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Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

David S. Luft
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Extract

Despite the substantial scholarly interest in Austrian intellectual history during the past decade, what we have learned about Austrian intellectual life remains isolated from our received models of Central European German culture. Scholars who study Austrian philosophy and literature are inclined to emphasize the “diachronic constants” of an intellectual tradition that is unfamiliar to most students of German philosophy, literature, and history. Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century frequently ignore key Austrian figures altogether; major literary figures, such as Grillparzer or Stifter, are often regarded as peripheral in discussions of German literature; and political historians continue to imagine German history in terms of Prussia and the achievements of Bismarck. Thus, our knowledge of the German culture of the Habsburg Monarchy or of Vienna at the turn of the century still has not been brought into relation to a model of German culture that is dominated by Northern, Protestant, and idealist traditions. The relations within this wider realm of German culture are far too complex to submit to easy summary, and any honest attempt at empiricism confronts a staggering mass of potential evidence, even in the case of the more limited question of the influence of North German culture in nineteenth-century Austria.

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Articles
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Central European History , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 53 - 75
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1983

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References

1. Schorske's, CarlFin de siècle Vienna (New York, 1980)Google Scholar emphasizes the cultural unity of Vienna, as does Janik, Allan and Toulmin's, StephenWittgenstein's Vienna (New York, 1973).Google Scholar while Johnston's, WilliamThe Austrian Mind (Berkeley, 1972)Google Scholar stresses the context of the Habsburg Monarchy.

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3. For a discussion of the generation of 1905, in Central Europe generally and in Austria in particular, see my Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture: 1880–1942 (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 13–22.Google Scholar

4. A recent book on Schopenhauer by Hamlyn, D. W. (Schopenhauer, London, 1980), p. viiiGoogle Scholar, emphasizes how “very few good books” there are on Schopenhauer in English and adds that Gardiner's, PatrickSchopenhauer (Baltimore, 1963)Google Scholar is “almost the only exception to that rule.” Hamlyn's concluding judgment on Schopenhauer is nearly as rare (p. 170): “A great mind indeed.” Although Schopenhauer has received very little attention from English-speaking philosophers, Bertrand Russell accords him an entire chapter (albeit brief) in his History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946)Google Scholar, but he does not even mention Bolzano's name.

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7. The classic accounts of Schopenhauer's impact are Nietzsche's, FriedrichSchopenhauer as Educator, trans. Hillesheim, James W. and Simpson, Malcolm R. (South Bend, Indiana, 1965)Google Scholar, and Mann's, Thomas “Schopenhauer” (1938) in Essays of Three Decades, trans. Lowe-Porter, H. T. (New York, 1947), pp. 372–410.Google Scholar For a fascinating account of Schopenhauer's influence among those around Richard Wagner, see von Meysenbug's, MalwidaMemoiren einer Idealisten (Berlin, n.d.).Google Scholar

8. Georg Lukács argued in Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Neuwied, 1962)Google Scholar that academic historians of philosophy in Imperial Germany had tried to pretend that irrationalism had not happened, or that it was a minor event in the history of modern philosophy. More recently, I. M. Bochenski characterized irrationalism—by which he meant Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—as a relatively unimportant “subsidiary current” in nineteenth-century philosophy (Contemporary European Philosophy, Berkeley, 1957Google Scholar). Even in the wake of existentialism, Schopenhauer's academic status has not been much higher in the United States: Stanley Rosen wrote an entire book on nihilism while mentioning Schopenhauer only once (Nihilism, New Haven, 1968, p. 72Google Scholar), and William Barrett's seminal book on existentialism, Irrational Man (Garden City, N.Y., 1958)Google Scholar, avoids mentioning Schopenhauer altogether.

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10. Fritz Mauthner described Schopenhauer as “the first important philosopher since the beginning of the Christian era who simply and clearly denied the existence of God” (in his Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, vol. 4, Stuttgart, 1922, p. 169Google Scholar). This seems to have been no deterrent for a wide variety of Christian pessimists and spiritualists who moved his theory of will away from its more brutal metaphysics.

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16. Robert Mühlher's “Philosophie und Dichtung,” in Österreichische Dichter, pp. 202–17, is the most helpful general discussion of this question.

