Wittgenstein's Vienna

by Allan Janik, Stephen Edelston Toulmin

This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de siecle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein s native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems .This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful. New York Times Book Review."

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Biography, Art, Germany, Travel

322 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 1996

Reviews

[James Curcio · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is somewhat of a surprise to me, but this may be one of my favorite works of philosophy. The reason why is simple: Wittgenstein's Vienna studies the thought of a particular individual not just on its apparent ground, but also, and possibly more fundamentally, within the context of the culture and history in which it arose. This is something that should be done with many of the thinkers and artists of days past, but Wittgenstein in particular almost demands this treatment.

The proof of this is given in how much he has been misunderstood.

Let me give an example:

"A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein as a positivist, because he has something of enormous importance in common with the positivists: he draws the line between what we can speak about and what we must remain silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds--and this is the essence--that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must remain silent about!" - Paul Engelmann.

I think it has more to do with my stance than some great intellect or anything that my initial reading of the Tractatus -- which in detail I barely understood upon first reading -- is in fact what Wittgenstein had intended, and precisely what many smarter and more famous individuals than myself had completely misunderstood. The last section of the book, which people like Russell though was a sort of throwaway addendum, is in fact the very heart of the matter. And W's later work (touched on in the posthumous Discourses) is not so much a departure from his earlier thought as a clarification about language, which does throw a serious curveball in regard to the demarcation between that-which-can-be-spoken and that-which-must-be-passed-over-in-silence.

The Tractutus, in other words, is essentially not a work on logic and language, but rather a work on ethics/value/meaning. This thesis is presented very well in Janik and Toulmin's book, and their methodology is such that it wound up being one of the central books in our first investigation of myth, "The Immanence of Myth." (Weaponized.)

[Miglė · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pasiėmiau šią knygą keliaudama į Vieną, nes norėjau pavaikščioti Wittgensteino ir loginių pozityvistų keliais:)

+ Knygoje daug pasakojama apie kontekstą ir kultūrinį klimatą, kuriame radosi tiek Wittgensteino, tiek loginių pozityvistų idėjos. Įdomu paskaityti apie tą aristokratiją (nors daugybės knygoje minėtų žmonių aš nežinojau), naujas idėjas, atsirandantį antisemitizmą ir kaip jis trukdė tų naujų idėjų vystumui ir sklaidai (na, kad ir nušautas Moritzas Schlickas).
+ Skyreliai suorganizuoti ne visai chronologiškai, bet pagal įvairias vietas Vienoje. Parašyti jų adresai ir kas ten vyko, taigi galima nueiti ir išvysti kokią atminimo lentelę:)

- Kaip gaila, kad knygoje nėra miesto žemėlapio (na, gal ir logiška, nes tų adresų labai daug, sunku būtų visus į vieną žemėlapį sukišti), bet...
- Gale nėra net pavardžių ar adresų rodyklės! Žinoma, nebūtina šią knygą skaityti kaip miesto gidą, bet kad jau pati knyga taip suorganizuota, minimi žmonės ir adresai, rodyklę būtų na, tiesiog pravartu turėti.

Bet nieko tokio, susižymėjau įdomesnes vietas skirtukais ir aplankiau Wittgensteino suprojektuotą namą, Musilio namą (t.y. pastatą, kurio bute kažkada gyveno Musilis) ir pastatą, kuriame gyveno Schlickas. Nespėjau nueiti į universitetą, ant kurio laiptų jis buvo nušautas, didelė visgi ta Viena.

[James Klagge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) in a class in 1975. In 1976-77 I undertook to compile what I called a "Cultural-Historical Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus." But I soon discovered that this book had been published in 1973, accomplishing most all of what I had wanted to do, only far better. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the TLP. This is about the 4th time I've read the book, but I am only now listing it in Goodreads b/c my listings only cover what I have read since 2006. This book provides all the Austrian background to Wittgenstein that Anglophone students were generally unaware of. I have recently come back to my original project--now as a collection of materials that influenced Wittgenstein (Tractatus in Context: The Essential Background for Appreciating Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) in his composition of the TLP. So I returned to this book for help in finding references. But it was worth the re-read. The book is co-authored, and I have come to know the first author (Allan Janik)--in fact my current copy of the book is signed by him--a fine scholar and man. He emphasizes the importance of Karl Kraus for setting up the problems that Wittgenstein came to address in TLP. I recently read a new edition and commentary on some of Kraus's writings (The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus) and this makes for an interesting comparison. Both books look at what Kraus means for today (though "today" in this book was the early 1970s). While this book's applications (Ch 9) are dated, this book's account of Kraus and his relevance as a cultural critic is far superior to Frazen's discussion.
Even if you are not a philosopher interested in Wittgenstein, this book offers a wide-ranging account of cultural issues generally that touches on such figures as Schoenberg (music), Loos (architecture), Musil (literature), Hertz (physics), and dozens of others.

