He is over-reacting. In Austria there is still a fault-divorce, and the institution marriage is also debased.


That's the most relevant reason for why the birth rate is declining.


Procrastination because of a fear of failure, that means you believe that even the smallest error could be evidence that you are a worthless person


Procrastiantion only if drive for fruitful activity is supressed


von Beruf "Sohn" oder "Tochter"


Keine Erfahrung mit Sorge als zentrale Kategorie der menschlichen Existenz


Fehlende Erfahrung Grenzen gesetzt zu bekommen


emotionale Überforderung (Parentifizierung)


Leben in materiellem Überfluss


Wie kommt es zu Wohlstandsverwahrlosung?


Die Diagnose Hochbegabt kommt bei 2% der Kinder vor.


“Jefferson opposed Hamilton's policy innovations as a threat to the ideal of a
republic of yeomen farmers led by gentlemen planters. Yet as President,
Jefferson could not undo Hamilton's work. The American version of the Whig
Revolution endured and the United States was on the path to great prosperity.”
4


“Hamilton opposed government ownership of any enterprise except for
"manufactories of all the necessary weapons of war." Hamilton favored a
revenue tariff that averaged about 10 percent over a property tax to fund the
federal government. Hamilton sought to maximize the federal government's
revenue and provide a modest margin of protection to domestic manufacturers
rather than to block imports. Indeed, Hamilton argued: "It is a signal
advantage of tax on articles of consumption, that they contain in their own
nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit; which cannot
be exceeded without defeating the end proposed - that is an extension of the
revenue." The United States did not establish protective tariffs until after
the War of 1812.” 3


“From his study of the English economy, Hamilton understood when a government
faithfully services it debt, its bonds becomes "as good as gold." Then,
government bonds can as bank reserves. Hamilton wanted U.S. debt to become as
respected as Britain's. Then, U.S. debt could serve as the reserves for a
national bank that could issue paper currency. Hamilton's plan had several
parts. First, Congress would assume the Revolutionary War debt from states.
Congress would then impose tariffs and excise taxes to service the enlarged
federal debt. Congress would create a mint and charter a Bank of the United
States, modeled after the Bank of England, to issue a nationally circulating
currency. With the support of President Washington and over the opposition of
Secretary of State Jefferson, Hamilton persuaded Congress to enact his plan
although Hamilton had to agree to move America's capital from New York City to
what would become Washington, D.C. Money replaced barter as the primary means
of exchange. The Bank of the United States along a newly established stock and
bond exchanges helped Americans entrepreneurs to start new manufacturing and
trading businesses that were not dependent on land ownership. While some
future policymakers misused Hamilton to justify their protectionism, Hamilton
was not a protectionist in the modern sense. Hamilton recognized potential
benefits of free trade, but he believed in reciprocity. So long as the United
Kingdom, the world's leading economic power, practiced mercantilism, a
peripheral economy, as the United States was then, would not, in Hamilton's
mind, benefit from unilateral free trade.” 3


“During the Revolution, Hamilton proposed emancipating slaves that agreed to
fight in Continental Army. Later Hamilton founded the New York Society for the
Manumission of Slaves.” 3


“Alexander Hamilton was different than other founders. Born in Nevis outside
of wedlock, abandoned by his father at age 2, and orphaned by his mother at
age 13, Hamilton proved to an exceptionally talented clerk at Beekman and
Cruger, an international trading firm, on St. Croix. Winning a scholarship to
King's College (now Columbia University) in New York, Hamilton immigrated to
America in 1773. Serving as General George Washington's aide-de-camp, Hamilton
observed how a weak Continental Congress imperiled the war effort.
Consequently, Hamilton had a very different prospective from other founders
with the notable exceptions of Washington and John Marshall. Hamilton wanted
America to become a dynamic meritocracy. Observing the plantation system in
the Caribbean, Hamilton understood that (1) land ownership is the only source
of wealth in agricultural societies, and (2) any such societies would
eventually become static with a few landowning haves and the rest perpetually
poor have-nots. Hamilton wanted poor, but talented individuals like himself to
have avenues other than land ownership to earn wealth. Moreover, Hamilton
rejected slavery because it prevented slaves from their full economic
potential and made masters indolent and lazy.” 3


“Identifying with the English gentry rather than the rising middle class,
Bolingbroke greatly influenced most of the founders' views of economics and
politics. Most founders, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, agreed
with Bolingbroke about the primacy of agriculture, shared his fears of banks
and a paper currency, and dreaded industrialization.” 2


“In the 1770s, colonial legislatures still regulated the prices for many goods
and services and forbade arbitrage and speculation. Colonial courts still
accepted "just price" doctrine, allowing judges, all whom were members of a
small oligarchy, to overturn contracts when market prices moved against
colonial elites. And when crops failed or prices fell, colonial legislatures
frequently declared "debt holidays" to prevent creditors from seizing the
property of the colonial oligarchs.” 2


“Before the Revolutionary War, the American colonies also had pre-
capitalistic, quasi-feudal economies similar to England before the Whig
Revolution. Outside of New England, land ownership was highly concentrated -
about two-thirds of all land was owned by less than one-tenth of all free
white males. Moreover, land ownership qualifications in all colonies except
Pennsylvania, where all taxpayers could vote, disenfranchised more than one-
half of all free white males. The upward mobility that had existed in the
colonies in the 17th century steadily diminished in the 18th century.” 2


“In England, the Whig Revolution was a series of events - the successful
invasion of William of Orange to dethrone James II in 1688, the selection of
George I to succeed Queen Anne in 1714, and the selection of Robert Walpole as
the first Prime Minister in 1721 - that created the Westminster parliamentary
system in which the monarch remained the head of state, but the prime
minister, serving at the pleasure of the House of Commons, was the head of
government. Most important, the Whig Revolution also created the institutional
and legal framework that transformed England into a modern capitalist economy
and sparked the Industrial Revolution. The adoption of Dutch commercial law,
the creation of the Bank of England, and the circulation of its bank notes
monetized the English economy. English courts abandoned the medieval "just
price" doctrine, which let judges nullify contracts after the fact based on
the concept that all goods and services had an objective value and any
deviation from this just price should therefore be unlawful. Instead, English
courts held that "it is the consent of the parties alone that fixes the just
price of anything, without reference to the nature of things themselves, or to
any intrinsic value." Traditional guilds collapsed. Entrepreneurs were free to
create new firms, determine output and prices, borrow from banks, and issue
stock. New manufacturing firms lured workers away from the estates of the
landed gentry to rapidly growing English cities with wages paid in paper
currency. A rising urban middle class challenged the economic and social
position of the rural gentry. Rapid economic, political, and social change
inevitably produced a reaction led by the arch-Tory Henry St. John, the First
Viscount Bolingbroke.” 1


Alexander Hamilton, “The Birth of Economic Liberty in the Anglosphere,” April 19, 2018, http://www.caymanfinancialreview.com/2018/04/19/the-birth-of- economic-liberty-in-the-anglosphere/.