17. McGrath, William J., Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, 1974).Google Scholar

18. Rieder, Heinz, Österreichische Moderne (Bonn, 1968), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

19. Mühlher, “Philosophie und Dichtung,” pp. 207–17.

20. Herbart did, of course, regard himself as Kant's successor, but he developed Kant's ideas in the direction of a realism quite unlike the mainstream of early nineteenth-century German idealism. On the other hand, Herbart's ideas became the norm of Austrian Schulphilosophie. Some scholars regard Schopenhauer's idealism and Herbart's realism as perfectly opposed continuations of Kant's thought. Schopenhauer acknowledged the validity of this antithesis between their philosophies, “since the false is opposed to the true.” Cf. Glockner, Hermann, “Schopenhauer im Traditionszusammenhang der europäischen Philosophie,” XXXVI. Schopenhauer Jahrbuch, 1955, pp. 72–81Google Scholar, and Erdmann, Johann Eduard, “Schopenhauer und Herbart: Eine Antithese,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik von Fichte und Ulrici, n.s. 21 (1852): 209–26.Google Scholar The most helpful discussions of Austrian philosophy are Bauer's Der Idealismus und seine Gegner in Österreich and Johnston's chapter on “The Leibnizian Vision of Harmony” in The Austrian Mind. In The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley, 1980)Google Scholar David F. Lindenfield challenges the notion of a significant continuity between the Bohemian Leibnizian tradition and Meinong, but he does agree that Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften displays the special affinity of Austrian thought for science and empiricism.

21. It was around 1860 that Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach encountered Schopenhauer's ideas through Hieronymous Lorm, and her initial instinct seems to have been to reject him. Mühlher, “Philosophie und Dichtung,” p. 207. Although books published in Berlin and Leipzig obviously found their way to Vienna, it was not until the late 1860s that significant references to Schopenhauer began to appear in works published in Austria—and even this was only a trickle until 1870. Jospeh Nadler argues that Schopenhauer influenced Ebner-Eschenbach as well as Saar, and he even sees some affinity between Schopenhauer and Stifter. Nadler, Joseph, Literaturgeschichte Österreichs (Salzburg, 1951), p 354.Google Scholar

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24. McGrath, Dionysian Art, p. 184.

25. McGrath, Dionysian Art, pp. 79, 90, and Bauer, Roger, “Die Wiederkunft des Barock und das Ende des Ästhetizmus,” in Fin de siècle: Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Bauer, Roger et al. (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 211.Google Scholar

26. The dramatist Eduard Bauernfeld (1802–90), one of the more robust and appealing representatives of Austrian liberalism in the nineteenth century, found Wagner utterly ridiculous. In a letter of 1873 Bauernfeld referred to a figure in one of his plays as “a parasite and a Schopenhauerian philosopher.” Briefe an, von und um Josephine von Wertheimstein, ed. Kann, Robert A. (Vienna, 1981), p. 308.Google Scholar Regarding Wagner, see ibid., pp. 180 and 251.

27. Brentano, Franz, Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik (Bern, 1952), p. 230.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., p. 228.

29. Boltzmann, Ludwig, “Über eine These Schopenhauers,” Populäre Schriften (Leipzig, 1905).Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 404.

31. Hamerling, Robert, Die Atomistik des Willens: Beiträge zur Kritik der modernen Erkenntnis (Hamburg, 1891)Google Scholar, and Lorm, Hieronymous, Der grundlose Optimismus (Vienna, 1894).Google Scholar

32. McGrath, Dionysian Art, p. 42; Johnston, The Austrian Mind, p. 231; and Lesky, The Vienna Medical School, pp. 357–58.

33. McGrath, Dionysian Art, p. 43.

34. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, p. 756, and Johnston, The Austrian Mind, pp. 232–33.

35. Mach, Ernst, The Analysis of Sensations, trans. Williams, C. M. (New York, 1959), p. 82Google Scholar; Mach, Ernst, Knowledge and Error, trans. McCormack, Thomas J. and Foulkes, Paul (Dordrecht, Holland, 1976)Google Scholar; and Blackmore, John T., Ernst Mach (Berkeley, 1972), p. 289.Google Scholar

36. Ellenberger argues that the concept of the unconscious as taught by Schopenhauer and Hartmann won general acceptance in the last decades of the nineteenth century and that most philosophers “admitted the existence of an unconscious mental life.” Ellen-berger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, pp. 311–12. Jerry S. Clegg actually goes so far as to see Freud's work as a conscious attempt to overcome “the major pessimist of our age.” “Freud and the Issue of Pessimism,” LXI. Schopenhauer Jahrbuch, 1980, p. 49.Google Scholar

37. Schnitzler, Arthur and Waissnix, Olga, Liebe, die starb vor der Zeit: Ein Briefwechsel (Vienna, 1970), p. 36.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., pp. 121–22.

39. Hugo von Hofmannsthal/Arthur Schnitzler Briefwechsel, ed. Nikl, Therese and Schnitzler, Heinrich (Frankfurt, 1964), p. 57.Google Scholar

40. Hugo von Hofmannsthal/Beer-Hofmann Briefwechsel, ed. Weber, Eugene (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 3.Google Scholar

41. See Meyer-Wendt, H. Jürgen, Der frühe Hofmannsthal und die Gedankenwelt Nietzsches (Heidelberg, 1973), pp. 32–33Google Scholar; Kuna, Franz, “Vienna and Prague 1890–1928,” in Modernism, ed. Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James, p. 122Google Scholar; and Hofmannsthal's Aufzeichnungen. Hofmannsthal appears here as a hybrid, since he was born in the 1870s but was already a major figure at the age of eighteen and thus belonged in many respects to the intellectual frame of reference of the generation of the 1890s. Among the writers of the 1890s Hofmannsthal seems to have been most alert to Schopenhauer's significance for life and art, but he was not so sensitive a reader of Schopenhauer as other key figures of the generation of 1905.

