by Peter Watson
Just as Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics of kingship and “ceremonies of the whole” were a response to das Gleitende, induced by scientific discoveries, so too was the new philosophy of Franz Clemens Brentano (1838–1917). Brentano was a popular man, with students—among them Freud and Tomáš Masaryk—crowding his lectures. A statuesque figure, he was frequently to be seen swimming the Danube. He published a best-selling book of riddles. Josef Breuer was his doctor.
Brentano’s main interest was to show, in as scientific a way as possible, proof of God’s existence. For him, philosophy went in cycles and there had been three—ancient, medieval, and modern—each divided into four phases: investigation, application, skepticism, and mysticism. These he laid out in the following grid:
CYCLES
PHASES: Investigation
Ancient: Thales to Aristotle
Medieval: Thomas Aquinas
Modern: Bacon to Locke
PHASES: Application
Ancient: Stoics, Epicureans
Medieval: Duns Scotus
Modern: Enlightenment
PHASES: Skepticism
Ancient: Skeptics, Eclectics
Medieval: William of Occam
Modern: Hume
PHASES: Mysticism
Ancient: Neoplatonists, neo-Pythagoreans
Medieval: Lullus, Cusanus
Modern: German Idealism
This approach helped make Brentano a classic halfway figure in intellectual history. His science led him to conclude, after twenty years of search, that there does indeed exist “an eternal, creating and sustaining principle,” which he called “understanding” (an echo of Kant). At the same time, his view that philosophy moved in cycles led him to doubt the progressivism of science. Despite this, his approach did spark two other branches of philosophy that were themselves influential in the early years of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Christian von Ehrenfels’s theory of Gestalt.9
Husserl (1859–1938) was born in the same year as Freud and in the same province, Moravia, as both Freud and Mendel. Like Freud he was Jewish, but he had a more cosmopolitan education, studying at Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna. His first interests—as we have seen earlier—were in mathematics and in logic, but he found himself drawn to psychology. In those days, in the German-speaking countries psychology was usually taught as an aspect of philosophy, but it was growing fast as its own discipline, thanks in particular to the laboratory psychology pioneered by Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt (1832–1920), a prolific professor at Leipzig—his works run to 53,000 pages—had shared a laboratory with Helmholtz and tried all his life to introduce the methodology of experimental physiology into psychology. Contrary to Dilthey, Wundt firmly believed that our psychology would eventually be explained by small physical events, such as reflex arcs, observed in the laboratory.10
Husserl, who attended some of Wundt’s lectures, is best understood as a post-Kantian, post-Darwinian, post-Nietzschean—and therefore post-Christian—philosopher, whose concern was to understand the phenomenon of existence, of being, in a nonreligious way. The key concepts for him, therefore, were consciousness, logic, and language. How are we to understand the phenomena of the world and the phenomena in the world? Through the mind we are conscious, the central psychological phenomenon of our existence; to what extent are the phenomena available to us through consciousness real—i.e., independent of our mind, our consciousness? Or do our minds in some way “intend” these phenomena? Does an apparently straightforward phenomenon like logic exist “out there” in the world, or is logic an “intention” of the mind? And how does all this relate to our use of and understanding of language? Is language an accurate reflection/description of phenomena and if so, how does the analysis of language help in understanding the world?
Husserl’s big book on the subject, Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), was published in 1900 (volume one) and 1901 (volume two).11 His main conclusion can be characterized as an updated Idealism, that there is a “tendency” of the mind to organize experience, to order consciousness. Husserl was not a great stylist, it has to be said, and many—especially in the Anglophone world—have difficulty following him. But one accessible way of approximating what he was getting at, in an admittedly simple and basic way, is via the well-known visual illusion that may be seen either as a candlestick (in black), or two faces opposing each other (in white). The fact that we switch—almost involuntarily—between these two perceptions means, for Husserl, that there is some organizing principle in our consciousness that can determine—or help determine—how we experience the world.
Husserl was fascinated by how one individual both changes and stays the same over time: what does it mean to have a continuous identity, and what does it mean to be part of a whole? He was convinced that there are entire areas of being, of consciousness, that science can never address, even in principle, and in this Husserl (who left a vast archive) is best understood now as the immediate father of the so-called continental school of twentieth-century Western philosophy, whose members were to include Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas. They stand in contrast to the “analytic” school begun by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is more popular in North America and Great Britain.12
Brentano’s other notable legatee was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), the father of Gestalt philosophy and psychology. In 1897 Ehrenfels accepted a post as professor of philosophy at Prague. Here, starting with Ernst Mach’s observation that the size and color of a circle can be varied “without detracting from its circularity,” Ehrenfels modified Brentano’s ideas, arguing that the mind somehow “intends Gestalt qualities”—that is to say, there are certain “wholes” in nature that the mind and the nervous system are “prepared,” predisposed, to experience. Gestalt theory became very influential in German psychology for a time, and although in itself it led nowhere, it did lay the groundwork for the theory of “imprinting,” a readiness in the neonate to perceive certain forms at a crucial stage in development.
