Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited

Allan Janik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351326148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Fin de siecle Vienna was once memorably described by Karl Kraus as a "proving ground for the destruction of the world." In the decades leading to the World War that brought down the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city was at once an operetta dream world masking social and political problems and tension, as well as a center for the far-reaching explorations and innovations in music, art, science, and philosophy that would help to define modernity. One of the most powerful critiques of the retreat into fantasy was that of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early career in Vienna has helped frame debates about ethical and aesthetic values in culture. In Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited Allan Janik expands upon his work Wittgenstein's Vienna (co-authored with Stephen Toulmin) to amplify a number of significant points concerning the genesis of Wittgenstein's thought, the nature of Viennese culture, and criticism of contemporary culture.

Although Wittgenstein is the central figure in this volume, Janik places considerable emphasis on other influential figures, both Viennese and non-Viennese, in order to break down some of the persistent stereotypes about the philosopher and his surrounding culture, especially the myths of "carefree" Vienna and Wittgenstein the positivist. The persistence of these myths, in Janik's view, stems in part from the inability of many historians to differentiate past from present in the evaluation of intellectual currents. Janik reviews a number of figures overlooked in assessing Wittgenstein: Otto Weininger, Kraus, Schoenberg, Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, Offenbach, and Georg Trakl. All of these, Janik demonstrates, are absolutely necessary to understand what was at stake in the debates on aestheticism and the critique of a modern culture.

Wittgenstein's efforts to recognize the limits of thought and language and thus to be fair to science, religion, and art account for his place of honor among critical modernists. These essays elucidate Wittgenstein's perspective on our culture.

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 Wien”

“Schön bist du, doch gefährlich auch,…

Du Capua derGeister….

Weithin Musik, wie wenn im Baum

Der Vögel Chor erwachte,

Man spricht nicht, denkt wohl etwa kaum

Und fühlt das Halb-Gedachte…”

In his insightful essay “Arnold Schoenberg—A Perspective” Glenn Gould wrote, “The fact that people tend to make … [a] distinction 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 “hot-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 Broch 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 siècle 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 siècle 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 Broch 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 which have informed art have ceased to be compelling without having been replaced by anything solid. In other words style for style’s own sake devoid of any moral dimension became the central principle of Viennese aestheticism’s non-aesthetic.⁵ At the same time aesthetic considerations tended to dominate public life. Carl Schorske has described the ensuing situation trenchantly and succinctly:

Elsewhere in Europe, art for art’s sake implied the withdrawal of its devotees from a social class; in Vienna alone it claimed the allegiance of virtually a whole class, of which the artists were a part. The life of art became a substitute for the life of action. Indeed, as civic action proved increasingly futile, art became almost a religion, the source of meaning and the food of the soul.⁶

And, if art became religion, politics became theater, as the opportunistic anti-Semite Karl Lueger came to dominate Viennese public life in the years from 1895 till his death in 1911.

For Schoenberg the Viennese “value vacuum” manifested itself in music in that sense of comfort and ease which makes people too lazy to look actively for anything worthwhile at all. Long before Broch and Schoenberg, Franz Grillparzer had described Vienna as a “Capua of the mind,” where sensual delights could easily corrupt the unwary intellectual in the same way that the delights of Capua undermined the morale of Hannibal’s troops paving the way to defeat in battle.⁷ In a sense one could compare the role of cultural criticism in Schoenberg’s project to construct a musical culture for a society that already had a musical culture of sorts to Kierkegaard’s task of introducing Christianity into “Christendom.”⁸ The analogy with Kierkegaard is appropriate because the task at hand in both cases 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 challenging 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 essentially problematic.¹⁰ However, it is even more significant that he could 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 Uber 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 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 till 1936 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 turn 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, Adolf Loos (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 taste,” starting with such simple matters as table manners and fashion. To this end he edited for a time a periodical called The Other, whose 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 Loos and I—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 was 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 scrupulous 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 desire to ignore the boundary between the Self and the world that characterizes immorality in the most basic sense. Just as passionately as 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 turn 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 what is—or is not—worthwhile show itself as such.²⁰ 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 modern 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 Moderne” has virtually nothing to do with “die Moderne” in the sense of the project of Enlightenment. Indeed, there is much to be said for the thesis that the Viennese “Moderne,” that irrational “nervous romanticism” or “mysticism of nerves”²³ and narcissistic glorification of ephemeral psychic states which the Viennese “Moderne” cultivated, is in fact more postmodern than modern. In that sense the Viennese “Moderne” has rightly been termed “conservative modernism,”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 (frissons) with the help of a post-Wagnerian...