Weininger's Vienna

“To understand ideas, we must consider what function they have in people’s lives,” says Allan Janik. A philosopher and professor of the history of ideas, he has devoted thirty years of study to the task of imbuing the popularly held and rose-tinted picture of the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna with ideas, people and life.

Allan Janik is an American student of Austrian philosophy and the history of ideas. His breakthrough came with what has already become a classic study, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, which he published as a young student together with Stephen Toulmin in 1973. This book, the first systematic attempt to read and understand Wittgenstein in the light of his own historical and philosophical context, has made its influence felt in various fields.

Over the last thirty years Janik has written on both central and peripheral figures in the critical period of Viennese modernism surrounding the year 1900. Some of his most important articles on the subject appeared in 2001 in Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited. The sources he has researched since the mid-eighties, at the Brenner Archives at Innsbruck University, contain extensive collections of Nachlass and letters to and from such prominent figures as the authors Karl Kraus and Georg Trakl, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the architect Adolf Loos. The Innsbruck research team is currently preparing to publish Wittgenstein’s entire correspondence: 2,300 letters. In his professorial capacity at Vienna University, Allan Janik lectures on Austrian cultural history and philosophy.

Janik is also engaged in research projects in the field of practical philosophy, and, more particularly, everything to do with tacit knowledge as it applies to professional skills and technology, subjects he has taught for twenty years at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology. One of his latest books is devoted to the revival of practical philosophy, and is designed to counter the present tendency to provide theoretical answers to practical questions. By extensive use of examples he accords material derived from history and works of fiction an important place in philosophical practice. Janik, who in his spare time doubles as a dramaturge at a theatre in Innsbruck, is also planning to write a book about the philosophy of the theatre. He was, in fact, on his way to the theatre to direct a play when we met at the Café Central in this alpine town on the River Inn for the purpose of this interview.

The theatre: a microcosm of life itself

“I shall write about what it means to play a role on the stage and how doing so has an epistemological dimension. This dimension enables us to understand the Wittgensteinian idea of “following a rule”. Thomas Mann once declared that a theatre script could not be read. What he meant was that, although one can sit down and read a script, it does not become a theatrical text until it has been produced and staged. One understands this when one knows how many decisions lie behind just one minute’s acting on the stage,” says Allan Janik.

K. Å: What can a philosopher learn from working in the theatre?

Allan Janik: To reflect upon how meaning is conveyed. When it has been decided to play, say, Romeo and Juliet, how does one set about creating the two lovers on the stage? By directing the players every minute, there on the boards, that’s how, and by collaborating with a director throughout the whole performance. It is all a reminder in cameo of how fascinatingly intricate and complex a human life really is. Peter Brook says theatre is concentrated life. It is concentrated in space and time: people are made to think and act together within a restricted space and limited period of time. And if one is not from the theatre, one is flabbergasted by how important the audience is. The first thing an actor says after a performance is often that “the audience was fantastic today” or “the audience was terrible today”. This implies that the audience is an integral part of a production. The audience’s attention affects the concentration of the players, which is why every evening’s performance is different.

Another aspect of the same phenomenon is, of course, the effect theatre critics have on both audiences and actors. In other words: theatre is criticism from first to last. An actor learning a part will eagerly seize upon every response from people near the stage during rehearsals or while actually performing.

Weininger’s central role

It was his interest in Vienna as well as his close collaboration with the Dialogue Seminar at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater over the last 15 years that led Allan Janik to the theatre. Towards the end of the 19th century the theatre was revered as the acme of artistic expression. Fin-de-siècle Vienna was the place where much that was new – including pictorial art and innovative architecture – developed and prospered side by side, along with logical and legal positivism in philosophy, psychoanalysis and twelve-tone music. What is more, both Zionism and National Socialism took root and grew in Vienna – again contemporaneously. A critical modernism evolved in the city, linking aesthetics to ethics. But the founders of these new movements, Wittgenstein, Kraus; Loos, Schönberg, were anything but popular in their own city – the contemporary scene was dominated by a culture that adored ornament, and that distorted picture of Vienna remains the one that is purveyed to tourists today.