[Sean Chick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book offers a deep look into Vienna before World War I, seeing it as a wellspring of the kind of modernity that dominated the West, at least until the convulsions of the 1960s. For myself, it is a hard read. I despise Schoenberg and Loos, I think Freud is interesting but ultimately odious due to his dogmatism, and Wittgenstein is Wittgenstein. I used to joke that Austria produced many of the worst elements of the 20th Century. This book only confirmed that.

Still, it's a pivotal period that laid the groundwork for the West's declining faith in itself. Janik makes the argument that the revolution of ideas in Vienna never came to fruition. A tall order in a world where classical composition was shredded by Schoenberg. Loos' aesthetic, if not his philosophy, surrounds us in every dull prefab building masquerading as architecture. Still, it is a colorful and thoughtful portrait, and I particularly liked the discussion of philosophy leading up to Wittgenstein. Yet, the book plays with but never answers the burning question. Why did these thinkers and artists hate beauty so much? Why do people weep when Victorian structures are destroyed but hardly ever when another Loos-inspired box is wrecked? The argument that it was a rejection of bourgeois ease and hypocrisy is partially correct, yet the previous rebellious generations still embraced beauty, whether that be the Enlightenment or the Romantics. There was a destructive pathology at work here, one that I fear has only fully blossomed as of late.

[Luc De Coster · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I told a friend I was travelling to Vienna, she recommended to read “Wittgenstein’s Vienna” (thanks Myriam). I did not read it once but twice: before and after the trip.

The ideas of Ludwig “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” Wittgenstein (1889-1951) could be very helpful in dealing with this age of crumbling truths, conspiracy theories, unverifiable facts and images and an avalanche of cheap ideological opinions. Rigorous discipline guarding scientific and logical quality of public statements would be so helpful.

But that is not what this book is about. Janik and Toulmin want to explain how Wittgenstein was first and foremost Viennese and how his philosophy was deeply rooted in the cultural scene of the Austrian capital in the first decades of the 20th century. Wittgenstein moved to Cambridge in 1929 and has long been discussed within the tradition of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy with its focus on epistemological questions, the “truth value” of propositions and how to use language for “describing” reality. Wittgenstein was considered to be a philosopher of knowledge, dealing with the Kantian question: “What can I know?”

Janik and Toulmin demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s quest for truth was the result of an ethical concern for authenticity much more than a desire for constructing an infallible logical toolbox. Wittgenstein grew up in Habsburg Vienna where the emperor Franz Joseph overlooked the waltzing high society of Vienna in its efforts not to notice the growing inadequacy of century old structures to accommodate modernity and the growing diversity of the huge empire. Pretending everything was as it used to be was the Viennese way of dealing with things. Just as Freud revealed repressed sexuality there were journalists, musicians, scientists, artists, architects all turning the fundamentals of their disciplines inside out.

Through a very comprehensive overview of cultural and intellectual life in Vienna this book show us how Wittgenstein’s philosophy is rooted in a Germanic tradition and in particular in a Viennese setting. The efforts of Arnold Schönberg to create a new musical language mirror the breach of architect Adolf Loos, replacing the ornamentalism of Baroque and Seccesion Vienna with a slim and functional design. Likewise Wittgenstein wished to make a new beginning with the language of philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna is an adventurous walk through a varied landscape seamlessly connecting the mysticism of Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, with artists such as Klimt or Kokoschka, logicians such as Frege and Russell, physicists such as Mach and Boltzmann with long forgotten but then famous Viennese journalists (Kraus) all within the mind and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Certain parts are not easy reading but a visit to Vienna gains so much from this book.
If you want to learn about Wittgenstein’s philosophy, this may not be the best book, but if you wish to learn about the background against which this philosophy became possible, highly recommended.

[Matthew W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a lot people don't seem to see the value of a book like Wittgenstein's Vienna, it is fortunate books like it exist.