I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy
immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it
exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing
them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is
it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form
of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is
rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since
1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality
is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that
civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I
report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely
exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies,
when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man
can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they
are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is
sincerely a democrat? 211f


I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-
limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-
devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its
curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its
whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens
invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the
great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a
process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous
ferocity. 209f


Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest
for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that
is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but
for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of
the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd!
What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a
welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a
psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any
other, more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. 208f


I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is
quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever
devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions
that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always
immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than
what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality
that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great
emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but
immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more
comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth.
It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and
it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. 206f


For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good
that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then
try to erect that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything
is a party of liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just
as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same
drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and
installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them. 205f


it is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with
gold and precious stones, i.e., with money. 204


Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the
missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course,
something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true
aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour,
courage - above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the
state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. 203


As for me, I have never encountered any actual evidence, convincing to an
ordinary jury, that vox populi is actually vox Dei. The proofs, indeed, run
the other way. The life of the inferior man is one long protest against the
obstacles that God interposes to the attainment of his dreams, and democracy,
if it is anything at all, is simply one way of getting round those obstacles.
Thus it represents, not a jingling echo of what seems to be the divine will,
but a raucous defiance of it. 201


the last joke upon man may be that he never learned how to govern himself in a
rational and competent manner 200


There is, in the human mind, a natural taste for such hocus-pocus. It greatly
simplifies the process of ratiocination, which is unbearably painful to the
great majority of men. What dulls and baffles the teeth may be got down
conveniently by an heroic gulp. No doubt there is an explanation here of the
long-continued popularity of the dogma of the Trinity, which remains unstated
in plain terms after two thousand years. And no doubt the dogma of
Transubstantiation came under fire in the Reformation because it had grown too
simple and comprehensible because even the Scholastic philosophy had been
unable to convert its plain propositions into something that could be believed
without being understood. Democracy is shot through with this delight in the
incredible, this banal mysticism. 198f


Democracy becomes a substitute for the old religion, and the antithesis of it
197


Mediaeval Christianity, which was a theological and philosophical apologia for
those systems [of despotism], actually erected belief in that immutability
into a cardinal article of faith. The evils of the world were incurable : one
put off the quest for a perfect moral order until one got to heaven, post-
mortem. There arose, in consequence, a scheme of checks and balances that was
consummate and completely satisfactory, for it could not be put to a test, and
the logical holes in it were chinked with miracles. 196f


My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis, I am not engaged in therapeutics,
but in pathology. That simple statement of fact, I dare say, will be accepted
as a confession, condemning me out of hand as unfit for my task, and even
throwing a certain doubt upon my bona fides. For it is one of the peculiar
intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of the insoluble
becomes unfashionable nay, almost infamous. To lack a remedy is to lack the
very licence to discuss disease. The causes of this are to be sought, without
question, in the nature of democracy itself. It came into the world as a cure-
all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body
politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote ; any flux
of blood may be stopped by passing a law. 195f


Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the
mob's fears. It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavoured and
coloured and put into cans. 192


The capitalists, in fact, run the country, as they run all democracies: they
emerged in Germany, after the republic arose from the ruins of the late war,
like Anadyomeme from the sea. They organize and control the minorities that
struggle eternally for power, and so get a gradually firmer grip upon the
government. 191


The Capitalistic system now enlists the best brains in all the democratic
nations, including France and Germany, and I believe that, instead of losing
such support hereafter, it will get more and more of it. As the old
aristocracies decline, the plutocracy is bound to inherit their hegemony, and
to have the support of the nether mob. An aristocratic society may hold that a
soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker; but
in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because
their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can
more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it. Thus the
imponderable but powerful force of public opinion directs the aspirations of
all the more alert and ambitious young men toward business, and what is so
assiduously practised tends to produce experts. 190


This fellow-feeling for thieves is probably what makes Capitalism so secure in
democratic societies. Under absolutism it is always in danger, and not
infrequently, as history teaches, it is exploited and undone, but under
democracy it is safe. Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations
of Capitalism ; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and
aspirations. Thus he tends to be friendly to it, and to view with suspicion
those who propose to overthrow it. 187f


Why should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale
bribery. In place of a government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it
sets up a government that is a mere function of the mob's vagaries, and that
maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries. 180


Since the first uprising of the lower orders, the modern age has seen but one
genuinely valuable contribution to moral legislation : I allude, of course, to
the Code Napoleon. It was concocted by a committee of violent anti-Puritans,
and in the full tide of a bitter reaction against democracy. 157f


No Puritan has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony
worth hearing, or a poem worth reading 157


Democracy, as a political scheme, may be defined as a device for releasing
this hatred born of envy, and for giving it the force and dignity of law. 154


We need no scientists in France, shouted MM. of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Wat Tyler, four centuries before, reduced it to an even greater frankness and
simplicity: he hanged every man who confessed to being able to read and write.
154


What the human race owes to the old autocracies, and how little, in these
democratic days, it is disposed to remember the debt! Their service, perhaps,
was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but it was a service none the less:
they held the green fury of the mob in check, and so set free the spirit of
superior man. Their collapse under Flavius Honorius left Europe in chaos for
four hundred years. Their revival under Charlemagne made the Renaissance
possible, and the modern age. 153


Liberty gone, there remains the majestic phenomenon of democratic law. A
glance at it is sufficient to show the identity of democracy and Puritanism.
The two, indeed, are but different facets of the same gem. In the psyche they
are one. For both get their primal essence out of the inferior man's fear and
hatred of his betters, born of his observation that, for all his fine
theories, they are stronger and of more courage then he is, and that as they
go through this dreadful world they have a far better time. Thus envy comes
in; if you overlook it you will never understand democracy, and you will never
understand Puritanism. 152f


The truth is that the common man's love of liberty, like his love of sense,
justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. As I have argued, he is not
actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably
lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to
take the herdsman with it. 147


These editors, under democracy, constitute an extremely powerful class. Their
very lack of sound knowledge and genuine intelligence gives them a special
fitness for influencing the mob, and it is augmented by their happy obtuseness
to notions of honour. Their daily toil consists in part of praising men and
ideas that are obviously fraudulent, and in part of denouncing men and ideas
that are respected by their betters. 135


The result everywhere is the election of a depressing gang of incompetents,
mainly petty lawyers and small-town bankers. 124


only too often there is no competent man available. Even if one happens to
live there which in large areas of the South and many whole States of the
newer West is extremely improbable - he is usually so enmeshed in operations
against the resident imbeciles and their leaders, and hence so unpopular, that
his candidature is out of the question. 122f


This is the rule […] that a legislator must be an actual resident of the
district he represents. Its obvious aim is to preserve for every electoral
unit a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect is to
fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local politicians,
many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to grasp the problems with
which government has to deal. 122