A prominent figure in the Vienna of these years was the philosopher Otto Weininger (1880-1903). Janik is one of the authors who have written most about him. Weininger’s books, most notably his magnum opus, Geschlecht und Charakter, which was published in 1903 (the same year he took his own life in the house where Beethoven once lived), has ever since been viewed as unequivocally misogynous and racist. Many people claim to have detected in the book a hatred of women that is on a par with Weininger’s out-and-out Jewish self-hate. And he does indeed equate irrationality with “Woman” and conformity with “Judaism”. Regardless of whether or not he really was the odious thinker he is made out to be, there is no denying that he made things difficult for himself by challenging contemporary clichés, ending up contrary to his intentions by producing counter clichés.

The central proposition in Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter is that sexuality is never morally legitimate, not even within marriage, as sex always entails treating oneself or some other person as a source of pleasure or means of satisfying one’s desire, and not as an object in itself. For that reason, to be a rational, moral person, to act in accordance with one’s duty, one needs must lead a lonely, loveless life – a life which one must not only see through to the end but also embrace as the very meaning of existence on earth. “Man is alone in the universe, in an infinite, eternal solitude,” Weininger writes. “No one in fin-de-siècle Vienna is further removed from modern tastes, moral values and intellectual trends than Weininger,” says Allan Janik. This we understand when we consider Weininger’s tone and substance. He claims that an elevated mental life is linked to “masculine” qualities, whereas the “feminine” can be reduced to sexuality. There is also this: “Both Jew and Woman lack personality.” Weininger’s opinions were hotly debated in Norway, among others by Hulda Garborg in his book Kvinden skabt af Manden (Woman Created by Man).

A. J: The more I study fin-de-siècle Vienna, the more I realize the importance of Otto Weininger. In regard to Ludwig Wittgenstein, of course, but also in relation to Hermann Broch, both of whom loom large in the modernist Viennese landscape. I have always been puzzled and intrigued by Weininger. For that reason I set out to discover precisely what he had written and why he said the things he did. Finally, I felt it was necessary to organize an international symposium on him on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Geschlecht und Charakter. The fact is that the handful of people worldwide who have devoted themselves seriously to the study of Weininger had never met one another. Some of them have not even pursued an academic career, in fact, simply because Weininger has been regarded as a nut case. The symposium took place in May this year. It aims was to convert interest in Weininger from polemics to scholarly research.

Influence and intentions

A. J: The widely held view of Weininger is ascribable not least to the grave methodical weakness inherent in assessing a thinker purely on the basis of the influence he exercises and has had on other thinkers. That has been Weininger’s fate – and he has also influenced two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But not enough history of ideas exists to justify our considering only the influence he has exerted on others since his death and in what is more or less a vacuum. We must also place his writings in their original historical context, i.e., re-contextualize them and his propositions within the matrix of a culture like that of fin-de-siècle Vienna. More, we must try to penetrate to the very core of his intentions, to find out what role he himself wished to play in the Vienna of that time. This throws a new, and different, light on Weininger, who then emerges as a bold and gifted philosopher whose ideas have had important consequences for the development of Viennese critical modernism – and opinion, as expressed in the works of a journalist like Karl Kraus and a composer such as Arnold Schönberg.

K. Å : So the purpose of this revision of the popular view of a thinker is not to exonerate Weininger and explain away what some people see as his more distasteful sides?

A. J: No. This idea-historical method is an attempt to take him sufficiently seriously to justify analyzing his hair-raising statements in a broader context, instead of merely considering them in a vacuum. Re-contextualization is not a substitute for criticism, but it does make reasoned criticism possible (such criticism is rarely to be found in the Weininger literature) by, in the first place, careful reading of the actual texts and, in the second place, by determining the text-immanent context in the light of which the work must be read. The object of such re-contextualization is to determine why an intelligent young philosopher in the Vienna of 1903 said what he did. We are free to appreciate the questions posed by a thinker without having to agree with the answers he himself gave.

Weininger and Judasism

K. Å: Why has it taken so long for serious researchers to buckle down to the task of making a proper study of Otto Weininger? Has it anything to do with Austria’s problem with the Jews and Weininger’s struggle with the same concern? Or can it be explained quite simply by his seeming insanity?

