and argued persuasively that his thought
can't be truly understood unless that background were fully taken into
consideration.
The 12 essays and the introduction to "Wittgenstein's Vienna
Revisited" deepen our understanding of Wittgenstein's background. As
in his earlier work, Mr. Janik's contention in the new book is to show
that the world was badly mistaken to see Wittgenstein's thought as an
offspring of Bertrand Russell's positivism with its strong emphasis on
mathematics and science. (Wittgenstein was a student of Russell's at
Cambridge University and taught at that school for many years).
Rather it is Vienna and its culture — particularly Viennese
modern and the critical reactions to it — that supply us with the real
clues as to what the author of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosoophicus"
and "Philosophical Investigations" was up to. Just as "a red square
against a black background is perceived differently from a red square
of the same dimensions seen against a white background," writes Mr.
Janik, so Wittgenstein's thought is perceived in a vastly different
way when seen against Vienna 1900 than when looked at in the context
of Russell's Cambridge.
And the basic difference comes down to how readers are to
understand the famous last sentence of the "Tractatus" where
Wittgenstein ends with the proposition that "Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must remain silent." For positivists such as Russell the
sentence simply meant a rejection of all metaphysics as nonsense. In
their view, Wittgenstein urged silence because he concluded that
outside of mathematicas and the more rigorous sciences, there is
nothing that can be said that has meaning.
But this was not Wittgenstein's intention, Mr. Janik insists.
Wittgenstein's point in urging us to be quiet about what cannot be
talked about, as Mr. Janik sees, was that you must remain silent
because "what you end up saying when you try to put what is higher
into words is something trivial." To avoid triviality, we say nothing.
How Wittgenstein arrived at this revolutionary conclusion is the
subject of "Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited." Born in 1889, the
philosopher came of age in the years following 1900 when Wiener
Moderne — which included such movements as Secession and Jugenstil —
was at its peak. "This is our religious idea: to breed men into
artists," Hermann Bahr declared. And as Mr. Janik shows, at the center
of the movement was the belief that the important thing in life was
not that "my impressions of the world . . . be accurate, but that they
be mine."
One's personal and private experience became "the ultimate
criterion of truth," because one's "dreams and ecstacies are one's own
in ways that nothing else is" and are therefore the only knowledge
worth having.
Mr. Janik describes this view of the world as narcissistic and
breathtakingly subjective — and it is. Where did it come from? In his
"Vienna 1900," the historian Carl Schorske wrote that the Wiener
Moderne had learned their subjectivism from Friedrich Nietzsche. But
Mr. Janik gently disagrees and shows that the major source had to have
been Richard Wagner whose operas and essays (particularly one that
Wagner wrote on Beethoven) provided "the philosophical justification
of this withdrawal into our own experience" into a world of fantasy
where ecstasy was the supreme achievement.
A profound reaction to the intense private and personal world of
the Wiener Moderne began to form very early. In 1903, Otto Weininger
published his "Sex and Character," a highly controversial work accused
(wrongly Mr. Janik argues) of anti-Semitism and misogynism, but which
attacked the Vienese moderns head on by concluding that their
dissolving of the boundaries between the self and the world was
"immoral in the most basic sense" (Mr. Janik's words). The self,
Weinginger declared is limited and so is self-expression, and we
humans would do well to recognize that fact.
By 1919, when Ferdinand Ebner brought out his "The Word and the
Spiritual Realities" the critical reaction to Vienese modernity was
largely complete (except for the work of Wittgenstein). Ebner's thesis
was that what was immoral about subjectivism (Ebner called it
"Ego-Encapsulation") was that it ended in monologue rather than
dialogue. Monologue results in our creating a picture of the world as
we want it and replacing the real world with that fantasy world. Truth
comes only from engagement with the Other as Other. The important
thing in life isn't to think about something. It is to do it.
But Wittgenstein's background isn't complete without the
satirist Karl Kraus, influential editor of such journals as The Torch
and author of the extraordinary (and very long) drama, "The Last Days
of Mankind." It was Kraus's notion that many of the social and
cultural problems of his time came from abuse of language. From that
belief it is but a short step to the argument that regeneration of
society and culture could derive only from the correct use of words
and a revitalization of our daily speech.
The stage is now set for the "Tractatus" and more particularly
for Wittgenstein's later works and their deep concern with what people
can say that has meaning and authenticity. Mr. Janik quotes one of the
philosopher's great aphorisms, where Wittgenstein defined philosophy
as "a battle against the bewitchment of our minds by means of
language."
For Wittgenstein, Mr. Janik shows, getting right with the world
had come to mean learning how to resist the lure of words that
bewitched and distorted, and that separated us from what is real.
Interestingly, this led the philosopher to adopt what he himself
called a "religious point of view," though he denied that he was a
religious man.
Mr. Janik writes that Wittgenstein saw religion as "the source
of color and vitality in life." But more importantly, "His conviction
that the religious picture of human nature as basically ill was more
profound than the Enlightenment's picture of it as perfect," Mr. Janik
maintains, and helped him see that the "genuine metaphysical malaise
of our time" is "the refusal to recognize the limits that Nature
itself imposes upon an animal that speaks." It was a conclusion — of
human limitation grounded in the real world directly experienced —
that springs clearly from Weinginger, Ebner, and critical modernism,
enriched by Wittgenstein's genius.
Surely few scholars can rival the breadth and depth of Mr.
Janik's knowledge of fin de siecle Vienna and Wittgenstein. These
essays are collected from scholarly publications but are a pleasure to
read. Indeed, there seems to be no end to the author's ability to
enlighten.
In his short, brilliant essay on the great Austrian poet Georg
Trakl, Mr. Janik not only manages to convey something of the
achievement of that extraordinary writer, he also indeliably imprints
Trakl's significance and his relationship to Wittgenstein and the
violent, bloody 20th Century on our minds by pointing out that Trakl
was a poet of silences just as Wittgenstein was a philosopher of
silences. But Trakl's silences were due, in Mr. Janik's view, because
he thought one could not write of brutality and corruption without
trivializing them.
Stephen Goode is senior writer at Insight magazine.
Gertrude Slany
Many thanks for the review and the litererary link - this book will be the
Christmas present for a former boyfriend of my daughter, who does
philosophical/linguistic studies and was always hoping for me to bring
back a book from Vienna, if possible in the original handwriting of
Wittgenstein. Naive for someone so educated . . .
In Isaac's language: muchos gracias
Gertrude Slany