What are the roots of modern racial Antisemitism? That German fellow Johann Andreas Eisenmenger apparently did a swell job exposing the Talmud as a hate-book, but what about hatred of those with Jewish blood?

It seems that Vienna, Austria was essentially the Jewish capital of Europe. Apparently, Vienna was also the capital of modern day intellectual Antisemitism. The only thing is that the top Antisemites were virtually all Jewish. Karl Kraus, Arthur Trebitsch, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Otto Weininger, Viktor Adler, and Heinrich Friedjung are just a couple of the great purveyors of Austrian intellectual Antisemitism.

Probably the most unflattering example of Viennese Jewish Antisemitism was father of modern day political Zionism Theodor Herzl. Before picking up Zionism, Herzl was a Pro-assimilation Jew who actively sought having Austrian-German Jewry disappear into the German population. Some modern day Zionist extremist types call Jewish assimilation "The silent holocaust."

In Wittgenstein's Vienna, the author makes the claim that Herzl's prime motivation for Zionism was his self-loathing for his Jewish background. After all, Zionism's ultimate goal is to bring world Jewry back to the completely mythical Heroic days of David's Kingdom. Apparently, Theodor Herzl was also a dandy boy that loved wearing frock coats at International Zionist conferences.

Out of all the peculiar things about Theodor Herzl, the strangest (or maybe not so) was his obsession with top Anti-Semite Richard Wagner. Just like fellow Austrian Adolf Hitler, Herzl was completely consumed with world changing passion after experiencing Wagner's music. In fact, Herzl credited Wagner's Tannhauser in influencing his advocacy of the Jewish state. Adolf Hitler is known for stating that one cannot understand National Socialism unless they understand Richard Wagner. Apparently, the same can be said about Zionism.

[r0b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a great read!
I am thinking/agreeing that this book is probably quite fundamental to pursuing an understanding of the guy.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una obra que yo recomendaría a las personas que después quieran leer a Wittgenstein. ¿Habla de la Viena de principios de siglo XX? Por supuesto, pero luego se centra en el filósofo, con lo que cumple la promesa del título. De hecho, los capítulos de Stephen Toulmin sobre él son oscurísimos (de Toulmin me gustó mucho 'Cosmópolis', un libro editado por Península que hoy no es fácil de encontrar). Al final, diría que su lectura me ha servido para animar mi curiosidad por Wittgenstein y, sobre todo, para entender por qué no voy a entender el 'Tractatus'.

Por cierto, os animo a saltaros la Introducción de Isidoro Reguera, que en mi opinión es pésima, y a ser pacientes con la traducción de Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, que en varias ocasiones me ha sacado de mis casillas.

[Aike · Rating 4 out of 5]

yeah great fun i liked this contextual approach to (Wittgenstein's) philosophy. it's a bit outdated at times / very much fits in the philosophy of science of its time with it's not so subtle centrism but that honestly only added a fun layer to it for me what can i say im easy to please like that right

[Connor Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only do Janik and Toulmin have an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge, but they are bold and relentlessly methodical in putting it together; They're equally at home discussing the shift from seven tone to twelve tone composition, the replacement of artificially baroque architecture with functional spaces, the emergence of "internally mapped" axiomatic systems vs historical explanations of scientific enterprise, poetic expression, journalistic styles and rivalries... and deftly charting the cross links between these various areas. This occupies about half of the book- the remainder deals with Wittgenstein as the masthead of all these changes and concerns.

Not so much because he was at their very spearpoint, but because he tried to deal with them in the widest, most comprehensive, and most general way. Here the authors are very insightful into his philosophy, his personality, his influences, and his relationship with the philosophical community at large, building him up out of these mutually affecting factors. (though they try to avoid any "psychobiography")

And throughout, they maintain this intricate narrative elegantly, and more importantly naturally. Connecting the dots as they did was impressive; getting it so coherently on paper is equally so.

But why should Wittgenstein be the central focus of this book, rather than other figures who struggled with the same concepts (one of the book's points), like Boltzmann or Loos? The authors have a persuasive argument to make as well, specifically about Wittgenstein's philosophy. For them, Wittgenstein has been mangled by an English speaking philosophical world who did not know his context and therefore were not in a position to appraise his work and aims.

His reputation as somewhat of a god, an eccentric genius of peerless depth, is actually a neutralization of his contributions because it removes them from useful, active discourse. A pedestal is as useful as a garbage bin for getting rid of an unwanted or inconsistent idea. For Janik and Toulmin, the only way to take Wittgenstein at face value is to know the unique situation that formed him: the dusk of the Austrio-Hungarian empire and its centerpiece, Vienna.