A. J: It does stem from his reputation as a “madman”, but it is also because there is in Austria no tradition of writing intellectual history. The image of Austrian historians is that of classical, 19th-century German historians, scholars who are primarily interested in old-fashioned criticism of sources. At Austria’s seats of historical learning, cultural history is neglected. Cultural history is the province of specialists in German literature. But Germanists usually lack the conceptual breadth, depth and philosophical sophistication required to analyze a past in which ideas played a much more central role than they do today. Philosophers, for the most part, are uninterested in cultural history.

To cut a long story very short: Weininger is difficult to categorize, though if one doesn’t think too much about it, he comes through as a “bad guy”. Some people delight in having ready to hand someone at whom they can point an accusing finger and make a scapegoat. But it’s not that simple. It is fatal to believe that whenever people say something derogatory about Jews, Judaism or Jewishness, they are Nazis. The history of Judenfeindschaft, animosity towards Jews, is extremely complicated, but it need not be equated with fanatical anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it was a stance taken by assimilated Jews themselves, who were prone to self-criticism. It found expression as internal Jewish polemics and politics, and became known as “self-hatred”. The fact that Weininger overstated his view should not overshadow the he clearly pointed out in his book that he was himself a Jew. This in turn indicates that his criticism was at heart affirmation of a strongly assimilated Jewish identity. Viewed in this light, Weininger gives expression, in a representative manner, to moral values that were typical of assimilated Jews in his day even if their rhetorical expression was exaggerated. We can see that in the perspective of the time, though not later, and most certainly not after 1945. It is easy to forget that both the success of women’s lib and the nightmare of Nazism are phenomena that Weininger did not live long enough to see. But he was, at least, prescient enough to foresee and reject misogynous and anti-Semitic interpretations of his writings. The result is that, although it may be politically correct, in endeavouring to expose with the aid of present-day concepts of enlightened values what we see as his prejudices, we are just as pathetic, intellectually speaking, as we accuse Weininger of being.

Recent research has brought to light an ironical way of construing Weininger’s criticism of Judaism, an interpretation that exposes the essentially Jewish character of this mode of thought. I believe that closer examination of feminist ideas in fin-de-siècle Vienna will lead us to the same conclusion and encourage us to see that Weininger was not the greatest danger to, and problem facing, middle-class feminism, but that his was an effective way of expressing them.

K. Å: When did you read Weininger for the first time, and what did you get out of it?

A. J: It was in 1965, when I was working on my Master’s thesis. I read Geschlecht und Charakter in English, and was both astonished and confused by it. I just didn’t know what to make of it. Later, when I came to study in Innsbruck, I got hold of the German original. I found then that much of the text that dealt directly with sexuality had been left out of the English translation, and that all relevant references and notes were likewise missing. Their excision obscured the fact that Weininger provided documentation for much of what he wrote. I began then to see how he fits into the history of science and sexology.

K. Å: Is there nothing to justify an interpretation of Weininger as a misogynous and anti-Semitic thinker?

A. J: Of course there is. Anti-Semites in Italy and France today think a lot of him; they love to quote his writings, though largely out of context. False interpretations are effective. They are not hard to come by either, as Weininger wrote a great many very strange things, things I believe were intended to provoke Vienna’s Jews. Weininger’s magnum opus is riddled with references to Nietzsche, among them statements that directly parallel that writer’s Zur Genealogie der Moral, in which Nietzsche writes of the “old” Jews and the “new” Jews. Weininger uses this distinction but differently from Nietzsche, who thought the new Jews were the real “free spirits” – or could be. Weininger, on the contrary, accused the “new” Jews – who figured so largely in Die Wiener Moderne – of having lost the courage, aesthetic ideals and capacity for heroic self-sacrifice that characterized the Jew of the Old Testament.