This notion that the mob is wise, I fear, is not to be taken seriously: it was
invented by mob-masters to save their faces: there was a lot of chatter about
it by Roosevelt, but none by Washington, and very little by Jefferson. 120


The democratic politician, confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his
master, the mob, tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is
really full of rectitude and wisdom. This is the origin of the doctrine that,
whatever its transient errors, it always comes to right decisions in the long
run. 119f


Once Frederick the Great was asked why he gave commissions in his army only to
Junker. Because, he answered, they will not lie and they cannot be bought. 119


The old Congressman, the veteran of genuine influence and power, is either one
who is so stupid that the ideas of the mob are his own ideas, or one so far
gone in charlatanry that he is unconscious of his shame. Our laws are made, in
the main, by men who have sold their honour for their jobs, and they are
executed by men who put their jobs above justice and common sense. The
occasional cynics leaven the mass. We are dependent for whatever good flows
out of democracy upon men who do not believe in democracy. 116f


I do not say that a gentleman may not thrust himself into politics under
democracy; I simply say that it is almost impossible for him to stay there and
remain a gentleman. 109


It is an axiom of practical politics, indeed, that the worst enemies of
political decency are the tired reformers - and the worst of the worst are
those whose primary thirst to make the corruptible put on incorruption was
accompanied by a somewhat sniffish class consciousness. Has the United States
ever seen a more violent and shameless demagogue than Theodore Roosevelt? Yet
Roosevelt came into politics as a sword drawn against demagogy. 108


[…] there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that
it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics – that there is a way out of
the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd
as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it,
they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for
prostitution is to fill the bawdy-houses with virgins. My impression is that
this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap
out of the windows, or they would cease to be virgins. 107


There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called,
by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are
complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The
demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows
to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to
say and then pretends that he believes it himself. Every man who seeks
elective office under democracy has to be either the one thing or the other,
and most men have to be both. The whole process is one of false pretences and
ignoble concealments. No educated man, stating plainly the elementary notions
that every educated man holds about the matters that principally concern
government, could be elected to office in a democratic state, save perhaps by
a miracle. 102f


What are the sources of that power? They lie, obviously, in the gross
weaknesses and knaveries of the common people - in their inability to grasp
any issues save the simplest and most banal, in their incurable tendency to
fly into preposterous alarms, in their petty self-seeking and venality, in
their instinctive envy and hatred of their superiors -in brief, in their
congenital incapacity for the elemental duties of citizens in a civilized
state. 100f


If he [the politician under democracy] is an adept, he can hear the first
murmurs of popular clamour before even the people themselves are conscious of
them. If he is a master, he detects and whoops up to-day the delusions that
the mob will cherish next year. 100


What is too often forgotten, in discussing the matter, is the fact that no
such monarch was ever actually free, at all times and under all conditions. In
the midst of his most charming tyrannies he had still to bear it in mind that
his people, oppressed too much, could always rise against him, and that he
himself, though a king von Gottes Gnaden was yet biologically only a man, with
but one gullet to slit ; and if the people were feeble or too craven to be
dangerous, then there was always His Holiness of Rome to fear or other agents
of the King of Kings; and if these ghostly mentors, too, were silent, then he
had to reckon with his ministers, his courtiers, his soldiers, his doctors,
and his women. The Merovingian kings were certainly absolute, if absolutism
has ever existed outside the dreams of historians ; nevertheless, as every
schoolboy knows, their sovereignty was gradually undermined by the mayors of
the palace, and finally taken from them altogether. So with the emperors of
Japan, who succumbed to the shoguns, who succumbed in their turn to a
combination of territorial nobles and city capitalists, not unlike that which
brought King John to bay at Runnymede. It seems to me that the common people,
under such a democracy as that which now prevails in the United States, are
more completely sovereign in fact as well as in law, than any of these ancient
despots. They may be seduced and enchained by a great variety of prehensile
soothsayers, just as Henry VIII was seduced and enchained by his wives, but,
like Henry again, they are quite free to throw off their chains whenever they
please, and to chop off the heads of their seducers. 80f


The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet
worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They are thus
constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number,
by determined and ambitious individuals, and even by exterior groups. The
business of victimizing them is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and
a delicate and lofty art. It has its masters and it has its quacks. 78


Public policies are determined and laws are made by small minorities playing
upon the fears and imbecilities of the mob - sometimes minorities of
intelligent and honest men, but usually minorities of rogues. 55


He [man] not only doesn't long for liberty, he is quite unable to stand it.
What he longs for is something wholly different, to wit, security, He needs
protection. He is afraid of getting hurt. All else is affectation, delusion,
empty words. 49


There was no liberty anywhere in Europe, even in name, until 1789, and there
was little in fact until 1848. And in America? Again I summon the historians,
some of whom begin to grow honest. America was settled largely by slaves, some
escaped but others transported in bondage. The Revolution was imposed upon
them by their betters, chiefly, in New England, commercial gents in search of
greater profits, and in the South, country gentlemen ambitious to found a
nobility in the wilderness. Universal manhood suffrage, the corner-stone of
modern free states, was only dreamed of until 1867, and economic freedom was
little more than a name until years later. 47f


It is barely a century and a half- a scant five generations - since four-
fifths of the people of the world, white and black alike, were slaves, in
reality if not in name. 46


The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite
beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. He can imagine, and even esteem,
in his way, certain false forms of liberty - for example, the right to choose
between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously
dishonest - but the reality is incomprehensible to him. And no wonder, for
genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and
that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood,
said Jefferson, is its natural manure. More, he must be able to endure it - an
even more arduous business. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution,
it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is
one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his
inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All
around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope
for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their
own to fight. He has made of him- self a sort of god in his little world, and
he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness. Has
Homo boobiens any talent for this magnificent self-reliance? He has the same
talent for it that he has for writing symphonies in the manner of Ludwig van
Beethoven, no less and no more. That is to say, he has no talent whatsoever,
nor even any understanding that such a talent exists. Liberty is unfathomable
to him. He can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour. 44ff


All the revolutions in history have been started by hungry city mobs. […] I
can think of no city revolution that actually had liberty for its object, in
any rational sense. The ideas of freedom that prevail in the world today were
first formulated by country gentlemen, aided and abetted by poets and
philosophers, with occasional help from an eccentric king. 43f


[…] democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time of it in this
world. Such, indeed, is the origin of democracy. And such is the origin of its
twin, Puritanism. 38


Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm. 24f


The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits
of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary : the red-coats, the Hessians,
the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the
Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the
hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German
spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. 22f


Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob
psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and
make it the cornerstone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under
democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of
bugaboos. 22


The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming main, of men and women who have
not got beyond the ideas and emotions of child-hood, hovers, in mental age,
around the time of puberty, and chiefly below it. 17