[Anders · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an engrossing and original account of scientific and cultural life in late-Habsburg Vienna, hard to put down even when the concepts are particularly tricky. The authors' main idea is that the philosophy of Wittgenstein, both in its early and late incarnations, has been misunderstood because seen through the lens of the British analytic tradition. Thus, Wittgenstein is better understood as a typical pre-WWI Viennese, deeply concerned with topics such as integrity in a world of falsehoods and the task of separating "facts" from "values." Because this Viennese world that nurtured his thinking disappeared in the great European cataclysm, his Tractatus (not exactly a transparent read at the best of times) could be appropriated by Bertrand Russell and the Vienna Circle in ways that puzzled and infuriated Wittgenstein himself.
What makes the book truly great, however, is that it spins nearly all the intellectual threads of Viennese life together in a compelling fashion, documenting how artists like Klimt, architects like Adolph Loos, musicians like Schönberg and von Hofmannsthal, and physicists like Hertz and Boltzmann all influenced one another and had very much to contend with the strange situation of living in a decadent, multinational monarchy with a sluggish bureaucracy and corrupt press. The great European city that bred both modern German racist nationalism and Zionism more or less simultaneously shows itself, not surprisingly, to be full of fascinating contradictions and thought-provoking parallels to our own times.

[Stephen Case · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wittgenstein is a name that looms large on the landscape of twentieth-century philosophy, and one day I’ll get around to actually reading his work. For now though, I’m still dancing around the edges. I’ve written about Logicomix before as a creative introduction to the mathematical and philosophical scene in which Wittgenstein appeared, and about a year ago that led me to an excellent biography on Wittgenstein. This latest book on the philosopher, which had come up several times before in references to Wittgenstein, I found at a university library used book sale. I grabbed it immediately, possibly uttering a small shriek of excitement.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna is a cultural and social contextualization of Wittgenstein’s work. The authors are self-consciously unapologetic that their study is interdisciplinary and not well-suited to the lens of professional philosophy that would view Wittgenstein’s work in terms of the development of analytical philosophy alone. Rather, they say it’s important—essential—in understanding Wittgenstein’s major work to first understand the context in which Wittgenstein wrote, the final days of the Habsburg Empire and its capital Vienna just before the Great War.

By examining the culture of the period—the aesthetic revolts against insincerity and ostentation in music, literature, and architecture centered on the writings of the social critic Karl Kraus—they claim Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a similar cultural artifact, a philosophical response to this environment. Instead of being intended (as it was perceived by the Logical Positivists) as a groundwork for analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein meant the Tractatus to rigorously define the boundary between facts and values. Critically though this was not to exclude values from the realm of importance (as the Logical Positivists took his famous closing phrase, “of what we cannot speak we must pass over in silence”) but rather to protect ethics and all that was truly important (and unspeakable) in the human experience from the encroachment of logic.

For the authors, Wittgenstein’s work is primarily a cultural, philosophical, and even artistic response to his social environment similar to that of Adolf Loos in architecture and will be (and has been) misunderstood without this broader context. As an example of an interdisciplinary study—and in itself a strong critique of philosophy divorced from context—Wittgenstein’s Vienna is wonderful. It takes a real problem—the interpretation of a famously eccentric man and his undeniably influential work—and it offers an answer grounded in full-bodied exploration of that man’s time and context.

My complaint is that though the arguments are compelling and even a pleasure to read, and though the authors make Habsburg Vienna come to life and illuminate things from the origins of modernism to the perils of political stagnation and the linguistic relations between subject peoples at the dawn of Eastern European nationalism, they tend to let a general zeitgeist form the mode of connection between all this and Wittgenstein. That is, a stronger argument would have connected the dots more firmly, including perhaps more of Wittgenstein’s correspondence and biographical links between Wittgenstein and the key cultural players, Kraus in particular. The authors argue that Kraus was central to creating and fostering the cultural critique in which they’re placing the Tractates—going so far as to call the Tractates a Krausian work—but I still was left with questions about the contacts and connections between the two men.