Many of those who dismiss Weininger as a serious thinker because of his alleged hatred of Jews, forget that he identified Judaism with neither a race nor a people nor a faith, but, on the contrary, with a spiritual movement or state of mind that is typical of modernism and which represents a possibility for any human being. It is nothing else than conformity and satisfaction with mediocrity. In defining Judaism thus, Weininger contrasts a higher Judaism that represents a moral ideal with a lower Judaism that represents a more non-binding aestheticism. Weininger abhorred the aesthetics of the Viennese Art Secessionists because they were totally detached from ethics and science. He makes direct reference to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Jewishness becomes a kind of psycho-cultural classification that is latent in contemporary Christian culture. Nietzsche’s attacks on Judaism have been labelled anti-anti-Semitism. The same term may well be used to describe Weininger’s position. It is not without its dangers but it is certainly not fanaticism.

A moral difference

K. Å: How, now, would you describe Weininger’s importance for Wittgenstein?

A. J: The idea that there is a limit to the self can be traced to Weininger’s influence on Wittgenstein – to his contention that it is necessary to accept the world as a limited whole. The distinction between saying and proving has its philosophical roots in Goethe, Boltzmann and, to some extent, Schopenhauer. But it was Weininger who convinced Wittgenstein that this difference is of moral significance, that it is not only a question of theoretical learning but one of character. He emphasizes that the ability to see the world correctly is an act of will; it is not the result of a line of reasoning. To be able to think differently one must live differently.

K. Å: What are the most important questions confronting present-day researchers?

A. JWeininger’s whole attitude towards Judaism needs to be more closely examined, as does his relationship with other Jewish thinkers. These are historical questions that are important, but no one is going to uncover a treasure trove of philosophical challenges at this late stage, because the world that existed before the First World War is lost and gone for ever. Another question is why Weininger set out to provoke the Jews of Vienna the way he did. Geschlecht und Charakter is a book that could have been written only in Vienna.

Weininger’s relations with Freud also call for closer study. One of the things that make Weininger interesting today is precisely the fact that he was one of the very first outside Freud’s own circle to recognize the great man’s brilliance and realize that Freud’s methods were the tools of the future. Freud himself wasn’t over-pleased about Weininger’s interest, as he was hoping for recognition of a different kind.
When one studies the Vienna of 1900 and the surrounding years one runs across Weininger here, there and everywhere. People who use or misuse him for their own purposes act as though he says what they want him to say about Jews, women and so on. Everyone who writes about him thinks he was a madman who intrigued one and all by his madness. But are we ourselves similarly intrigued by it? We are very different from the citizens of fin-de-siècle Vienna, that’s for sure. But we have to face facts: Weininger was in no way an outsider. To be a member of Vienna’s Philosophical Society was to be as much of an insider as was humanly possible. It was a society that met once a week to listen to a talk, though the audience didn’t discuss that same evening what the speaker had said; that was left till later, to afford time for reflection and serious debate. When Nietzsche died in 1900, many such lectures were held (some were attended by Houston Stewart Chamberlain), lectures at which the effects on philosophy of the theory of evolution were discussed. Otto Weininger was at the centre of these events. One gains a different impression of Weininger when one learns that Stefan Zweig said that he once saw him at a café but did not dare go over and engage him in conversation; and Zweig was neither overly reticent nor cowardly. That says something of Weininger’s standing in his day: central, but totally misunderstood.

Ideas in society

K. Å: What is your own identity as an academic? Are you a philosopher, an historian of ideas, or something in between the two?

A. J: I have studied both subjects, as well as Greek and Latin. In the course of my twenty-one years in Europe I have had the privilege of more or less defining my own identity. For ten years I have taught cultural history in a department of German. I regard myself primarily as a philosopher, but one who is absorbed by history, who feels an urge to delve deeper into the history of philosophy, to determine how philosophy has affected society – and how society affects philosophy. In other words, philosophical matters studied in the context of dynamic practice.

K. Å: Is there really a growing interest in practical philosophy in academe today, or is that merely a superficial impression?

A. J: I’m probably the worst possible person to ask about that, as in all the fields in which I work I am, in my own eyes, an outsider. But I have a decided impression that practical philosophy is coming back into its own. And there is definitely an interest in philosophical models among people who are not themselves philosophers – an interest in ascertaining how conceptual entities manifest themselves in practical life. There is a desire to know how we learn about daily life, what kinds of silent skills enable us to acquire, process and utilize knowledge without conscious thought.

