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Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973)

Bill Long 11/22/04

Why I can No Longer Read A Book

When it appeared with clashing cymbals and drum rolls in 1973, Wittgenstein's Vienna, by cultural historian Janik and philosopher Toulmin (who studied with Wittgenstein in 1946-47), set the academic philosophical world on fire. It argued a new thesis: that in order to understand the enigmatic but fascinating Wittgenstein, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century, one had to see him not just in his context at Cambridge University where he had gone to study with Bertrand Russell at age 22 in 1911, but in the context of the intellectual ferment of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where he was raised as the son of one of the leading industrialists of that city. By placing Wittgenstein in his "place," so to speak, J & T can argue that ethical, rather than merely linguistic concerns, stood behind his remarkable 1918 Tractatus, and that these concerns arose from the heady neo-Kantian ferment in Vienna near the end of the 19th century.

This thesis, in 1973, was revolutionary; it is more humdrum today. Most smart people, even if they are not trained historians, may tend to conclude without deep reflection that what influenced you in the first 22 years of your life might have a continuing effect on you. It is precisely because most philosophers don't have a historical bone in their bodies that the field could have gone along for so many years not simply ignoring history but actually antagonistic to it. But a correction has been going on for over a generation, now, in philosophical circles, and so, from the perspective of 2004, the Janik/Toulmin thesis is anything but radical.

Problems Surface

So, I picked up the book because I wanted to try to understand the intellectual world of Hans Kelsen (b.1881), one of the most significant jurisprudes of the twentieth century. He was a Vienna resident and contemporary of Wittgenstein as well as a leading figure in trying to develop a "pure theory of law," influenced by Kant's treatise Critique of Pure Reason. I wasn't particularly bothered that this book did not treat Kelsen at all, focusing as it did on the people who generated the intellectual climate rather than those who absorbed it in the next generation. What bothered me, after wading through the first chapter where it took them 10 pages to tell me how radical their ideas were, was the next chapter: Chapter 2: "Hapsburg Vienna: City of Paradoxes."

I settled in to get a sensitively-drawn history, cultural, political and intellectual, of Vienna from about 1850-1880. And the chapter begins on a promising note, by pointing out the paradox of the Vienna cafe, for example. One might stay all day reading a paper and drinking one cup of coffee at a cafe but the shadow side of this openness and public culture was that most housing for working people was poorly constructed and without much in the way of heat. Ok, interesting facts, I thought. Tell me more.

This point of this story was to prepare us to see the Hapsburg Monarchy as also full of paradoxes. The author (Janik) then turns to his historical overview, but it is a historical overview without dates, without a sense of movement of time, without a sense that people actually inhabited a particular space in what we would consider to be a city. The Hapsburgs (Habsburgs) might have thought of themselves as the instruments of God on earth, but his broadly drawn brush strokes of Hapsburg interest in "law and order," the breach of this "law and order" through the "Cilli affair" or the ways in which Franz Josef tried to govern an ungovernable land, made me feel that I was being told to live in the 4th floor of a building that was suspended over the street and lacked floors 1-3. In other words, he gave me no context, no reason for thinking why what he was saying was important, no sense that I was really learning anything. I was grasping smoke as I studied the chapter, leaving it with the sense that I really didn't know anything about the way civic life was structured in Vienna or the way the Hapsburgs were ruling at the end of the 19th century.

Putting Down the Book

When people don't express themselves clearly or where they do not introduce facts that will aid in the conceptualization of the idea they are presenting, I lose heart. I would have liked to know, first of all, the structure of government, the traditions of the Hapsburgs that informed their theory of government, a map of the Empire, the historic relations of parts of the Empire, the population of the Empire, the place of Vienna in it, the psychology of the Viennese over the years, etc. These are things that just fly off the top of my head before even settling in to read a chapter or a book. If it shows itself unable to answer these basic questions, which I consider not simply to be my questions but the questions necessary to answer in order that intelligent discourse can really begin, I drop the book. It is not helping me construct knowledge.

But I think that this is mostly the way that the world works. People write books and only halfway, or less, explain even the basics of the thing they are describing. Questions fly off nearly every page for me, questions that are seemingly essential to answer before the next paragraph is even engaged. But authors rarely answer them for me. It is almost as if my reading now consists of reading one or two pages from a book until I get to an interesting idea. Then I discard the book because it never follows up on the idea, struggling as the author does to come up with clear expression and thinking. Then, I search out the idea on my own, coming to closure on it when it answers the questions that the original page may have generated. But then, once I have done this, I no longer need the book. I discard it. I am sure that I "miss" all kinds of valuable stuff in it, but it is more valuable for me to discover the world than for an author to present it to me so inadequately.

It makes me begin to think that these guys are either dumb or tongue-tied or extremely limited in their intellectual horizons. For several years it even made me resentful: that these guys, who really can't explain themselves very well and when they try to do so, give such half-assed explanations, occupy significant chairs around the world. But now I don't care. I will glean a fact here or there from most of them and it will lead me to the creation of my intellectual world. And, to be sure, my intellectual world will include a detailed treatment of fin-de-siecle Vienna, but it will be far deeper and much more lucid than anything the professors can provide.