The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Change there certainly was. Before the show opened, the Nazis demonstrated outside the theatre. The first night was disrupted by whistles from the balcony, then by fistfights in the aisles, with a riot soon spreading to the stage. For the second night police lined the walls, and the house lights were left on.74 The Nazis took more and more interest in Brecht, but when he sued the film producer who had bought the rights to Die Dreigroschenoper because the producer wanted to make changes against the spirit of the contract, the Brownshirts had a dilemma: How could they take sides between a Marxist and a Jew? The brownshirts would not always be so impotent. In October 1929, when Weill attended one of their rallies out of mere curiosity, he was appalled to hear himself denounced ‘as a danger to the country,’ together with Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. He left hurriedly, unrecognised.75

  One man who hated Berlin – he called it Babylon – who hated all cities, who in fact elevated his hatred of city life to an entire philosophy, was Martin Heidegger. Born in southern Germany in 1889, he studied under Edmund Husserl before becoming himself a professional teacher of philosophy.76 His deliberate provincialism, his traditional mode of dress – knickerbockers – and his hatred of city life all confirmed his philosophy for his impressionable students. In 1927, at the age of thirty-eight, he published his most important book, Being and Time. Despite the fame of Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger was – besides being earlier – a more profound existentialist.

  Being and Time is an impenetrable book, ‘barely decipherable,’ in the words of one critic. Yet it became immensely popular.77 For Heidegger the central fact of life is man’s existence in the world, and we can only confront this central fact by describing it as exactly as possible. Western science and philosophy have all developed in the last three or four centuries so that ‘the primary business of Western man has been the conquest of nature.’ As a result, man regards nature as though he is the subject and nature the object. Philosophically, the nature of knowledge is the central dilemma: ‘What do we know? How can we know that we know?’ Ever since Descartes these questions have been paramount. For Heidegger, however, reason and intellect are ‘hopelessly inadequate guides to the secret of being.’ Indeed, at one point he went so far as to say that ‘thinking is the mortal enemy of understanding.’78 Heidegger believed that we are thrust into the world willy-nilly, and by the time we have got used to being here, we are facing death. Death, for Heidegger, is the second central fact of life, after being.79 We can never experience our own death, he said, but we can fear it, and that fear is all-important: it gives meaning to our being. We must spend our time on earth creating ourselves, ‘moving into an open, uncertain, as yet uncreated future.’ One other element of Heidegger’s thought is essential to understanding him. Heidegger saw science and technology as an expression of the will, a reflection of our determination to control nature. He thought, however, that there was a different side to man’s nature, which is revealed above all in poetry. The central aspect of a poem, said Heidegger, was that ‘it eludes the demands of our will’. ‘The poet cannot will to write a poem, it just comes.’80 This links him directly with Rilke. Furthermore, the same argument applies to readers: they must allow the poem to work its magic on them. This is a central factor in Heidegger’s ideas – the split between the will and those aspects of life, the interior life, that are beyond, outside, the will, where the appropriate way to understanding is not so much thinking as submission. At one level this sounds a little bit like Eastern philosophies. And Heidegger certainly believed that the Western approach needed sceptical scrutiny, that science was becoming intent on mastery rather than understanding.81 He argued, as the philosopher William Barrett has said, summing up Heidegger, that there may come a time ‘when we should stop asserting ourselves and just submit, let be.’ Heidegger quoted Friedrich Hölderlin: We are in the period of darkness between the gods that have vanished and the god that has not yet come, between Matthew Arnold’s two worlds, ‘one dead, the other powerless to be born.’82

  This is, inevitably perhaps, a rather bloodless summary of Heidegger’s thinking. What made it so immediately popular was that it gave respectability to the German obsession with death and unreason, with the rejection of urban rationahst civilisation, with, in effect, a hatred of Weimar itself. Moreover, it gave tacit approval to those völkisch movements then being spawned that appealed not to reason but to heroes, that called for submission in the service of an alternative will to science, to those who, in Peter Gay’s striking phrase, ‘thought with their blood.’ Heidegger did not create the Nazis, or even the mood that led to the Nazis. But as the German theologian Paul Tillich, who was himself dismissed from his chair, was to write later, ‘It is not without some justification that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are connected with the anti-moral movements of fascism and national socialism.’ Being and Time was dedicated to Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s mentor, who was Jewish. When the book was reprinted during the Nazi era, the dedication was omitted.83