What people do

K. Å: Talking about practice and real life, as a philosopher you have a unique body of experience as a result of your association with Arbetslivscentrum and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, right?

A. J: I was in Sweden for the first time in 1979 for a conference on computers and work. Later, in 1986, I had the chance to stay for nearly a year and have been returning ever since. My intention was to provide support for people who dealt with professional learning and vocational skills by helping them to articulate the concept of tacit knowledge. In the 1980s this was a revolutionary idea and one that needed defending, as many people saw it as self-contradictory. Today, everyone involved in, say, management regards tacit knowledge as a matter of fundamental importance.

My greatest devotion as a philosopher is still to what I read early on, for example Aristotle’s ethics and his idea that it is what people do that determines what they are. This is a tenet of all practical philosophy. If we are to understand them, we must determine what function ideas have in people’s lives, what is at the heart of practical knowledge, of mastering something. It would be hard to over-estimate the philosophical interest of vocational skills. But few fields in the history of philosophy have been so badly undervalued. One of the things that have been lost in the modernization process is the idea that examples are of profound importance in moral philosophy. The renewed interest being shown by philosophers in literature and history is now reversing this trend. Stories provide a first-class source for ethical reflection.

A critical modernism

K. Å: I’d like to ask you a difficult question, if I may. What characterized research into Viennese modernism, which was in full bloom when you wrote Wittgenstein’s Vienna thirty years ago? And how would you describe this field today?

A. J: It may sound rather immodest, but the fact is that I had more or less to create, organize and institutionalize the subject of “cultural-historical research into the Vienna of 1900” myself. All that existed that was really of value were Carl E. Schorske’s three (marvellous, I must add) essays and a few other books – but there was no integrated field of research. Stephen Toulmin and I wanted to take a closer look at the criticism that existed in this cultural situation, criticism we thought was a more sophisticated paradigm: Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, Arnold Schönberg, Otto Weininger, Ludwig Wittgenstein. They are the ones who created critical modernism as a counter to the cultural situation in Vienna round about the end of the 19th century. They consolidated their positions not least by focusing on the question of limits, on what can be said and what can only be demonstrated; and they set out to impose limits on rationality and reason from within. That is what makes their modernism critical, that is to say, self-reflective.

It is remarkable that in the world of Viennese research there should be such a large volume of literature on people who exercise a spontaneous fascination in virtue of their charisma. But when it comes to a thinker who is difficult and a bit of a handful altogether, someone like Otto Weininger, all interest abruptly ceases.

Lack of social history

Åmås : What are the most critical questions that need to be asked in this field today?

A. J: An enormous number of books and articles have been written on the subject, many of them of doubtful value. But much still remains to be done. The two most interesting Austrian authors who will repay closer study are undoubtedly Karl Kraus and Robert Musil. They are often quoted and imitated, but few people in Austria are capable of researching them in a rewarding manner, for reasons that I have already remarked upon. This means that the best literature on fin-de-siècle Vienna comes from the USA and Britain. These are books that are both interpretative and visionary. Many humanist researchers here in Austria are good at editing and documentation, but they are less adept at interpreting historical documents in terms of their social context. They love publishing anthologies. To my mind, though, anthologies are substitutes for thinking. In Austria, the problem with history as a subject is compounded by the fact that there is no social history. There is political history, which is diplomatic or military history, but that’s all. If one is prepared to concede that Wittgenstein’s opinion of meaning as use has a certain worth, one must understand how people act in a social context, and also understand their pronouncements, including what prompts them and what they themselves think they mean.

Many ideological “games” have been played with Austrian cultural history. Most of what has been written has been coloured by right-wing views. One of the few to have written from a Leftist point of view said something very apposite about Vienna in the year 1900, viz. that two million people had to work their fingers to the bone in order that two hundred thousand others might enjoy the fin-de-siècle. But that person was one of the few exceptions. In Austria one all too readily finds oneself labelled a right-wing academic if one shows an interest in culture. Culture is looked upon as the long shadow cast by politics, a nostalgic shadow. There isn’t much interesting writing on art history in Austria either, at least not of the kind that embraces intellectual horizons.

