Our present is all void and dreariness,
If consecration comes not from without.15
Hofmannsthal’s view is most clearly shown in his poem ‘Idyll on an Ancient Vase Painting,’ which tells the story of the daughter of a Greek vase painter. She has a husband, a blacksmith, and a comfortable standard of living, but she is dissatisfied; her life, she feels, is not fulfilled. She spends her time dreaming of her childhood, recalling the mythological images her father painted on the vases he sold. These paintings portrayed the heroic actions of the gods, who led the sort of dramatic life she yearns for. Eventually Hofmannsthal grants the woman her wish, and a centaur appears. Delighted that her fortunes have taken this turn, she immediately abandons her old life and escapes with the centaur. Alas, her husband has other ideas; if he can’t have her, no one else can, and he kills her with a spear.16 In summary this sounds heavy-handed, but Hofmannsthal’s argument is unambiguous: beauty is paradoxical and can be subversive, terrible even. Though the spontaneous, instinctual life has its attractions, however vital its expression is for fulfilment, it is nevertheless dangerous, explosive. Aesthetics, in other words, is never simply self-contained and passive: it implies judgement and action.
Hofmannsthal also noted the encroachment of science on the old aesthetic culture of Vienna. ‘The nature of our epoch,’ he wrote in 1905, ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].’ He added that ‘what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende.’17 Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell’s and Planck’s discoveries? ‘Everything fell into parts,’ Hofmannsthal wrote, ‘the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts any more.’18 Like Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal was disturbed by political developments in the dual monarchy and in particular the growth of anti-Semitism. For him, this rise in irrationalism owed some of its force to science-induced changes in the understanding of reality; the new ideas were so disturbing as to promote a large-scale reactionary irrationalism. His personal response was idiosyncratic, to say the least, but had its own logic. At the grand age of twenty-six he abandoned poetry, feeling that the theatre offered a better chance of meeting current challenges. Schnitzler had pointed out that politics had become a form of theatre, and Hofmannsthal thought that theatre was needed to counteract political developments.19 His work, from the plays Fortunatus and His Sons (1900–I) and King Candaules (1903) to his librettos for Richard Strauss, is all about political leadership as an art form, the point of kings being to preserve an aesthetic that provides order and, in so doing, controls irrationality. Yet the irrational must be given an outlet, Hofmannsthal says, and his solution is ‘the ceremony of the whole,’ a ritual form of politics in which no one feels excluded. His plays are attempts to create ceremonies of the whole, marrying individual psychology to group psychology, psychological dramas that anticipate Freud’s later theories.20 And so, whereas Schnitzler was prepared to be merely an observer of Viennese society, an elegant diagnostician of its shortcomings, Hofmannsthal rejected this therapeutic nihilism and saw himself in a more direct role, trying to change that society. As he revealingly put it, the arts had become the ‘spiritual space of the nation.’21 In his heart, Hofmannsthal always hoped that his writings about kings would help Vienna throw up a great leader, someone who would offer moral guidance and show the way ahead, ‘melting all fragmentary manifestations into unity and changing all matter into “form, a new German reality.” ‘The words he used were uncannily close to what eventually came to pass. What he hoped for was a ‘genius … marked with the stigma of the usurper,’ ‘a true German and absolute man,’ ‘a prophet,’ ‘poet,’ ‘teacher,’ ‘seducer,’ an ‘erotic dreamer.’22 Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics of kingship overlapped with Freud’s ideas about the dominant male, with the anthropological discoveries of Sir James Frazer, with Nietzsche and with Darwin. Hofmannsthal was very ambitious for the harmonising possibilities of art; he thought it could help counter the disruptive effects of science.
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