If this was the dominant Zeitgeist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the century, stretching from literature to philosophy to art, at the same time there was in Vienna (and the Teutonic lands) a competing strain of thought that was wholly scientific and frankly reductionist, as we have seen in the work of Planck, de Vries, and Mendel. But the most ardent, the most impressive, and by far the most influential reductionist in Vienna was Ernst Mach (1838— 1916).53 Born near Brünn, where Mendel had outlined his theories, Mach, a precocious and difficult child who questioned everything, was at first tutored at home by his father, then studied mathematics and physics in Vienna. In his own work, he made two major discoveries. Simultaneously with Breuer, but entirely independently, he discovered the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium. And second, using a special technique, he made photographs of bullets travelling at more than the speed of sound.54 In the process, he discovered that they create not one but two shock waves, one at the front and another at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates. This became particularly significant after World War II with the arrival of jet aircraft that approached the speed of sound, and this is why supersonic speeds (on Concorde, for instance) are given in terms of a ‘Mach number.’55
After these noteworthy empirical achievements, however, Mach became more and more interested in the philosophy and history of science.56 Implacably opposed to metaphysics of any kind, he worshipped the Enlightenment as the most important period in history because it had exposed what he called the ‘misapplication’ of concepts like God, nature, and soul. The ego he regarded as a ‘useless hypothesis.’57 In physics he at first doubted the very existence of atoms and wanted measurement to replace ‘pictorialisation,’ the inner mental images we have of how things are, even dismissing Immanuel Kant’s a priori theory of number (that numbers just are).58 Mach argued instead that ‘our’ system was only one of several possibilities that had arisen merely to fill our economic needs, as an aid in rapid calculation. (This, of course, was an answer of sorts to Husserl.) All knowledge, Mach insisted, could be reduced to sensation, and the task of science was to describe sense data in the simplest and most neutral manner. This meant that for him the primary sciences were physics, ‘which provide the raw material for sensations,’ and psychology, by means of which we are aware of our sensations. For Mach, philosophy had no existence apart from science.59 An examination of the history of scientific ideas showed, he argued, how these ideas evolved. He firmly believed that there is evolution in ideas, with the survival of the fittest, and that we develop ideas, even scientific ideas, in order to survive. For him, theories in physics were no more than descriptions, and mathematics no more than ways of organising these descriptions. For Mach, therefore, it made less sense to talk about the truth or falsity of theories than to talk of their usefulness. Truth, as an eternal, unchanging thing that just is, for him made no sense. He was criticised by Planck among others on the grounds that his evolutionary/biological theory was itself metaphysical speculation, but that didn’t stop him being one of the most influential thinkers of his day. The Russian Marxists, including Anatoli Lunacharsky and Vladimir Lenin, read Mach, and the Vienna Circle was founded in response as much to his ideas as to Wittgenstein’s. Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and even Albert Einstein all acknowledged his ‘profound influenee.’60
Mach suffered a stroke in 1898, and thereafter reduced his workload considerably. But he did not die until 1916, by which time physics had made some startling advances. Though he never adjusted entirely to some of the more exotic ideas, such as relativity, his uncompromising reductionism undoubtedly gave a massive boost to the new areas of investigation that were opening up after the discovery of the electron and the quantum. These new entities had dimensions, they could be measured, and so conformed exactly to what Mach thought science should be. Because of his influence, quite a few of the future particle physicists would come from Vienna and the Habsburg hinterland. Owing to the rival arenas of thought, however, which gave free rein to the irrational, very few would actually practise their physics there.
That almost concludes this account of Vienna, but not quite. For there are two important gaps in this description of that teeming world. One is music. The second Viennese school of music comprised Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, and Alban Berg, but also included Richard (not Johann) Strauss, who used Hofmannsthal as librettist. They more properly belong in chapter 4, among Les Demoiselles de Modernisme. The second gap in this account concerns a particular mix of science and politics, a deep pessimism about the way the world was developing as the new century was ushered in. This was seen in sharp focus in Austria, but in fact it was a constellation of ideas that extended to many countries, as far afield as the United States of America and even to China. The alleged scientific basis for this pessimism was Darwinism; the sociological process that sounded the alarm was ‘degeneration’; and the political result, as often as not, was some form of racism.
3
DARWIN’S HEART OF DARKNESS
Three significant deaths occurred in 1900. John Ruskin died insane on 20 January, aged eighty-one. The most influential art critic of his day, he had a profound effect on nineteenth-century architecture and, in Modern Painters, on the appreciation of J. M. W. Turner.1 Ruskin hated industrialism and its effect on aesthetics and championed the Pre-Raphaelites – he was splendidly anachronistic. Oscar Wilde died on 30 November, aged forty-four. His art and wit, his campaign against the standardisation of the eccentric, and his efforts ‘to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy’ have made him seem more modern, and more missed, as the twentieth century has gone by. Far and away the most significant death, however, certainly in regard to the subject of this book, was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, on 25 August. Aged fifty-six, he too died insane.
There is no question that the figure of Nietzsche looms over twentieth-century thought. Inheriting the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche gave it a modern, post-Darwinian twist, stimulating in turn such later figures as Oswald Spengler, T. S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Michel Foucault. Yet when he died, Nietzsche was a virtual vegetable and had been so for more than a decade. As he left his boardinghouse in Turin on 3 January 1889 he saw a cabdriver beating a horse in the Palazzo Carlo Alberto. Rushing to the horse’s defence, Nietzsche suddenly collapsed in the street. He was taken back to his lodgings by onlookers, and began shouting and banging the keys of his piano where a short while before he had been quietly playing Wagner. A doctor was summoned who diagnosed ‘mental degeneration.’ It was an ironic verdict, as we shall see.2