THE PATHOLOGIES OF SCIENCE
Also prevalent in Vienna at the time were a number of avowedly rational but in reality frankly scientistic ideas, and they too read oddly now. Chief among these were the theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903).
The son of an anti-Semitic but Jewish goldsmith, Weininger developed into an “overbearing coffee house dandy.” He had a tendency to be withdrawn and taught himself more than eight languages before he left the university and published his undergraduate thesis.13 Renamed Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) by his editor, the thesis was released in 1903 and became a huge hit. The book was rabidly anti-Semitic and extravagantly misogynist, Weininger putting forward the view that all human behavior can be explained in terms of male and female “protoplasm,” which contributes to each person. A whole lexicon of neologisms was invented by Weininger to explain his ideas: idioplasm, for example, was his name for sexually undifferentiated tissue; male tissue was arrhenoplasm; and female tissue was thelyplasm. According to him, all the main achievements in history arose because of the masculine principle—all art, literature, and systems of law, for example. The feminine principle, on the other hand, accounted for the negative elements, and all these negative elements converge, Weininger says, in the Jewish race. Commercial success and fame did not settle Weininger’s restless spirit. Later that year he rented a room in the house in Vienna where Beethoven died and shot himself. (“In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece.”)14 He was twenty-three.
A rather better scientist, no less interested in sex, and the emergence of “sexual science,” was the Catholic psychiatrist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). His fame stemmed from a work he published in Latin in 1886, titled (in German) Psychopathia Sexualis: eine klinischeforensische Studie, quickly translated into seven languages. Most of the “clinical-forensic” case histories were drawn from courtroom records and attempted to link sexual psychopathology eithe
r to married life, to themes in art, or to the structure of organized religion. The most infamous “deviation,” on which the notoriety of his study rests, was his coining of the term “masochism.” The word was derived from the novels and novellas of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the son of a police director in Graz. In the most explicit of his stories, Venus im Pelz, Sacher-Masoch describes his own affair with a Baroness Fanny Pistor, during the course of which he “signed a contract to submit for six months to being her slave.”15
Psychopathia Sexualis clearly foreshadowed some aspects of psychoanalysis. Krafft-Ebing acknowledged that sex, like religion, could be sublimated in art—both could “enflame the imagination.”16 For Krafft-Ebing, sex within religion (and therefore within marriage) offered the possibility of “rapture through submission,” and it was this process in perverted form that he regarded as the etiology for the pathology of masochism.17
“DESIGN IS INFERIOR TO ART”
The dominant architecture in Vienna was the Ringstrasse. Begun in the mid-nineteenth century, after Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the demolition of the old city ramparts and a huge swath of space was cleared in a ring around the center, a dozen monumental buildings were erected in this ring over the following fifty years. They included the Opera, the Parliament, the Town Hall, parts of the university, and an enormous church. Most were embellished with fancy stone decorations, and it was this ornateness that provoked a reaction, first in Otto Wagner, then in Adolf Loos.
Otto Wagner (1841–1918) won fame for his “Beardsleyan imagination” when he was awarded a commission in 1894 to build the Vienna underground railway.18 This meant the construction of more than thirty stations, plus bridges, viaducts, and other urban structures. Wagner broke new ground by not only using modern materials but showing them. For example, he made a feature of the iron girders in the construction of bridges. These supporting structures were no longer hidden by elaborate casings of masonry, in the manner of the Ringstrasse, but painted and left exposed. His other designs embodied the idea that the modern individual—living his or her life in a city—is always in a hurry, anxious to be on his or her way to work or home. The core structure therefore became the street, rather than the square or vista or plaza. For Wagner, Viennese streets should be straight and direct; neighborhoods should be organized so that workplaces are close to homes, and each neighborhood should have its own center, rather than there being just one center for the entire city.
Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was close to Freud and to Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel, and the rest of the Café Griensteidl set, and his rationalism was more revolutionary than Wagner’s—he was against the Zeitgeist.19 Architecture, he declared, was not art. “The work of art is the private affair of the artist. The work of art wants to shake people out of their comfortableness [Bequemlichkeit]. The house must serve comfort. The art work is revolutionary, the house conservative.” Loos, who had lived in Chicago, extended this perception to design, clothing, even manners.20 He was in favor of simplicity, functionality, plainness. He thought men risked being enslaved by material culture, and he wanted to reestablish a “proper” relationship between art and life. Design was inferior to art because it was conservative, and when he understood the difference, man would be liberated. “The artisan produces objects for use here and now, the artist for all men everywhere.”21
Weininger especially, but Loos too, was carried away with rationalism. Both adopted scientistic ideas, but quickly went beyond the evidence to construct systems as fanciful as the nonscientific ideas they disparaged.
Nothing better illustrates this divided and divisive way of looking at the world in turn-of-the-century Vienna than the fight over Gustav Klimt’s paintings for the university, the first of which was delivered in 1900. Klimt, born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862, was, like Weininger, the son of a goldsmith, but there the similarity ended. Klimt made his name decorating the new buildings of the Ringstrasse with vast murals.22 These were produced with his brother Ernst, but on the latter’s death in 1892 Gustav withdrew for five years, during which time he appears to have studied the works of James Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Edvard Munch. Klimt did not reappear until 1897, when he emerged at the head of the Vienna Secession, a band of nineteen artists who, like the Impressionists in Paris and other artists at the Munich and Berlin Secessions (see Chapter 27), eschewed the official style of art and instead followed their own version of art nouveau. (In the German-speaking lands this is known as Jugendstil.)
Klimt’s style, bold and intimate at the same time (as photos show the man himself to have been), had three defining characteristics—the elaborate use of gold leaf (a technique learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent color, hard like enamel, and a languid eroticism applied in particular to women. Klimt’s paintings were not quite Freudian: his women were not neurotic, far from it. They were calm, placid, above all lubricious, “the instinctual life frozen in art.” Nevertheless, in drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt hinted that it had hitherto gone unsatisfied. His women were presented as insatiable—here were women capable of the perversions reported in Krafft-Ebing’s book, tantalizing and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna, but it quickly culminated in his commission for the university.23
Three large panels were asked for: Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. All three provoked a furor but the rows over Philosophy came first. For this picture, the commission stipulated as a theme “The Triumph of Light over Darkness.” What Klimt actually produced was a “deliquescent tangle” of bodies that appear to drift past the onlooker, a kaleidoscope of forms that run into each other, and all surrounded by a void. The professors were outraged, and Klimt was vilified as presenting “unclear ideas through unclear forms.” Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it “sought the truth via the exact sciences.” Eighty scholars petitioned that Klimt’s picture never be shown at the university. The painter returned his fee and never presented the remaining commissions. The significance of the fight is that it brings us back to Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, to Husserl and Brentano. For in the university commission, Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. It may be more atavistic, more primitive, a dark force at times, but where is the profit in denying it? This remained an important strand in German thought until World War II.
Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was a Hungarian Jew who studied law at Vienna. As a pupil in his Gymnasium he had written a poem praising Luther as a champion of Germany and in Vienna he helped organize a German-National student group. A handsome man who wrote comedies, he became more successful as a journalist in the 1880s, contributing feuilletons to the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung and the Neue Freie Presse. (The feuilleton was originally a French idea, an article—often below the fold on the front page of a newspaper—that eschewed “hard” news in favor of wittily written comment, bouncing off the news, posing awkward questions about what was, and was not, being revealed.) The crucial change in Herzl’s life came in 1891 when he became the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse and arrived in France to witness a tide of economic anti-Semitism brought about by the Panama scandal.24 Three years later, in 1894, Herzl was aghast when France formed an alliance with Russia at the very time pogroms were killing thousands of Ukrainian Jews. It was the indifference—not just of the West, but of Western Jews—to the fate of the eastern Europeans that caused him, in 1895, to publish his proposal for a Jewish state. Although he continued with journalism and wrote yet more plays, the rest of his career was devoted to realizing this one idea, that the governments of Europe should grant to a Jewish stock company sovereignty over a part of the colonial territory under their control to be turned into a refuge for any Jews who wished to take advantage of it. From 1896 until his death in 1904, Herzl organized a series of six world c
ongresses of Jewry; among their aims was to persuade the sultan of the Ottoman Empire to release part of Palestine for the purpose of establishing a Jewish state. Failing that, Herzl would have accepted areas in Africa or Argentina (which many of his supporters would not accept).
Herzl knew he probably would not live to see his dream realized but never had any doubt that, one day, his vision would come about (this is evident in his copious correspondence). When he died, the Zionist bank in London, the Jewish Colonial Trust, had 135,000 shareholders, “then the largest number financing any enterprise in the world.” More than 10,000 Jews from all over Europe attended his funeral in 1904.