I allude to the fact that man on the lower levels, though he quickly reaches
the limit of his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, remains capable for
a long time thereafter of absorbing delusions. What is true daunts him, but
what is not true finds lodgment in his cranium with so little resistance that
there is only a trifling emission of heat. I shall go back to this singular
and beautiful phenomenon later on. It lies at the heart of what is called
religion, and at the heart of all democratic politics no less. The thinking of
what Charles Richet calls Homo stultus is almost entirely in terms of palpable
nonsense. He has a dreadful capacity for embracing and cherishing impostures.
His history since the first records is a history of successive victimizations
by priests, by politicians, by all sorts and conditions of quacks. His heroes
are always frauds. In all ages he has hated bitterly the men who were
labouring most honestly and effectively for the progress of the race. What
such men teach is beyond his grasp. He believes in consequence that it is
unsound, immoral and of the devil. 14f


Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial
stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of
them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat
is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked; and the more plausible he is the
more wicked he becomes. 14


In 1867 a philosopher out of the gutter [Marx] pushed that doctrine to its
logical conclusion. He taught that the superior minority had no virtues at
all, and hence no rights at all - that the world belonged exclusively and
absolutely to those who hewed its wood and drew its water. In less than half a
century he had more followers in the world, open and covert, than any other
sophist since the age of the Apostles. 7


Meanwhile, of course, there had been a certain seeping down of democratic
theory from the metaphysicians to the mob - obscured by the uproar, but still
going on. Rhetoric, like a stealthy plague, was doing its immemorial work. 6


This notion, as I hint, originated in the poetic fancy of gentlemen on the
upper levels - sentimentalists who, observing to their distress that the ass
was over-laden, proposed to reform transport by putting him into the cart. 4


It remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate the
democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit, an esoteric
and and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale—that
inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes superiority—nay, the superiority
of superiorities. 3


H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy (1920; repr., Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007).


«Politische Revolutionen erreichen selten etwas von echtem Wert; ihre einzige
zweifelsfreie Wirkung ist, daß eine Diebesbande hinausgeworfen und durch eine
andere ersetzt wird. […] Selbst die amerikanischen Kolonien erreichten wenig
durch ihren Aufstand von 1776. Denn 25 Jahre nach der Revolution waren sie als
freie Staaten in einem weit schlechteren Zustand, als sie es als Kolonien
gewesen wären. Ihre Regierung war teurer, ineffizienter, unehrlicher,
tyrannischer. Es war nur der allmähliche materielle Fortschritt des Landes,
der sie vor Hungersnot und Zusammenbruch bewahrte, und dieser materielle
Fortschritt kam nicht dank der Tugenden ihrer neuen Regierung zustande,
sondern wegen des Überflusses der Natur. Unter dem britischen Huf wäre es
ihnen genausogut ergangen, und wahrscheinlich ein ganzes Stück besser.» 145f


Henry L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy , ed. Mark Meigs (Paris; [Poitiers: A. Colin ; CNED, 2004).


America


My first Workspace


Seminar 1


Seminar 2


Wittgenstein legt den Fokus auf das einfache Ideal, sondern auf die komplexe Realität (in dem Fall: der Sprache). Ist dass ein Wesensmerkmal, was man als "österreichisch" bezeichnen kann?


Das ist in ihrem Wesen eine sehr österreichische Sichtweise, nüchtern, real (und nicht ideal)


Eine Stadt ist physisch, daher mehr Regulierung durch ("physische") Gewalt möglich;
Sprache ist potentiell geschrieben, asynchron, anonym, schnelllebig,....


Warum kann es mehr top-down-Elemente geben?


Gute Analogie - Emergente Entwicklung; aber Stadtplanung hat mehr top-down-Elemente als Sprache?


Mir scheint es, als wäre bei Worten, die konkrete Dinge beschreiben, es nicht so, z.B. die Bedeutung von "Pokertisch"


“a man like Ernst Cassirer, who shared Wittgenstein's admiration for Hertz's
work and used it as one of the starting points for his own Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms, a kind of Mahler of philosophy - that is to say, a writer
whose more conservative-looking arguments can perhaps provide as many clues to
the way ahead in philosophy as the writings and teachings of Wittgenstein
himself. […] At this point in cultural history, indeed, the indispensable
reaction against aesthetic sloppiness and intellectual self-indulgence in all
fields was an artistic and intellectual Puritanism which brought back to the
task of creation the intellectual concentration and purity of vision that men
had been in danger of losing. Yet polemical Puritanism is always in danger of
overreaching itself in turn and, so, lapsing into a new fanaticism. It may
therefore be just as important to recognize when the Puritan reformation has
completed its necessary work and brought men back to a proper balance as it
was to initiate it in the first place.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 279)


“Schönberg himself preferred Gustav Mahler to Josef Matthias Hauer any day; it
was better to break out from the conventionality of the older diatonic
modalities, as Mahler did, than to sell oneself like Hauer to novel techniques
of an equally conventional and stylized kind. And we may ask ourselves whether
the most fruitful way ahead in music now does not it self bypass twelve-tone
systems almost entirely, by moving ahead from the classical tradition - like
Britten or Copland - in a direction closer to Mahler's own. More ways
existed, after all, of softening up the conventional crust of nineteenth-
century counterpoint and harmony than the revolutionary modernists were
prepared to allow; and as a result, there may now be available more ways of
developing forms of musical expression adaptable to our actual human purposes
by working ahead from Mahler and his present-day successors than from, say,
Hauer or Hindemith.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 278)


“For his own part, Wittgenstein was no more of a revolutionary than Schönberg.
Just as Schönberg claimed only that his novel twelve-tone Harmonielehre pro
vided the most effective way of continuing the exploration of "musical logic"
begun by (for example ) Bach and Beethoven, so Wittgenstein insisted only that
his methods of philosophizing represented "the legitimate heir to what has
previously been called philosophy." And, for all the poverty of his own
reading in the classical literature of the subject, Wittgenstein would refer
to such men as Augustine, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard with admiration and
respect […]. he had never been seriously drawn toward an empiricist
epistemology himself, whether it came from Mach and Schlick, or from Moore
and Russell; he had always been too much of a transcendental philosopher for
that. […] Idle symbolism and pseudo-technical jargon were being used as an
excuse to substitute a set of abstract formal conundrums, lacking any roots in
real life, for the true problems of philosophy […].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973,
p. 277)


“Wittgenstein remarked about C. D. Broad, his colleague at Trinity College,
Cambridge: "Poor Broad thinks of philosophy as the physics of the abstract."
This whole business—of contriving more and more sophisticated "theories"
about (for example) other minds or scientific entities or the logical
construction of material objects out of sense data-represented, in
Wittgenstein's eyes, a misguided collection of pseudo-technicalities, which
once again confused the means of philosophy with its ends. […] a deeply
philosophical thinker struggling to clear away intellectual obstacles to the
free movement of the mind.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 276)