  We last left George Lukács in chapter 10, in Vienna, in exile from Budapest, ‘active in hopeless conspiratorial [Communist] Party work, tracking down people who have absconded with party funds.’84 Throughout the 1920s Lukács’s life remained difficult. In the early years he vied with Béla Kun for leadership of the Hungarian Party in exile – Kun had fled to Moscow. Lukács met Lenin in Moscow and Mann in Vienna, making enough of an impact on the latter for him to model the Communist Jesuit Naphta in The Magic Mountain partly on Lukács.85 Most of the time, however, he lived in poverty, and in 1929 he stayed illegally in Hungary before going to Berlin and on to Moscow. He worked there at the Marx-Engels Institute, where Nikolai Ryazanov was editing the newly discovered manuscripts of the young Marx.86

  Despite these difficulties, Lukács published in 1923 History and Class Consciousness, for which he was to become famous.87 These nine essays were about both literature and politics. So far as literature was concerned, Lukács’s theory was that, beginning with Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, novelists have fallen predominantly into two groups, those who portray ‘the incommensurability between self (or hero) and environment (or society),’ as Cervantes, Friedrich von Schiller, and Honoré de Balzac did, as ‘world fleeing,’ or as in Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, or Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, in ‘the romanticism of disillusionment,’ involved in life but aware that man cannot be improved, as Joseph Conrad had said.88 In other words, both approaches were essentially antipositive, antiprogressive. Lukács moved from literature to politics to argue that the different classes have different forms of consciousness. The bourgeoisie, while glorifying individualism and competition, respond in literature, and in life, to a stance that assumes that society is ‘bound by immutable laws, as dehumanised as the natural laws of physics.’89 In contrast, the proletariat seeks a new order of society, which acknowledges that human nature can change, that there can be a new synthesis between self and society. Lukács saw it as his role to explain this dichotomy to the bourgeoisie so they would understand the revolution, when it came. He thought the popularity of film lay in the fact that in movies things lost presence, and that people liked the illusion, to live ‘without fate, without causes, without motives.’90 He also argued that while Marxism explained these different class consciousnesses, after the revolution, with the new synthesis of self and society that he posited, Marxism would be superseded. He came to the conclusion, therefore, that ‘communism should not be reified by its own builders.’91

  Lukács was roundly condemned and ostracised for being a revisionist and anti-Leninist. He never ready recovered, never counterattacked, and eventually admitted his ‘error.’ However, his analysis of Marxism, class-consciousness, and literature found an echo in Walter Benjamin’s work in the 1930s, and was revived in modified form after World War II by Raymond Williams and others in the doctrine of cultural materialism (see chapters 26 and 40).

  In 1924, the year after History and Class Consciousness was pu
blished, a group of philosophers and scientists in Vienna began to meet every Thursday. Originally organised as the Ernst Mach Society, in 1928 they changed their name to the Wiener Kreis, the Vienna Circle. Under this title they became what is arguably the most important philosophical movement of the century (and one, incidentally, directly opposed to Heidegger).

  The guiding spirit of the circle was Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), Berlinborn who, like many members of the Kreis, had trained as a scientist, in his case as a physicist under Max Planck, from 1900–4. The twenty-odd members of the circle that Schlick put together included Otto Neurath from Vienna, a remarkable Jewish polymath; Rudolf Carnap, a mathematician who had been a pupil of Gottlob Frege at Jena; Philipp Frank, another physicist; Heinz Hartmann, a psychoanalyst; Kurt Gödei, a mathematician; and at times Karl Popper, who became an influential philosopher after World War II. Schlick’s original label for the kind of philosophy that evolved in Vienna in the 1920s was konsequenter Empirismus, or consistent empiricism. However, after he visited America in 1929 and again in 1931–2, the term logical positivism emerged – and stuck.

  The logical positivists made a spirited attack on metaphysics, against any suggestion that ‘there might be a world beyond the ordinary world of science and common sense, the world revealed to us by our senses.’92 For the logical positivists, any statement that wasn’t empirically testable – verifiable – or a statement in logic or mathematics was nonsensical. And so vast areas of theology, aesthetics, and politics were dismissed. There was more to it than this, of course. As the British philosopher A. J. Ayer, himself an observer of the circle for a short time, described it, they were also against ‘what we might call the German past,’ the romantic and to them rather woolly thinking of Hegel and Nietzsche (though not Marx).93 The American philosopher Sidney Hook, who travelled in Germany at the time, confirmed the split, that the more traditional German philosophers were hostile to science and saw it as their duty ‘to advance the cause of religion, morality, freedom of the will, the Volk and the organic nation state.’94 The aim of the Vienna Circle was to clarify and simplify philosophy, using techniques of logic and science. Under them, philosophy became the handmaiden of science and a ‘second-order subject.’ First-order subjects talk about the world (like physics and biology); second-order subjects talk about their talk about the world.95 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was one of the main influences on the Vienna Circle, and he too had been interested in the role of language in experience, and was very critical of traditional metaphysics. In this way, as the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle said, philosophy came to be regarded as ‘talk about talk.’96