The work is multifaceted and branched off into lots of interesting side-trails along the way of contextualizing Wittgenstein and his work. There were, for instance, arguments related to the birth of modernism, particularly modern architecture. The authors claim, for instance, that the architecture of Loos was a revolt against ostentation and ornament for it’s own sake, that Loos thought use should dictate design. But they say once this mode was established, its minimalism became itself a new orthodoxy: modernism for its own sake, which gave rise to the Cartesian office buildings and apartments of today in which function is completely masked by uniformity, exactly the opposite of what early modernists like Loos had intended.

This work is compelling because it mixes together so many disciplines. Whether or not you’ve heard of Wittgenstein, if you’re interested in the history of philosophy and in particular the philosophy of language, Habsburg Europe, cultural history, art history, or even social criticism, there’s something in here that you can latch onto. Good books have lots of doors that open outward; this one is full of them.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating account of philosophy, history, politics and the arts.
First of all, by contextualizing and shedding (to me) a new light on Wittgenstein's philosophy, it renewed my interest in his work. I usually felt more compelled towards his later ideas than the Tractatus, thinking that the latter was a dry and arrogant attempt to reduce all philosophy to a logical language. Now I understand that this was the interpretation of the Vienna Circle, and that Wittgenstein came from a tradition that passed through Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, and the Tractatus was meant to solve the trivial linguistic problems while freeing philosophical discussion to deal what really mattered in metaphysics and ethics.
But this doesn't happen in a vacuum, and the book covers similar movements happening in music, visual arts, architecture, literature and even politics. This is exactly what I feel philosophy needs: contextualization, showing that it is an intellectual effort responding to it's surroundings, searching for the abstract concepts behind them.
I read this alongside Just The Arguments, which distilled 100 philosophical arguments into small neat constructions without enough context. This contrast only emphasized to me the importance of Wittgenstein's contribution, and made those arguments all feel silly and irrelevant.
The end result is that I feel that I need a short break from reading philosophy and open myself to read novels and poetry.

[Mario · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about."

The book argues that the themes of Wittgenstein's Tractatus are connected to a larger body of discourse which preoccupied fin de siècle Viennese intellectuals. The first five chapters outlines the intellectual milieu of Vienna--the controversies as well as innovations in political theory, art, music, architecture and science. Every idea and theory mentioned in these pages seem to echo themes that are dealt with in Wittgenstein's work: Krausian dichotomy between reason and fantasy, the speakable and the unspeakable; his and Hoffmannsthal's preoccupation with the primacy of authenticity---an authenticity and integrity that must reflect in the professional output of artists and intellectuals; Kierkegaard's subjectivist ethics and indirect discourse; Boltzmann and Hertz's perspective on the mathematical structures that serve to model physical reality; Schopenhauer's theses on representations. Everything seem to ferment and distill into the dense propositions of the Tractatus.

So that, the view that Wittgenstein in his critique of language endorses positivism is also refuted in the book. And that instead of adopting nihilism (as the positivists and empiricists who idolized him did), he seems to have subscribed to Kierkegaardian and Krausian morality. This has the added effect of explaining the ethical standards he had set for himself (reflecting in his reverence for Tolstoy's morality stories and austerities he imposed on himself.) The positivists who have co-opted the mechanisms (of language and logic) he devised, in an attempt to bolster their nihilism. They have taken literally a few of his propositions about the uselessness of metaphysical nonsense in lieu of its impenetrability. But it is clear that Wittgenstein considers what is to them "nonsense" as anything but unimportant.

[thecrx · Rating 2 out of 5]

If, like me, you have insomnia, and Ambien doesn't work, and Trazodone doesn't work, and Sonata doesn't work, perhaps you'll want to try this book.

It has "the true scholastic stink"--the authors aren't content to state something once; they prefer to state it five times, and heap the sentiment with additional adverbs and adjectives at every pass. Cause adverbs add authority and precision, right? Ha ha.

The subject matter interests me and is relevant to my work, and I hoped to gain some knowledge of this time period, but I just can't slog through the inept prose. A good editor could have transformed this book into a nimble exploration of the authors' hypotheses, but apparently good editors are lacking these days.

[Alex Zakharov · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual book with unexpected structure, it took the time to grow on me, but upon finishing it I definitely walked away a fan. Janick and Toulmin (J&T) seem to start out on a same trajectory as Schorske’s “Fin-De-Siècle” and cover a similar cast of characters (Klimt, Schoenberg, Otto Wagner, Karl Lueger, Herzl) but then they plunge into a philosophy-heavy meditative analysis of interrelation between philosophy, science, ethics and language, and then finally level off with unintended side-effects for the future of western’s culture and intellectual thought.