42. Hugo von Hofmannsthal/Leopold von Andrian Briefwechsel, ed. Perl, Walter H. (Frankfurt, 1968), pp. 103–4.Google Scholar

43. Heintel, Erich, “Robert Reininger,” in Philosophie in Österreich, Wissenschaft und Weltbild, 06/09., 1968, pp. 88–101.Google Scholar The degree to which Schopenhauer had been absorbed into the mainstream of intellectual life in Vienna is suggested by the major role he plays in Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, a book that had wide influence in intellectual and popular circles at the turn of the century. For Austrian intellectuals who were born around the turn of the century, such as Karl Popper or Heimito von Doderer, Schopenhauer was simply one of the givens of intellectual life.

44. Ebner, Ferdinand, Das Wort und die geistige Realitäten (Vienna, 1952).Google Scholar

45. Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, p. 211. Cf. also their discussion of the influence of Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923) in Vienna at the turn of the century. Mauthner was not himself a member of the Vienna Circle, and he belonged to the intellectual worlds of Prague and Berlin. Nonetheless, he was an Austrian for whom Schopenhauer was so much the philosophical point of departure that he could hardly extricate himself from Schopenhauer's views.

46. See Schlick, Moritz, Problems of Ethics (New York, 1939)Google Scholar and his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (Berlin, 1925).Google Scholar

47. Wolke, Werner, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Hamburg, 1967), p. 88.Google Scholar

48. Rudolf Kassner, Sämtliche Werke, 1:477.

49. Ibid., 1:196.

50. Ibid., 1:192, 289.

51. Ibid., 4:499, 395.

52. Ibid., 1:141; 3:409.

53. Ibid., 4:23, 421, 395. Kassner also criticized Schopenhauer's use of the concept of will to eliminate the soul from the world (4:187; 2:44).

54. Weininger, Otto, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Vienna, 1903, reprint: Munich, 1980).Google Scholar The English edition is Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (London, 1906, reprint: 1975), p. 340.Google Scholar Weininger has a lot to say about Schopenhauer in this book and most of it concerns love, will, sexuality, and eroticism.

55. Field, Frank, The Last Days of Mankind: Karl Kraus and his Vienna (New York, 1967), PP 58, 6.Google Scholar

56. Janik and Toulmin argue that the Krausians of Vienna liked the post-Kantians, but especially Schopenhauer (Wittgenstein's Vienna, p. 164). Some scholars argue that Kraus admired Nietzsche even more than Schopenhauer. Cf. Iggers, Wilma Abeles, Karl Kraus: A Viennese Critic of the Twentieth Century (The Hague, 1967), p. 216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Kohn, Caroline, Karl Kraus (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 219.Google Scholar

58. Field, Last Days of Mankind, pp. 22–23.

59. Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna, p. 164 and passim; Janik, Allan S., “Schopenhauer and the Early Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Studies (Maynooth, Ireland) 15 (1966): 76–95Google Scholar; and Johnston, The Austrian Mind, p. 212.

60. Engel, Morris, “Schopenhauer's Impact on the Early Wittgenstein,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 7, no. 3 (07 1969): 285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Ibid., pp. 286–87, 302.

62. Wittgenstein's seriousness in these matters was made still more painful by his guilt about his homosexuality and by the incredible power of his own moralistic demands on himself. Cf. Bartley, William Warren III, Wittgenstein (New York, 1973)Google Scholar, and Engelmann, Paul, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (Oxford, 1967).Google Scholar

63. Durzak, Manfred, Hermann Broch (Stuttgart, 1968), pp. 25–27.Google Scholar

64. Ibid., p. 31.

65. Cassirer, Sidonie, “Hermann Broch's Early Writings,” PMLA 75, no. 4 (09 1960): 453, 456Google Scholar, and Ziolkowski, Theodore, Hermann Broch (New York, 1964), pp. 7–8, 29–30Google Scholar and passim.

66. Heller, Erich, Franz Kafka (New York, 1975), p. 23.Google Scholar Cf. also Kafka, Franz, Briefe 1902–1924 (New York, 1958), pp. 310, 337Google Scholar: Kafka's letters suggest an affinity with Schopenhauer's view that life transformed into art is beautiful, but if we actually have to live it it is drudgery. Kafka wondered if it was right to live on happily as Schopenhauer did in a world constantly described as hell.

67. Cf. my Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture.

68. Musil, Prosa und Stücke, pp. 648, 1016. Musil associated Schopenhauer with Freud and the theory of blind sexual drive (ibid., pp. 1571, 1647).