  Neurath was perhaps the most talented of the circle. Though he trained as a mathematician, he also studied with Max Weber and wrote a book called Anti Spengler (1921). He was close to the Bauhaus people and developed a system of two thousand symbols (called isotypes) designed to help educate the illiterate (he would sign his own letters with an isotype of an elephant, happy or sad, as the case might be).97 But this huge ebullient character was intensely serious and agreed with Wittgenstein that one should remain silent regarding metaphysics, because it is nonsense, while recognising ‘that one is being silent about something that does not exist.’98

  The self-conscious organisation of the Vienna Circle, and their enthusiasm for their new approach, was also a factor in their influence. It was as if they suddenly knew what philosophy was. Science describes the world, the only world there is, the world of things around us. All philosophy can do, therefore, is analyse and criticise the concepts and theories of science, so as to refine them, make them more accurate and useful. This is why the legacy of logical positivism is known as analytic philosophy.

  In the same year that Moritz Schlick started the Vienna Circle, 1924, the year that The Magic Mountain appeared, Robert Musil began work in Vienna on his masterpiece, The Man without Qualities. If he had never written a book, Musil would still be worth remembering for describing Hitler in 1930 as ‘the living unknown soldier.’99 But his three-volume work, the first volume of which was published in the same year, is for some people the most important novel in German written this century, eclipsing anything Mann wrote. Rated by many as on a par with Joyce and Proust, it is still far less well known than Ulysses, A la recherche du temps perdu, or The Magic Mountain.

  Born in Klagenfurt in 1880, Musil came from an upper-middle-class family, part of the Austrian ‘mandinarate.’ He trained in science and engineering and wrote a thesis on Ernst Mach. The Man without Qualities is set in 1913 in the mythical country of ‘Kakania.’ Kakania is clearly Austro-Hungary, the name referring to Kaiserlich und Königlich, or K.u.K, standing for the royal kingdom of Hungary and the imperial-royal domain of the Austrian crown lands.100 The book, though daunting in length, is for many the most brilliant literary response to developments in other fields in the early twentieth century, one of a handful of creations that is incapable of over-interpretation. It is: post-Bergson, post-Einstein, post-Rutherford, post-Bohr, post-Freud, post-Husserl, post-Picasso, post-Proust, post-Gide, post-Joyce and above all post-Wittgenstein.

  There are three intertwined themes which provide a loose narrative. First, there is the search by the main character, Ulrich von …, a Viennese intellectual in his early thirties, whose attempt to penetrate the meaning of modern life involves him in a project to understand the mind of a murderer. Second, there is Ulrich’s relationship (and love affair) with his sister, who he had lost contact with in childhood. Third, the book is a social satire on Vienna on the eve of World War I.101

  But the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalisations and talk about value, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless, as Wittgenstein tells us, how are we to live? asks Musil. He accepts that the old categories in which men thought – the ‘halfway house’ ideas of racialism, or religion – are of no use any more, but with what are we to replace them? Ulrich’s attempts to understand the mind of the murderer, Moosbrugger, recall Gide’s arguments that some things are inexplicable. (Musil studied under the psychologist Carl Stumpf, as did Husserl, and so was not especially in thrall to Freud, believing that although there was an unconscious it was an unorganised ‘Proustian’ jumble of forgotten memories. He also researched his book in a scientific way, studying a real murderer in jail in Vienna.) At one point Ulrich notes that he is tall, with broad shoulders, that ‘his chest cavity bulged like a spreading sail on a mast’ but that on occasions he felt small and soft, like ‘a jelly-fish floating in the water’ when he read a book that moved him. In other words, no one description, no one characteristic or quality, fitted him. It is in this sense that he is a man without qualities: ‘We no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannises our lives.’

  Musil had hardly finished his massive work when he died, nearly destitute, in 1942, and the time it took for completion reflected his view that, in the wake of other developments, the novel had to change in the twentieth century. He thought that the traditional novel, as a way of telling stories, was dead. Instead, for him the modern novel was the natural home of metaphysics. Novels – his novel anyway – were a kind of thought experiment, on a par with Einstein’s, or Picasso’s, where a figure might be seen in profile and in full face at the same time. The two intertwined principles underlying experience, he believed, were violence and love, which is what links him to Joyce: science may be able to explain sex – but love? And love can be so exhausting that getting through today is all we can manage. Thinking about tomorrow – philosophy – is incommensurate with that. Musil wasn’t anti-science, as so many others were. (Ulrich ‘loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it.’) But he thought novelists could help discover where science might lead us. For him the fundamental question was whether the soul could ever be replaced by logic. The search for objectivity and the search for meaning are irreconcilabl
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