“Given his training as an engineer, of course, Wittgenstein was not opposed to
mathematical calculation, in its proper place. But applied mathematics had to
be applied to something; it had to be shown not only that the computations
involved were formally impeccable, but also that they did a job, over and
beyond their own formal elaboration. Too often, the modernistic style of
Viennese philosophizing apparently developed sophisticated formalisms entirely
for their own sake, without regard to the demands of any external relevance or
application. […] Nor did Wittgenstein have any more use for the analytical
philosophy developed by G. E. Moore and his Cambridge colleagues during the
1930s, or the "linguistic" philosophy cultivated at Oxford after the Second
World War. In course of time, he came to respect G. E. Moore as an individual,
both for his personal simplicity and single-mindedness and for the integrity
of his later intellectual questioning.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 275)


“For Wittgenstein as for Kraus, the whole point of his polemical critique was
one of intellectual liberation. Of course, the Vienna Circle philosophers also
presented themselves in this same emancipatory role, but theirs was the
liberation so characteristic of "progressive" thought, in politics and
elsewhere: the kind that fights old dogmas with new, rather than free itself
from dogma as such. The Viennese positivists were antimetaphysical, to be
sure; but their opposition to metaphysics was buttressed, like that of Hume,
by general philosophical principles as arbitrary as those of their opponents.
Wittgenstein's antimetaphysical approach, on the other hand, was genuinely
nondoctrinal.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 274)


“After 1920, the philosophical techniques introduced in the Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus were taken over by the logical positivists of Vienna and the
philosophical analysts of Cambridge; and those techniques acquired a central
place in the corpus of technical skills and doctrine s around which the new
and specialized academic enterprises of "professional philosophy" was growing
up.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 273)


“The resulting building has more in common with an organic cell than with a
shoe box […]. In architecture as in music, then, the technical innovations
worked out before 1914 by the "critical" generation of Schönberg and Loos were
formalized in the 1920s and 1930s, so becoming the basis for a compulsory
antidecorative style which eventually became as conventional as the
overdecorative style which it displaced. And we might pursue these parallels
still further if we pleased-into poetry and literature, painting and
sculpture, and even into physics and pure mathematics. In each case, novel
techniques of axiomatization or sprung rhythm, operationalism or
nonrepresentational art, were first introduced in order to deal with artistic
or intellectual problems left over from the late nineteenth century-so having
the status of interesting and legitimate new means-only to acquire after a
few years the status of ends, through becoming the stock in trade of a newly
professionalized school of modern poets, abstract artists or philosophical
analysts. In this way, the professionalization of culture bred a new race of
functionaries who have been ready to impose a novel orthodoxy, based on the
idolization of new abstract techniques and structures, in place of the
discredited canons of bourgeois taste and nineteenth-century academicism. In
the process, the deeper human purposes that it was the function of those novel
techniques to serve have too often been ignored, if not forgotten. So, poetic
techniques and forms have become more important than poetic expression, the
construction of quasi mathematical systems of inductive logic more important
than the rationality of scientific procedures, and - in general - form and
style more important than use and function. The resulting academicization of
novel professional techniques would, of course, have been as repugnant in its
own way to the Karl Krauses of the world as the things against which they and
the modernists were theoretically rebelling. For self-imposed constraints, in
conformance with the scholastic convent ions of an artistic or intellectual
profession, can be just as inhibiting and damaging to the individual fantasy
as external constraints, such as those imposed by the older patronage system.
With a curious unanimity, the barrenness of this professionally imposed
scholasticism came to be acknowledged during the 1960s, in a wide range and
variety of creative activities. Over the last few years we have seen men
taking up once again threads which had apparently been broken in 1918, not
only in music and architecture but in many other fields also; and there has
been something approaching a comprehensive rediscovery of late Habsburg
cultural potentialities and achievements, which intervening generations
either overlooked or rejected outright. From John Osborne's play about the
Redl Affair, A Patriot for Me , to the film of Thomas Mann's Death in
Venice , from the success of Hello, Dolly! and La Ronde (both of them
adaptations of Viennese originals) to the historicization of the philosophy
of science, we have been rediscovering for ourselves how far artistic and
intellectual tasks set aside between 1900 and 1920 are still our own. And it
is not only the cultural tasks of Habsburg Vienna that we are rediscovering;
along with the Viennese Secession Exhibition at the Royal Academy in London
in 1970 and the new enthusiasm for Gustav Mahler's dynamic lyricism, men like
John Galsworthy and Edward Elgar - whose names were anathema to professionals
a generation ago-are nowadays spoken of once again with affection and respect.
And perhaps, before long, we shall be ready to appreciate fully once again the
deeper creative fantasies which led the first, critical generation (whether
James Joyce or Arnold Schönberg, Adolf Loos or Oskar Kokoschka) to devise, for
their own legitimate purposes, those novel techniques which the professional
bureaucrats of neo-orthodoxy subsequently froze into the modern style.”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 272)


“While basing their own slogans on Loos's principles, and presenting their own
architectural style as highly functional, the younger Bauhaus generation in
fact turned Loos's architecture into something quite different. Lacking Loos's
own highly sensitive adaptation of every design to its own specific use, they
imposed on their buildings a generalized, multipurpose structural design,
capable of lending itself to any function. Ironically enough, the outcome of
this development was a stylized mode of design whose operative principles were
almost exclusively structural, rather than functional. Rather than have its
form determined in detail by function during the initial design, a typical
Bauhaus building provided only a generalized "logical space," defining an
ensemble of architectural possibilities that were realized in a specific form
only subsequently, after the occupation of the building. […] Far from being
functional, the resulting structures have been, one might say, the nearest
thing yet seen to the physical realization of a pure Cartesian system of
geometrical coordinates. […] these buildings have been as anonymous as those
of any architectural period: instead of displaying the uses to which they are
put, the Cartesian style of these buildings has totally concealed it. As with
the transition from Arnold Schönberg to the self-consciously twelve-tone
composers of the interwar years, this change inverted Loos's principles, and
substituted an atemporal, stylized structuralism for the historically
sensitive and varied functionalism at which he had been aiming. There were, no
doubt, economic reasons why this Cartesian style had a certain commercial
success: flexible, multipurpose buildings, like those which line Park Avenue
in New York City, promised a higher rental and resale value than the more
tightly designed, and specifically functional, buildings that Loos himself
would have designed. And it is only when we get to the 1950s that we find this
anonymous style losing its hold, and large-scale modern buildings being
constructed which can be regarded as fully functional, in Loos's sense of the
term. One might instance Eero Saarinen's Trans-World Airlines terminal at John
F. Kennedy International Airport […].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 270)


