Lukács was roundly condemned and ostracised for being a revisionist and anti-Leninist. He never ready recovered, never counterattacked, and eventually admitted his ‘error.’ However, his analysis of Marxism, class-consciousness, and literature found an echo in Walter Benjamin’s work in the 1930s, and was revived in modified form after World War II by Raymond Williams and others in the doctrine of cultural materialism (see chapters 26 and 40).
In 1924, the year after History and Class Consciousness was published, a group of philosophers and scientists in Vienna began to meet every Thursday. Originally organised as the Ernst Mach Society, in 1928 they changed their name to the Wiener Kreis, the Vienna Circle. Under this title they became what is arguably the most important philosophical movement of the century (and one, incidentally, directly opposed to Heidegger).
The guiding spirit of the circle was Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), Berlinborn who, like many members of the Kreis, had trained as a scientist, in his case as a physicist under Max Planck, from 1900–4. The twenty-odd members of the circle that Schlick put together included Otto Neurath from Vienna, a remarkable Jewish polymath; Rudolf Carnap, a mathematician who had been a pupil of Gottlob Frege at Jena; Philipp Frank, another physicist; Heinz Hartmann, a psychoanalyst; Kurt Godei, a mathematician; and at times Karl Popper, who became an influential philosopher after World War 11. Schlick’s original label for the kind of philosophy that evolved in Vienna in the 1920s was konsequenter Empirismus, or consistent empiricism. However, after he visited America in 1929 and again in 1931–2, the term logical positivism emerged – and stuck.
The logical positivists made a spirited attack on metaphysics, against any suggestion that ‘there might be a world beyond the ordinary world of science and common sense, the world revealed to us by our senses.’92 For the logical positivists, any statement that wasn’t empirically testable – verifiable – or a statement in logic or mathematics was nonsensical. And so vast areas of theology, aesthetics, and politics were dismissed. There was more to it than this, of course. As the British philosopher A. J. Ayer, himself an observer of the circle for a short time, described it, they were also against ‘what we might cad the German past,’ the romantic and to them rather woolly thinking of Hegel and Nietzsche (though not Marx).93 The American philosopher Sidney Hook, who travelled in Germany at the time, confirmed the split, that the more traditional German philosophers were hostile to science and saw it as their duty ‘to advance the cause of religion, morality, freedom of the will, the Volk and the organic nation state.’94 The aim of the Vienna Circle was to clarify and simplify philosophy, using techniques of logic and science. Under them, philosophy became the handmaiden of science and a ‘second-order subject.’ First-order subjects talk about the world (like physics and biology); second-order subjects talk about their talk about the world.95 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was one of the main influences on the Vienna Circle, and he too had been interested in the role of language in experience, and was very critical of traditional metaphysics. In this way, as the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle said, philosophy came to be regarded as ‘talk about talk.’96
Neurath was perhaps the most talented of the circle. Though he trained as a mathematician, he also studied with Max Weber and wrote a book called Anti Spengler (1921). He was close to the Bauhaus people and developed a system of two thousand symbols (called isotypes) designed to help educate the illiterate (he would sign his own letters with an isotype of an elephant, happy or sad, as the case might be).97 But this huge ebullient character was intensely serious and agreed with Wittgenstein that one should remain silent regarding metaphysics, because it is nonsense, while recognising ‘that one is being silent about something that does not exist.’98
The self-conscious organisation of the Vienna Circle, and their enthusiasm for their new approach, was also a factor in their influence. It was as if they suddenly knew what philosophy was. Science describes the world, the only world there is, the world of things around us. All philosophy can do, therefore, is analyse and criticise the concepts and theories of science, so as to refine them, make them more accurate and useful. This is why the legacy of logical positivism is known as analytic philosophy.
In the same year that Moritz Schlick started the Vienna Circle, 1924, the year that The Magic Mountain appeared, Robert Musil began work in Vienna on his masterpiece, The Man without Qualities. If he had never written a book, Musil would still be worth remembering for describing Hitler in 1930 as ‘the living unknown soldier.’99 But his three-volume work, the first volume of which was published in the same year, is for some people the most important novel in German written this century, eclipsing anything Mann wrote. Rated by many as on a par with Joyce and Proust, it is still far less well known than Ulysses, A la recherche du temps perdu, or The Magic Mountain.
Born in Klagenfurt in 1880, Musil came from an upper-middle-class family, part of the Austrian ‘mandinarate.’ He trained in science and engineering and wrote a thesis on Ernst Mach. The Man without Qualities is set in 1913 in the mythical country of ‘Kakania.’ Kakania is clearly Austro-Hungary, the name referring to Kaiserlich und Königlich, or K.u.K, standing for the royal kingdom of Hungary and the imperial-royal domain of the Austrian crown lands.100 The book, though daunting in length, is for many the most brilliant literary response to developments in other fields in the early twentieth century, one of a handful of creations that is incapable of over-interpretation. It is: post-Bergson, post-Einstein, post-Rutherford, post-Bohr, post-Freud, post-Husserl, post-Picasso, post-Proust, post-Gide, post-Joyce and above all post-Wittgenstein.
There are three intertwined themes which provide a loose narrative. First, there is the search by the main character, Ulrich von …, a Viennese intellectual in his early thirties, whose attempt to penetrate the meaning of modern life involves him in a project to understand the mind of a murderer. Second, there is Ulrich’s relationship (and love affair) with his sister, who he had lost contact with in childhood. Third, the book is a social satire on Vienna on the eve of World War I.101
But the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalisations and talk about value, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless, as Wittgenstein tells us, how are we to live? asks Musil. He accepts that the old categories in which men thought – the ‘halfway house’ ideas of racialism, or religion – are of no use any more, but with what are we to replace them? Ulrich’s attempts to understand the mind of the murderer, Moosbrugger, recall Gide’s arguments that some things are inexplicable. (Musil studied under the psychologist Carl Stumpf, as did Husserl, and so was not especially in thrall to Freud, believing that although there was an unconscious it was an unorganised ‘Proustian’ jumble of forgotten memories. He also researched his book in a scientific way, studying a real murderer in jail in Vienna.) At one point Ulrich notes that he is tall, with broad shoulders, that ‘his chest cavity bulged like a spreading sail on a mast’ but that on occasions he felt small and soft, like ‘a jelly-fish floating in the water’ when he read a book that moved him. In other words, no one description, no one characteristic or quality, fitted him. It is in this sense that he is a man without qualities: ‘We no longer have any inner voices. We know too much these days; reason tyrannises our lives.’