Austria has still not rid itself of the spectre of National Socialism. Neither before nor since has Vienna been as interesting as it was between 1860 and 1938, when all creative circles in the city were dominated by Jews. All the Jews who were left fled Austria, the sociologists among them making their way to the USA. Hardly any of them returned to the land of their birth. In consequence, those who were awarded a chair and senior posts in education immediately after 1945 were almost exclusively those whose own education had been under the Nazis, which meant that they were more or less totally devoid of visions and a wider outlook. This in turn left its mark on their students, who even today are still in the majority at Austrian universities. Admittedly, there are some very good historians, Germanists, but we have no international heavyweights in the humanities and social disciplines.

K. Å: From the outside, academe in Austria would appear to be very conservative, authoritarian and hierarchially minded.

A. J: Yes, it is. Austrian research establishments are full of people who are like over-zealous landowners, they jealously guard their own turf. Things are more problematic here than in the other countries with which I am familiar.

K. Å: Is this state of affairs in academic circles also a reflection of the way things are in Austria’s social life as a whole, almost sixty years after the end of the Second World War? Does academe still suffer from the nation’s failure to come to terms with its Nazi past? It seems to me that Russia has had much the same experience where the humanities and social disciplines are concerned; they still haven’t recovered from decades of totalitarian rule.

A. J: You may well have hit the nail on the head there. It is important to remember that what I have in mind is primarily my own field, the humanities. In some scientific fields Austria has a brilliant record and is well to the fore in international research. Medicine is a field in which Austria excels. The same is true in the natural sciences. I believe much the same is true of Germany as far as the disparity between the humanities and science is concerned.

However, unlike Germany, Austria has no critical theory, although it has had and, indeed, still has critical writers of fiction such as Thomas Bernhard and, to take a present-day example, Elfriede Jellinek. Austria’s literary scene is altogether very much alive and kicking, even in a small town like Innsbruck. What are totally lacking, however, are academic voices that subscribe to the socio-critical projects of such artists, for example within such a comprehensive subject as literary history.

Ibsen in Vienna

But let us conclude by returning to the person we have devoted most of our time to in this interview, Otto Weininger. Allan Janik has spent some of the last few years researching Henrik Ibsen’s relations with central figures in 19th-century Vienna. Weininger writes somewhere that one must think philosophically if one is to understand Ibsen. In 1902 he journeyed all the way to Kristiania to attend a performance of Peer Gynt at the National Theatre there, and even learned a little Norwegian to enable him to understand Ibsen better. He had seen a poor performance of the play in Vienna, but that was nothing to what he was witness to in Ibsen’s home country. “The production is ridiculous,” he wrote, “the audience idiotic.”

A. J: At the international Ibsen symposium held in Gossensass in the South Tyrol the theme was: “Is Ibsen a naturalist or symbolist”? In my view he is in fact both. Ibsen is a cubist. He endeavours to look at a problem from as many viewpoints as possible, from above and below and from every conceivable angle. To Weininger, it was Ibsen who exposed, in literary guise, the lies that are vital to life in a society dominated by conventional morality – just as Nietzsche did in philosophical form. In Kantian terms, in such a society vanity or egocentricity is the basic motivation behind every action. Such a narcissistic society could not help but be obsessed by sex, as Freud would eventually conclude. What is so praiseworthy about Ibsen is that he saw through this narcissistic culture and dared to hold up a mirror to it. Weininger wanted to draw Kantian philosophical implication from his work.
Weininger believed that there is a close parallel between philosophy and literature in principle. As he maintains in his foreword to Geschlecht und Charakter:

The task of the philosopher differs from that of the artist in form alone. What is a symbol for the latter is an abstract concept for the former. Art and philosophy are to one another like expression and content. The artist has breathed the world in, then breathed it out. To the philosopher, the world has been breathed out. He must breathe it in again.

Selected English works by Allan Janik in English

Wittgenstein in Wien, Springer Verlag, Vienna 1999
Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Simon and Schuster, New York 1973
Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey 2001