In comparison to Schorske in part one of the book J&T pay more attention to Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos then to Schindler and Wagner/Smitte. J&T show how Kraus and Loos assaulted the cultural status quo from independent but complementary directions. Kraus famously criticized the feuilleton as a genre that conflates reality and fantasy and as such blinds society to both. To Kraus ethics is of paramount importance, he thinks that modern man has lost his character and ethical vector, and Kraus is keen to reinject values and ethics into society through his writing. Along similar lines Loos, the architect’s architect, hated the conflation of form and function as his war against unnecessary ornamentation attests. To him an artistic ornament of a functional object is a sign of society refusing to deal with reality, and the man may have had a point.

While Kraus and Loos obsessed with reality vs fantasy and function vs form, Arnold Schoenberg was majorly concerned with discipline and inspiration. Schoenberg sensed how “inspiration” was becoming the necessary and sufficient condition for artistic expression, and insisted that discipline and technical mastery of the underlying art-form must be present as well. Inspiration without skill is a dud. Given the state of modern art today his fear was more than justified.

A&J also cover Hugo Hofemannsthal of course and his struggle with the limits of the “sayable”, I loved the story of his early beautiful Goethe-like poetry and how he abruptly stopped writing once he became more self-conscious and intellectual. This naturally brings us to the limits of the language and what it can represent.

And now A&J start shifting to science and philosophy. They go over Ernst Mach - the man was so radically anti metaphysical that he denied that atoms existed, even Max Planck couldn’t convince him otherwise. A&J move on to Heinrich Hertz’s “models” and “pictures” as scientific representations, and of course they cover Ludwig Boltzmann, entropy and a space of possible states of a given system. And now we do a heavy dive into Kant (limits of reason, apriori truths), Schopenhauer (critique of Kant, will and representation) and Kierkegaard (Christian tenor, indirect communication, individualism galore).

Stage is ready for Wittgenstein: language is already compromised (Hofemannsthal, Mauthner), exhaust of post-Kantian analysis envelopes continental Europe, and GE Moore and Bertrand Russell are pushing the opium of analytic philosophy in Britain. Wittgenstein is well aware of all this, and he is also quite enamored with Kraus and his ethical vector. Wittgenstein thinks that such vector is best expressed through Kierkegaardian indirect communication via Tolstoy’s late writings for example.

And it is in this context that Wittgenstein writes his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicos” in which he attempts to transcend the limits of language and generalize all of philosophy along Boltzmann-Hertz lines. I.e. consider language as a flavor of Hertz-like “model” and consider all valid Boltzmannian states that such model can possibly express. It was a bold attempt indeed, after all as a student of Russell, Wittgenstein must have been painfully aware of the failed attempts to systematize mathematics (i.e. Whitehead&Russell’s “Principia Mathematica”), let alone philosophy or language in general.

Nobody to this day quite knows what Wittgenstein was trying to say, but it is certainly the case that instead of transcending language he succeeded in taking a stab at demarcating its limits. He brilliantly conveyed so himself in a letter to one of his publishers “My work consists of two parts: of the one which is here [Tractatus], and of everything that I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one”. A&J speculate that to fill the void of the missing second part Wittgenstein would have directed his readers to the writings of Kraus and Tolstoy.

At the tail end of the book A&J bring us back to Vienna where they take stock of the legacy left by the Viennese fin de siècle thinkers and the fate of their philosophies in post-war European climate (20s/30s). Prepare to be unpleasantly surprised:
   o Technical experimentation in arts and culture which was meant as means became an end in itself. The technique became more important than the art itself, and we see a rise of disjoint bureaucratic professional circles which suppress creativity and prevent cross-pollination of ideas among different disciplines.
   o The ideas of Loos and Schoenberg got reinterpreted and coopted: aesthetic functionalism for a unique purpose got perverted into a generic all-purpose structuralism.
   o Perhaps most ironically Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” got re-purposed as a manifesto for Austrian and German political positivists and social engineers.

