by Peter Watson
At the time, no one could foresee that Hofmannsthal’s aesthetic would help pave the way for an even bigger bout of irrationality in Germany later in the century. But just as his 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 Brentano (1838—1917). Brentano was a popular man, and his lectures were legendary, so much so that students – among them Freud and Tomáš Masaryk – crowded the aisles and doorways. A statuesque figure (he looked like a patriarch of the church), Brentano was a fanatical but absentminded chess player (he rarely won because he loved to experiment, to see the consequences), a poet, an accomplished cook, and a carpenter. He frequently swam the Danube. He published a best-selling book of riddles. His friends included Theodor Meynert, Theodor Gomperz, and Josef Breuer, who was his doctor.23 Destined for the priesthood, he had left the church in 1873 and later married a rich Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity (prompting one wag to quip that he was an icon in search of a gold background).24
Brentano’s main interest was to show, in as scientific a way as possible, proof of God’s existence. His was a very personal version of science, taking the form of an analysis of history. For Brentano, philosophy went in cycles. According to him, there had been three cycles – Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern – each divided into four phases: Investigation, Application, Scepticism, and Mysticism. These he laid out in the following table.25
This approach helped make Brentano a classic halfway figure in intellectual history. His science led him to conclude, after twenty years of search and lecturing, that there does indeed exist ‘an eternal, creating, and sustaining principle,’ to which he gave the term ‘understanding.’26 At the same time, his view that philosophy moved in cycles led him to doubt the progressivism of science. Brentano is chiefly remembered now for his attempt to bring a greater intellectual rigour to the examination of God, but though he was admired for his attempt to marry science and faith, many of his contemporaries felt that his entire system was doomed from the start. Despite this his approach did spark two other branches of philosophy that were themselves influential in the early years of the century. These were Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Christian von Ehrenfels’s theory of Gestalt.
Edmund 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.27 His first interests were in mathematics and logic, but he found himself drawn to psychology. In those days, psychology was usually taught as an aspect of philosophy but was growing fast as its own discipline, thanks to advances in science. What most concerned Husserl was the link between consciousness and logic. Put simply, the basic question for him was this: did logic exist objectively, ‘out there’ in the world, or was it in some fundamental sense dependent on the mind? What was the logical basis of phenomena? This is where mathematics took centre stage, for numbers and their behaviour (addition, subtraction, and so forth) were the clearest examples of logic in action. So did numbers exist objectively, or were they too a function of mind? Brentano had claimed that in some way the mind ‘intended’ numbers, and if that were true, then it affected both their logical and their objective status. An even more fundamental question was posed by the mind itself: did the mind ‘intend’ itself? Was the mind a construction of the mind, and if so how did that affect the mind’s own logical and objective status?28
Husserl’s big book on the subject, Logical Investigations, was published in 1900 (volume one) and 1901 (volume two), its preparation preventing him from attending the Mathematical Congress at the Paris exposition in 1900. Husserl’s view was that the task of philosophy was to describe the world as we meet it in ordinary experience, and his contribution to this debate, and to Western philosophy, was the concept of ‘transcendental phenomenology,’ in which he proposed his famous noema/noesis dichotomy.29 Noema, he said, is a timeless proposition-in-itself, and is valid, full stop. For example, God may be said to exist whether anyone thinks it or not. Noesis, by contrast, is more psychological – it is essentially what Brentano meant when he said that the mind ‘intends’ an object. For Husserl, noesis and noema were both present in consciousness, and he thought his breakthrough was to argue that a noesis is also a noema – it too exists in and of itself.30 Many people find this dichotomy confusing, and Husserl didn’t help by inventing further complex neologisms for his ideas (when he died, more than 40,000 pages of his manuscripts, mostly unseen and unstudied, were deposited in the library at Louvain University).31 Husserl made big claims for himself; in the Brentano halfway house tradition, he believed he had worked out ‘a theoretical science independent of all psychology and factual science.’32 Few in the Anglophone world would agree, or even understand how you could have a theoretical science independent of factual science. But Husserl is best understood now as the immediate father of the so-called continental school of twentieth-century Western philosophy, whose members 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 became more popular in North America and Great Britain.33
Brentano’s other notable legatee was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), the father of Gestalt philosophy and psychology. Ehrenfels was a rich man; he inherited a profitable estate in Austria but made it over to his younger brother so that he could devote his time to the pursuit of intellectual and literary activities.34 In 1897 he accepted a post as professor of philosophy at Prague. Here, starting with Ernst Mach’s observation that the size and colour 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 pre-prepared to experience. (A well-known example of this is the visual illusion that may be seen as either a candlestick, in white, or two female profiles facing each other, in black.) Gestalt theory became very influential in German psychology for a time, and although in itself it led nowhere, it did set the ground for the theory of ‘imprinting,’ a readiness in the neonate to perceive certain forms at a crucial stage in development.35 This idea flourished in the middle years of the century, popularised by German and Dutch biologists and ethologists.