“Musical theory found its positivist ideology in the doctrine of
Gebrauchsmusik. […] Composing was, after all, just another manufacturing
process, aimed at satisfying external demands. […] Alongside Paul Hindemith
and the advocates of Gebrauchsmusik, accordingly, were those of Schönberg's
followers who ignored his conservatism and made it a matter of principle to
compose in accordance with the technical rules for the formation and
transformation of "tone rows." Either way, a new set of functionaries ended by
imposing on the music of this second generation an orthodoxy, or set of
conventions, as demanding in its own way as that which the earlier,
revolutionary generation had set out to displace. So, in a period of
professionals working under the leadership of artistic bureaucrats, there was
less scope for a few independent "loners" whose fantasy demanded forms of
expression free to develop in response to new situations.” (Janik and Toulmin,
1973, p. 268)


“Schönberg refused to call himself an atonalist, and insisted on being
regarded as a teacher of "twelve-tone composition , not twelve-tone
composition." True, he believed that the twelve-tone system offered
twentieth-century composers a much richer vein of musical ideas, capable of
developing according to their own inner logic, than the older classical
harmony, whose resources had been exhausted. But the virtues of the new system
were not, as he saw it, self evident, nor were they entirely "internal." One
could appreciate them only by considering the twelve-tone system as a natural
extension of the classical seven-tone system, and so as its "legitimate
heir." But one could never accuse Schönberg of idolizing these novel
techniques. For him, they were never more than a promising means to carry
forward the enduring missions of musical composition; never an end in
themselves, to the product of an aesthetic ideology, as they were for their
inventor, Josef Hauer. Schönberg's own theory of harmony may, perhaps, have
been open to serious criticism; half a century later, his insistence that "how
the music sounds" has no aesthetic significance at all, and all that is
important is the internal logic of its development (which can equally well be
appreciated by the instructed eye, from simply studying the score) looks like
a radical counter exaggeration. The late Romantics had no doubt carried their
search for "musical effects" to absurd lengths. But, as Schönberg himself
acknowledged, composers like Gustav Mahler could still find ways of giving
their ideas musical expression which changed the older classical system,
without entirely breaking with it.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 267)


“Culture, in a word, had been Balkanized; and in the process it had been
bureaucratized as well. The old conventional orthodoxies were dead and gone.
But, instead of giving a place to a cultural democracy of Krausian "integral
men," with each of them free to let his creative fantasy work through whatever
media and procedures his own judgment chose, the professionalization of the
arts too often ended by imposing new orthodoxies in place of old. The times
being what they were, of course, these new professional orthodoxies were
defined in terms of particular sets of techniques.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973,
p. 266)


“it is probably no accident that Moritz Schlick, around whom the philosophical
circle formed, was himself a count and an aristocrat. (The Schlick family was,
in fact, one of the eight families from the old Czech Protestant nobility that
had survived throughout the Habsburg era and had served as a focus of loyalty
for Czech nationalists in the Empire.)” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 265)


“Under the Habsburg system, cultural and artistic life had long been organized
around an elaborate system of patronage. Throughout the high classical period,
every noble house or prelate maintained an organist, a composer, even a
complete orchestra, having part-time duties in the family chapel or cathedral
which left substantial scope for the artist's own originality and enterprise.
(Similarly, to some degree, with painters and sculptors, architects and
writers.)” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 264)


“the Austria and Germany of the 1920s saw a natural turning toward positivism
and toward questions of technique. All areas of life, thought and art called
for a new instauration. The important thing was to bring the most up-to-date,
effective and scientific techniques available to this great work of
construction and reformation.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 263)


“while Wittgenstein's later philosophical teaching displayed a clear - almost
anthropological - recognition of cultural diversity, and of the relativity of
language games to the modes of human life within which they are operative, he
showed no feeling at all for the question, whether the course of human history
has in any meaningful sense seen any rational improvement […].” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 262)


“One of the few pieces of authentic moral advice Wittgenstein was heard to
give in his later years is the maxim, "One must travel light."” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 261)


“For a Marxist and a Machian equally, there was no reason to doubt that one
could do real good or ill in this world, by collective social action. […]
Ludwig Wittgenstein wanted none of this historicism. To him, historical
variety and change possessed no more philosophical relevance than they had
done for Plato, for Descartes, or for his much-admired Frege. In one of the
surviving pre Tractatus notebooks, we find him jotting down the curious
remark, "What is history to me? Mine is the first and only world."” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 260)


“Mach himself had died in 1916, disillusioned and disappointed with the
contemporary reception of his ideas. […] from 1920 on, Wittgenstein was
speaking, if for anyone, for the second of the three groups we have
distinguished—that is, for the Viennese intellectuals who were traumatized by
the Kakanian experience to the point of abandoning all belief in collective
values, and who fell back instead on an individualism as absolute and
antihistorical, in its own way, as the situation against which they were
reacting.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 259)


“The clearest testimony of Francis Joseph's ultimate failure was the total
absence from postwar Austria of any convincing movement for a restoration of
the monarchy.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 258)


“If the realm of values was completely dissociated, for Kraus and Wittgenstein
alike, from the realm of facts, this is a comment on the fossilization which
had overtaken the Lebensformen of upper-middle-class Kakanian existence. Given
life as it was lived in the Vienna of the early 1900s, no recognized public
forum of opportunities existed for the sincere and serious-minded discussion
of ethics or aesthetics. The man who truly understood the deeper character of
value judgments could, thus, find room for them only in the private world of
his own personal life.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 254)


“One of the most successful works of popular neo-Kantian literature,
published shortly after the First World War, was a contribution to
characterology written by Eduard Spranger. By the late 1920s, this book had
sold as many as 28,000 copies, and the title of this best seller was, quite
simply, Lebensformen. […] Spranger himself declared that alternative rational
systems were characteristic of rival types of mind. The "military mind," for
instance, conforms to one set of regulative principles, the "contemplative
mind" to another, the "artistic creative mind" to a third. Alternative
systems of regulative principles thus define different styles of thought […].”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 248)


“found himself, at fifty, urging his hearers to reflect more carefully on the
ways in which children do in fact learn (or might alternatively learn) the
standard patterns of behavior within which our language has a practical
function, and on the metaphysical confusions that can flow from any failure
to keep these practical functions clearly in mind.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973,
p. 241)


“Paul Engelmann puts the point: ‘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 be silent about just as they do. The
difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds

and this is its essence - that what we can speak about is all that matters
in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really
matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent
about.’” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 237)


“Where the Vienna positivists had equated the "important" with the
"verifiable" and dismissed all unverifiable propositions as "unimportant
because unsayable," the concluding section of the Tractatus had insisted -
though to deaf ears - that the unsayable alone has genuine value. We can, it
tells us, recognize "the higher" only in that which the propositions of our
language are unfitted to capture; since no "fact," such as can be "pictured"
by a "proposition," has any intrinsic claim either on our moral submission, or
on our aesthetic approval. Wittgenstein's silence in the face of the
"unutterable" was not a mocking silence like that of the positivists, but
rather a respectful one. Having decided that "value-neutral" facts alone can
be expressed in regular propositional form, he exhorted his readers to turn
their eyes away from factual propositions to the things of true value which
cannot be gesagt but only gezeigt. No wonder Wittgenstein saw the completion
of his Tractatus as a moment to give up doing philosophy and set out to devote
himself to humanly important activities!” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 237)


