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