Overall it seems that Viennese fin de siècle explosion of thinkers and theories which aimed to subvert old orthodoxies of stifling Austro-Hungarian empire simply brought about new ones. But I think we can extrapolate more generally, and safely concede that orthodoxy rotation is certainly not unique to Vienna in early 20th century - unfortunately, just like Steven Pinker’s “euphemism treadmill”, orthodoxies don’t die they merely reincarnate. And that, my friends, is most likely a natural element of human condition.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great stuff - intellectual history that's pretty heavy on the philosophical conundrums of the age. Prepare yourself for heavy doses of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, as well as Wittgenstein.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wonder if a book like this could’ve been written today? A book that tells the story of a city--Vienna-- through the lens of a man--Wittgenstein-- and then tries to understand his philosophy from within the context of the culture of the place and its preoccupations. The book really begins from where Schorske's book, Fin de Siecle Vienna left off: a crumbling society. The first part of the book is very reminiscent of Schorske and goes over similar ground tracing this dying Hapsburg empire and the intellectual giants who in reacting against the empire, pave the way for the modern world. There is less stress on architects Wagner and Loos and more stress — great stress on Karl Kraus. This then leads into a dazzling chapter Kierkegaard. I was not aware that it was during this time in Vienna that he was basically discovered, maybe in the way Mendelssohn "discovered" Bach. For according to this book, Vienna was much taken over by Kierkegaard and Tolstoy.

Through this supposition, the authors then do what must have been a tour de force when the book came out in the 70s.

My undergraduate degree was in philosophy but I am not very knowledgeable about Wittgentein.Of course, I knew he was considered to be a kind of founder of positivist philosopher, and I also recall some of his innovations in formal logic. But that said, I always felt so puzzled by his ladder remark and the way he absolutely insisted that his work (Tractatus) was being taken in the wrong way--in particular saying that Russell's introduction was completely wrong-headed. These two things were hard to understand. Because he never clarified sufficiently what he really meant and how Russell got it wrong but just insisted that Russell's interpretation of his work was completely wrong. He proceeded to walk away from philosophy (which in the end he was never formally a philosopher was he?) and wasn't heard from until his second book which did in fact attempt to undermine what he had done in Tractatus.

Many philosophers will say that it was either he or Heidegger who was the greatest mind in the 20th century. This is ludicrous. Even reading about his family and his wonderfully interesting life and realizing that he was a kind man and a good man (not the usual case with philosophers) still clearly Heidegger is the greatest philosophical mind of the 20th century.

Anyway, Janik and Toulmin then turn the Wittgenstein story on its head. Basically saying that Wittgenstein clarified what can and cannot be said (in his truth tables and postulates) and declared using a style not unlike the scientific method that we can call truth statements facts when they are borne out in the real world. But, that does not mean we are saying anything "true" about the real world but only what is true in how we perceive it. This is his ladder. Then instructing us to kick the ladder away (Wittgenstein's stroke of genius) he posits all the things in life worth thinking about as those which are not covered by truth tables... he specifically discusses ethics. I do not see any evidence that W was directly influenced by Kierkegaard, but reading W vis-a-vis Kierkegaard is extremely fruitful.

This book was a joy to read. An Old fashioned philosophy book. I have three copies. One so my husband could keep a copy in his brief case and I wouldn't get annoyed when he never gave it back because I had my own and a second "me" copy because I found out how stunning the cover is on the first edition with W's face overlaid on a line drawing of the secessionist building in Vienna! Schorske's book, Fin de Siecle Vienna remains the most gorgeous paperback book I have but this one was quite wonderful to behold too!

[Yaru Lin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most delightful.

I found this book while browsing a local bookshop's web store; Never would I have been convinced that an exposition on the social and political backdrop of Wittgenstein's work on language and reality would be a real page turner.

We see both familiar names that would be expected in a philosophical context - Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and even Tolstoy, as well as those less frequently associated with philosophy - Herz, Planck, Mach, Boltzmann. We watch a plethora of scientific and cultural ideas evolve through the dusk of Hapsburg Vienna and encounter burning questions of ethics that the Tractatus and later Wittgenstein works would address.

The list of applicable questions that stream into mind can go on almost endlessly:

When is theory be developed out of general analysis in an attempt to explain the universe, and when as a way of solving practical problems? What are the implications of neo-Kantian thoughts of reason not being able to dictate morality on contemporary humanitarianism and on political typologies? Should and can we think about the ethics of science and technology outside of rational frameworks?
To what extent is language a fitting metaphor for reality, and is anthropology any less flawed a representation of the physical world than say, blackhole statistical systems used by deep learning methods?

I have rarely felt so invigorated by scholiastic nonfiction. As Rorty aptly puts - "If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontextualize much of what you previously thought you knew."