“The logical positivists were overlooking the very difficulties about
language which the Tractatus had been meant to reveal; and they were turning
an argument designed to circumvent all philosophical doctrines into a source
of new doctrines, meanwhile leaving the original difficulties unresolved.”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 233)


“As early as 1924, Moritz Schlick was already writing to him, trying to
arrange a meeting, but nothing came of this. It was not until the spring of
1927, in fact, that the two men met and inaugurated the series of discussions

mainly between Wittgenstein and Waismann, but with Schlick also taking part
on occasion - which continued right through to 1930. […] Wittgenstein
reported to Paul Engelmann, after the initial meeting, "Each of us must have
thought that the other was crazy." At Schlick's request, Wittgenstein agreed
to meet Carnap and some of the other members of the Vienna Circle, but it
immediately became apparent that their intellectual positions were far apart -
perhaps, unbridgeably so. To begin with, Wittgenstein was unwilling to
discuss technical points in philosophy with the members of the Vienna Circle,
and he insisted rather on reading poetry to them, especially the poems of
Rabindranath Tagore.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 232)


“Taking a hint from Mach and from Russell's doctrine of "knowledge-by-
acquaintance," they equated Wittgenstein's "atomic facts" with the
indubitable, directly known "hard data" of Mach's and Russell's
epistemologies. The "unit propositions," which were the ultimate carriers of
meaning, thus became Protokollsätze, and thereby the ultimate carriers of
knowledge, each of them recording one single item of sensory evidence,
vouchsafed by one single sensation, or "sense datum." […] Like Hume again,
they identified the realm of the "necessary" and the a priori with that of
the "analytic" or "tautologous"; and this at first appeared to be in line
with the Tractatus account of logical truth or falsity. Propositions were to
be considered meaningful only if they were either confessedly logical, and
thereby tautologous or inconsistent, or else genuinely empirical, in which
case their semantic value would be determined by cashing them in for actual or
possible observation reports or Protokollsätze. […] The resulting philosophy
was a clean, functional one, worthy of Gropius - geometrical in its lines
[…].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 230)


“The philosophical aims of the young Viennese positivists were thus similar to
those of Moore and Russell; but their methods were different. Whereas the
young Cambridge radicals had set out to reform philosophy by analysis, the
Viennese positivists were determined to reform it by generalizing methods that
were already proving their worth in scientific theory. Philosophy must be set
on "the sure path of a science "- indeed, integrated with physics and biology
into a single "unified science.” In practice, this involved reconstructing
both philosophy and science in the form of axiomatic, mathematical
disciplines, as the example of Frege suggested; as empirical, inductive
disciplines, in which all generalizations and abstract concepts could be
legitimated directly by appeal to observation; or ideally (and here they ran
into the same problems that Hertz and Wittgenstein encountered) as empirical,
inductive sciences whose inner articulations were, at the same time,
formalized on the axiomatic pattern of systems in pure mathematics. If there
was a streak of positivism present at this stage, it came in through such men
as Mach, Avenarius and Vaihinger. […] Mach's epistemological position, like
Hume's, was a "sensationalist" one. This last idea was of great significance
for the Vienna Circle philosophers of the 1920s. When they set about finding
an epistemological starting point for their theories, they turned in vain to
Wittgenstein's Tractatus.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 229)


“Once he had completed the Tractatus in 1918-19, he felt he had done all there
was in him to do for the subject. So he dropped it. With that out of the way,
his creative fantasy needed to turn to other channels. He spent the academic
year 1919-20 at the Vienna Teachers' Training College, in the Kundmanngasse
[…] and then took up a series of appointments as an elementary-school teacher.
Though he did not find the school authorities or his pupils' parents easy to
deal with, he threw himself into the actual work, and seems to have been
quite remarkably effective, especially in the teaching of mathematics. Later
on, when his mood was very dark and he could not continue teaching, he worked
for a while as a gardener, until his sister Margarete Stonborough invited him
to design her a house, to be built in the Kundmanngasse. […] he collaborated
with his younger friend Paul Engelmann, who himself had an architectural
training; but very soon he was able to take sole responsibility […].” (Janik
and Toulmin, 1973, p. 224)


“When first elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he could not
bring himself to dine at High Table. […] He objected, rather, to the symbolic
fact that the High Table itself was placed on a platform, six inches higher
than the main floor of the dining hall; and, for a while, the college agreed
to serve him separately, at a small card table placed on the lower level.
(Later on, he scarcely dined in Hall at all.) […] He acquired from Tolstoy a
feeling that "humanly useful" work-particularly manual labor-alone had dignity
and value. He briefly visited Russia, though there is no suggestion that he
found Soviet society any more to his taste than the society of Western Europe;
and he gave the impression of being a man who would, above other men, have
found integrity and fulfillment within the framework of a kibbutz. Nor was
this impression an accidental one. When the first Jewish collective farms were
set up in Palestine, during the 1880s and 1890s, the ethos and social ideology
of the kibbutz movement were worked out and expounded by a new Russian
immigrant called Gordon, who was himself an immediate disciple and follower of
Tolstoy.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 222)


“The worldly, bourgeois society of the late nineteenth century had cut its own
throat, and the survivors were free of all moral obligations to their past.
It was time to make a fresh start. Redemption would come only through a new
austerity, of dress, of manners, of taste, of style. (In the 1920s, it was
easier to get yourself expelled from school as a troublesome radical for
having a crew cut, than for wearing your hair too long.) With bared chests,
sandals on their feet, and rucksacks on their backs, the young men of Germany
and Austria marched out of the corrupt cities and back into the pine forests,
where, in a spirit of Bruderschaft, they hoped to recapture the purer and
simpler values to which the generation of their fathers had been blind […].”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 221)


“In a culture over loaded with tawdry rubbish and meaningless etiquette, the
rebellious young men who were seeking to achieve consistency and integrity
rejected facial hair along with all other bourgeois superfluities. To them,
mustaches and sideburns were mere ostentation, like velvet smoking jackets and
fancy neckties. A serious, uncluttered mind called for a clean-shaven chin and
an open-necked shirt; artistic matters became, for them, matters for moral
reflection and judgment,rather than morality a matter of aesthetic taste; the
proper alternative to the arbitrary authoritarianism of society was not
anarchism but self-discipline. A man must take his own life in hand, on his
own responsibility before God […].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 220)


“Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief , which he mentions acquiring in a letter to
Russell, and which he also referred to as the book which "saved my life."”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 218)


“the Tractatus is itself, by intention, a polemic against the kind of
rationalism that maims and shackles the human spirit. […] book of aphorisms,
which showed how the two spheres of facts and value were to be distinguished.
The result was those cryptic seventy-five pages which Wittgenstein himself
feared would be very difficult to comprehend, save for the man who "has
himself already had the thoughts which are expressed in it.” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 217)