In all of these Viennese examples – Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Brentano, Husserl, and Ehrenfels – it is clear that they were preoccupied with the recent discoveries of science, whether those discoveries were the unconscious, fundamental particles (and the even more disturbing void between them), Gestalt, or indeed entropy itself, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If these notions of the philosophers in particular appear rather dated and incoherent today, it is also necessary to add that such ideas were only half the picture. 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 notorious theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903).36 The son of an anti-Semitic but Jewish goldsmith, Weininger developed into an overbearing coffeehouse dandy.37 He was even more precocious than Hofmannsthal, teaching himself” eight languages before he left university and publishing his undergraduate thesis. Renamed by his editor Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), the thesis was released in 1903 and became a huge hit. The book was rabidly anti-Semitic and extravagantly misogynist. Weininger put forward the view that all human behaviour can be explained in terms of male and female ‘protoplasm,’ which contributes to each person, with every cell possessing sexuality. Just as Husserl had coined neologisms for his ideas, so a whole lexicon was invented by Weininger: idioplasm, for example, was his name for sexually undifferentiated tissue; male tissue was arrhenoplasm; and female tissue was thelyplasm. Using elaborate arithmetic, Weininger argued that varying proportions of arrhenoplasm and thelyplasm could
account for such diverse matters as genius, prostitution, memory, and so on. According to Weininger, all the major 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. The Aryan race is the embodiment of the strong organising principle that characterises males, whereas the Jewish race embodies the ‘feminine-chaotic principle of nonbeing.’38 Despite the commercial success of his book, 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. He was twenty-three.
A rather better scientist, no less interested in sex, was the Catholic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). His fame stemmed from a work he published in Latin in 1886, entitled Psychopathia Sexualis: eine klinisch-forensische Studie. This book was soon expanded and proved so popular it was translated into seven languages. Most of the ‘clinical-forensic’ case histories were drawn from courtroom records, and attempted to link sexual psychopathology either to married life, to themes in art, or to the structure of organised religion.39 As a Catholic, Krafft-Ebing took a strict line on sexual matters, believing that the only function of sex was to propagate the species within the institution of marriage. It followed that his text was disapproving of many of the ‘perversions’ he described. The most infamous ‘deviation,’ on which the notoriety of his study rests, was his coining of the term masochism. This 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 at Baden bei Wien with a Baroness Fanny Pistor, during the course of which he ‘signed a contract to submit for six months to being her slave.’ Sacher-Masoch later left Austria (and his wife) to explore similar relationships in Paris.40
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.’ ‘What other foundation is there for the plastic arts of poetry? From (sensual) love arises that warmth of fancy which alone can inspire the creative mind, and the fire of sensual feeling kindles and preserves the glow and fervour of art.’41 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 aetiology for the pathology of masochism. Krafft-Ebing’s ideas were even more of a halfway house than Freud’s, but for a society grappling with the threat that science posed to religion, any theory that dealt with the pathology of belief and its consequences was bound to fascinate, especially if it involved sex. Given those theories, Krafft-Ebing might have been more sympathetic to Freud’s arguments when they came along; but he could never reconcile himself to the controversial notion of infantile sexuality. He became one of Freud’s loudest critics.
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 centre, a dozen monumental buildings were erected over the following fifty years in this ring. 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.42 This meant more than thirty stations, plus bridges, viaducts, and other urban structures. Following the dictum that function determines form, 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, their utilitarian form and even their riveting lending texture to whatever it was they were part of.43 Then there were the arches Wagner designed as entranceways to the stations – rather than being solid, or neoclassical and built of stone, they reproduced the skeletal form of railway bridges or viaducts so that even from a long way off, you could tell you were approaching a station.44 Warming to this theme, 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 palace. For Wagner, Viennese streets should be straight, direct; neighbourhoods should be organised so that workplaces are close to homes, and each neighbourhood should have a centre, not just one centre for the entire city. The facades of Wagner’s buildings became less ornate, plainer, more functional, mirroring what was happening elsewhere in life. In this way Wagner’s style presaged both the Bauhaus and the international movement in architecture.45
Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was even more strident. He was close to Freud and to Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel, and the rest of the crowd at the Café Griensteidl, and his rationalism was different from Wagner’s – it was more revolutionary, but it was still rationalism. 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.’46 Loos extended this perception to design, clothing, even manners. He was in favour 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 produced objects for use here and now, the artist for all men everywhere.’47
The ideas of Weininger and Loos inhabit a different kind of halfway house from those of Hofmannsthal and Husserl. Whereas the latter two were basically sceptical of science and the promise it offered, Weininger especially, but Loos too, was carried away with rationalism. Both adopted scientistic ideas, or terms, and quickly went beyond the evidence to construct systems that were as fanciful as the nonscientific ideas they disparaged. The scientific method, insufficiently appreciated or understood, could be mishandled, and in the Viennese halfway house it was.
Nothing illustrates better this divided and divisive way of looking at the world in turn-of-the-century Vienna than the row 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. 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, like Picasso, Edvard Munch. He 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 Berlin Secession, eschewed the official style of art and instead followed their own version of art nouveau. In the German lands this was known as Jugendstil.48
Klimt’s new style, bold and intricate at the same time, had three defining characteristics – the elaborate use of gold leaf (using a technique he had learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent colour, 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.’49 Nevertheless, in drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt hinted that it had hithe
rto gone unsatisfied. This had the effect of making the women in his paintings threatening. They were presented as insatiable and devoid of any sense of sin. In portraying women like this, Klimt was subverting the familiar way of thinking every bit as much as Freud was. Here were women capable of the perversions reported in Krafft-Ebing’s book, which made them tantalising and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna, but it quickly culminated in his commission for the university.
