Wittgenstein's Vienna
by Allan Janik, Stephen Edelston Toulmin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Allan Janik, Stephen Edelston ToulminEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-09-01
ISBN: 1566631327
Number of pages: 315
Publisher: Ivan R Dee
Book Reviews of Wittgenstein's Vienna
Book Review: Kulturgeschichte of a remarkable cultural and intellectual watershed
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a dazzlingly dense intellectual history of a time when there was an explosion of new ideas in both the arts and sciences. The place was Vienna, at the end of the Habsburg monarchy, where not only Sigmund Freud (psychlology) but also Loos (design), Schoenberg (music), Kochoscka (painting), and many others were establishing what we now call "modernism." It is also a philosophical tract of great depth, focusing on Wittgenstein. What is so remarkable is how commonplace their ideas and techniques have become in our everyday vocabulary - think "unconscious", but also "form follows function" - and how they all originated there, at the end of the 19C.
According to the authors, the starting point of the modernist movement is to be found in the deterioration of the Habsburg monarchy, spread as it was across a vast central european empire with dozens of languages and ethnic groups. To keep it all together in the face of rising nationalisms, the Habsburgs strove to maintain appearences of power and cohesion at all costs. This created a kind of living falsehood, in which issues were avoided by the use of code words and empty symbolic rituals.
Add to this the rise of new bourgeois fortunes, whereby a new middle classe arose based on industries. They too constructed their own private worlds within their homes, mimicing the Habsburgs and ignoring issues - in particular sexuality - to the point that it generated a latent hysteria in its women and anxiety in the working men, whose children despised them as fakes. Their houses were studded with overly ornate decorations, which were designed to ape the lifestyles of aristocrats, and they lived by elaborate codes of conduct and narrow career choices.
Obviously, this explains the biases in Freud's theories towards explaining too much by "suppressed impulses" buried in the unconscious (read hysterical women), but the authors argue that the great innovator of the age was Karl Krause, an independent satirist who called for honesty in language and the way one chose to live one's life. All of the others, they claim, were direct followers of Krause, from Klimt - he rebelled against the formalism of the royal academy of art with his Secessionist movement - to Wittgenstein and his study of language structure and meaning; even the great physicist Ernst Mach was apparently a follower of Krause, as was Canetti. They all knew eachother and were interested, and even participated, in eachothers' disciplines. This was a total surprise to me.
This is a fascinating intellectual tour (in the first 120 pages) that is evoked in dense prose that I had to read more than once to fully comprehend. I was particulary interested in their explanation of how Loos was attempting to strip away all ornament in an attempt to concentrate on the actual function of the buildings he designed as well as the household objects his followers created. This led directly to Bauhaus and all the other modernist schools of design, which exploited the new materials coming available, such as aluminum and tubular steel, to re-invent furniture, homes, and office spaces in ways that are still ripe for exploration today. I never understood the context in which this movement arose until I read this book.
The remaining 200 pages place Wittgenstein's philosphy in this context. To be honest, this interested me a lot less, but it is a must for students of modern philosophy. This is where the structure of language was explored, which led to the structuralists and to a degree the existentialists. It follows him to England, which comes in for heavy criticsm by the authors. In a way, this reads like a separate book.
Highly recommended. It is an intellectual adventure that is truly first rate.
Summary of Wittgenstein's Vienna
This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de siècle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. ?Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein?s native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems?.This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful.??New York Times Book Review.Austria Books
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