[Marco Innamorati · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un tentativo di dimostrare come le idee di Wittgenstein nascessero in continuità con le istanze culturali, artistiche, perfino architettoniche della Vienna di Musil, Freud, Kraus, Einatein, Loos…
In un certo senso un rovesciamento di Kenny, che vede continuità tra Tractatus e Ricerche filosofiche, nel senso che le seconde proseguirebbero la posizione del primo. Per Janik e Toulmin sono le Ricerche a chiarire la posizione di W e il Tractatus avrebbe importanza solo per quello che indica (l’etica, il mistico) e non per quello che dice.
In questo modo W è un pensatore che si immette in una linea che comprende Kant, Schopenhauer e Kierkegaard più che essere il faro del nuovo positivismo (quale in effetti negò di voler essere). Anche se bisogna comprendere il pensiero di W anche nella continuità con i contemporanei Mach, Hertz, Boltzmann e Mauthner.
Libro complesso e affascinante, che non beneficia nell’edizione italiana di un’impaginazione oltremodo compatta. La lettura ne risulta ancora più difficile…

[Boris Cesnik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great companion to Carl Schorkse's masterpiece 'Fin-de-Siecle Vienna' - every little helps. Every little tile added to the mosaic once called Vienna, every small clue, anecdote, story, thought, recount brings me to an era than never was is and will be for me but I feel closer and closer each time I read a book such as this.
Wittgenstein is beyond, behind, above and ahead of me - I can't comment as this is my first encounter with his philosophy.
What I can say though is that the language, writing and narrative is surprisingly flawless and smooth, very captivating as well as pleasantly literate.

[Al Maki]

“This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts.” So said the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
The authors of “Wittgenstein’s Vienna” set out to tell us what he really had in mind by looking very narrowly at the milieu in which he grew up. Although they present a thought provoking interpretation of a baffling book I thought it was much stronger on assertion than evidence. They seem to regard repitition as a form of proof.
It seems more a book to be read in a philosophy department than for learning about fin-de-siecle Vienna.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look into the wonder that was turn-of-the-20th century Vienna, producing as it did some of the most impactful people of the 20th century, many of whom knew each other. From that they explain the context of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, rooted in an uncompromising intellectual truth that contrasted with the socio-political fantasy world being spun around him. It's an interesting thesis, explained with tantalizing detail and clearly enough that people (like me) who are not steeped in Wittgenstein can grasp it.

Actually, I was hoping this would be about coffeehouses. They put the dagger into that fantasy right away.

[Kadin Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Janik and Toulmin write beautifully and have a penchant for weaving diverse topics together. Yet, in the end, I didn’t fee like this book did much for me. It’s not a piece of Wittgenstein scholarship (they don’t even write about him extensively until 70% into the book) and it fails to be good biography or intellectual history in those respective genres. In all, I feel like Wittgenstein’s Vienna tries to do too much at once. I’d like to see the authors’ writing ability and intellectual depth honed in a piece that has a narrower focus.

I have The Architecture of Matter and The Discovery of Time by Toulmin sitting on my shelf.

[Madalina_Constantin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wittgenstein is a stumbling stone for (most of) us, except for those few experts. Understanding the context of his thinking, the effervescence of ideas from where the Tractatus, for example, is born, opens a new gate towards the understanding of Wittgenstein`s thinking. The book is very well written, in a very understandable language, and very well documented.

[Gytis Bielskus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Daugybė datų, adresų ir pavardžių bei mažai Vitgenšteino gyvenimo ir idėjų. Nepaisant to, knyga šiek tiek supažindina su XIX amžiaus antrosios pusės - XX amžiaus pirmosios pusės Vienos elito viešuoju gyvenimu bei kavinių kultūra.

[Ed Brenegar · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have ever been to Vienna, or are planning to go, then I highly recommend this book. It tells the story of the city from the perspective to the great scientists and philosophers who were there before and after the First World War.

[Mitch Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book I read for class, and back then I didn’t get it lol. But on second look, this is a different, philosophical and also very valuable cultural perspective on Vienna 1900 (though I will readily admit I still don’t understand some passages!)

[AnaMejzr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo leí en español. Un libro muy interesante sobre Viena en el período anterior a la Primera Guerra Mundial, una lectura no muy fácil pero muy interesante!

[Daniel Campos · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is dated. As analytic philosophers' craze over Wittgenstein has waned, so has this book's relevance. I lost interest very quickly, even if I love Vienna.