“He was aware, as Kraus was, that reason is only an instrument for good when
it is the reason of a good man. The good man's being good is a function not
of his rationality, but of his participation in the life of the fantasy. For
the good man, ethics is a way of life, not a system of propositions […]. Thus
the Tractatus was, first and foremost, an attack on all forms of rational
systems of ethics — that is, theories of ethics that would base human conduct
upon reason. It did not, of course, claim that morality is contrary to reason;
merely that its foundations lay elsewhere. So, in contradistinction to Kant,
both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein find the basis of morality in "right
feelings" rather than in "valid reasons." […] Wittgenstein was convinced that
he had solved "the problem of philosophy." The model theory explained how
knowledge of the world was possible. The mathematical (logical) basis of that
theory explained how the very structure of propositions showed their
limitations - that is, how the structure of propositions determined the limits
of scientific (rational) inquiry. The implication of the model theory was
that the "meaning of life" lay outside the sphere of what could be said; the
"meaning of life" should properly be referred to as a riddle, rather than as a
problem, since there is no question of solving it, or answering it. […]
Subjective truth is communicable only indirectly, through fable, polemics,
irony, and satire. […] Ethics is taught not by arguments, but by providing
examples of moral behavior; this is the task of art.” (Janik and Toulmin,
1973, p. 215)


“Wittgenstein's critique of language, as expressed in the Tractatus, is in
fact - as he himself claimed - only half a critique. The half that he did not
write ("this second part, that is the important one") comprises the corpus of
Karl Kraus's writings. Rationalistic ethics and metaphysics are to
Wittgenstein what the feuilleton is to Kraus: conceptual monsters, which only
succeed in mixing up essentially different things. Just as in the feuilleton
fact and fantasy produce an artistic bastard, so in metaphysics science and
poetry mate to produce a conceptual mongrel. In art, ornament and use mate to
produce objects, such as filled prewar houses, that are both ugly and useless.
In music, the quest for theatrical effects has displaced the inherent logic of
the musical idea itself. The principles of composition had been applied to
produce effects mimicking other kinds of sound, and the true art of
composition had been lost in the shuffle. All of these distortions were the
result of telescoping elements which were essentially unrelated and which in
combination were destructive of one another. Since society not only condoned
but demanded the production of such aberrations, a critique of any of the arts
was implicitly a critique of culture and society as a whole. Wittgenstein's
Tractatus furnished the most abstract of these and therefore the least readily
comprehensible. […] Wittgenstein's radical separation of facts from values can
be regarded as 'the terminus of a series of efforts to distinguish the sphere
of natural science from the sphere of morality, which had begun with Kant,
had been sharpened up by Schopenhauer, and had been made absolute by
Kierkegaard. Like Kant, Wittgenstein was concerned at the same time to defend
the adequacy of language as a scientific instrument from Mauthner's
skepticism; the model theory of the proposition became the basis upon which
Wittgenstein could give scientific language a sure basis, while drawing an
absolute distinction between what language says and what it shows - that is,
what is "higher." On this interpretation, the Tractatus becomes an expression
of a certain type of language mysticism that assigns a central importance in
human life to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of
life. Only art can express moral truth, and only the artist can teach the
things that matter most in life. Art is a mission. To be concerned merely with
form, like the aesthetes of the 1890s, is to pervert art. So in its own way,
the Tractatus is every bit as much a condemnation of l'art pour l'art as
Tolstoy's What Is Art? ” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 214)


“Wittgenstein is trying to set the ethical off from the sphere of rational
discourse, because he believes that it is more properly located in the sphere
of the poetic: "Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same." […] “Ethics is
transcendental.” However, like logic, the ethical is not dependent upon the
facts: "How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for
what is higher." Much of the difficulty that people have experienced in
interpreting the Tractatus revolves around the fact that both ethics and logic
relate to what can be "shown" but not "said"; consequently, "the mystical" is
ambiguous. […] In the world of facts, there is nothing of value - "The sense
of the world must lie outside the world" […] "Only he is an artist," as Kraus
puts it, "who can make a riddle out of the solution.”” (Janik and Toulmin,
1973, p. 210)


“Ficker was the only editor in Austria who would even mention the work of Karl
Kraus, let alone concede its importance; Kraus reciprocated, by referring to
Der Brenner as the only honest periodical in Austria. When, in due course,
Wittgenstein used part of his patrimony for the benefit of writers and
artists, he entrusted to Ludwig Ficker the sum of one hundred thousand crowns,
asking him to distribute it among worthy artists. (Rainer Maria Rilke was one
of the first beneficiaries.) From the outbreak of war, right up to 1919,
Wittgenstein was in continual contact with Ficker by mail. Having made three
unsuccessful attempts to publish the Tractatus - first through Kraus's
publisher, Jahoda and Siegel, then through Braumueller, who had published
Weininger, and finally through "a German professor of philosophy" who Wright
conjectures was probably Frege and who had a connection with the periodical
Beiträge zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus - he turned to Ficker
for advice.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 209)


“Russell himself took it for granted that Wittgenstein was, first and
foremost, his own pupil and disciple; and he became disillusioned with
Wittgenstein later on […].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 204)


“The logical structure of language makes it possible for us to ascertain a
priori that certain configurations of objects are, or are not, "possible."
This is the function of "truth tables" in Wittgenstein's system; they
establish the a priori truth possibilities of any model. […] Wittgenstein's
"logical space" is similar to a coordinate system in theoretical physics.”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 202)


“Kraus was the true disciple of Kierkegaard without even knowing his name, in
Haecker's opinion, for Kraus continued Kierkegaard's work in his satires and
polemics. Kraus, like Kierkegaard, knew all too well that ethics is not a
science of morality, nor a branch of knowledge like geometry or chemistry.
Ethics has nothing to do with facts. Its basis is the subjectivity of
conviction, and its sphere is not that of science but that of the
paradoxical. Kraus further agreed with Kierkegaard that the unity of form and
content in a work of art was absolutely essential. Aesthetic form and ethical
content are two faces of the same coin. Only the good man knows what values
are, and only he can communicate them. No amount of scientific knowledge can
ever make a man good. On Kierkegaard's and Kraus's view of ethics, Haecker
insists, the notion of "moral sciences" (Geisteswissenschaften) presents a
contradiction in terms. Ethics is rooted in the paradoxical, and there can be
no science of the paradoxical. Only the aphorism was equal to expressing the
immediacy of the ethical. Thus Haecker's ideal for a critique of language was
to be found in the aphorisms and polemics of Kraus, who was Kierkegaard
redivivus.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 196)


“As Haecker saw it, Mauthner merely embraced skepticism as an intellectual
thesis, rather than as an existential posture, and therefore had more in
common with Descartes than with Pascal. By contrast, Kierkegaard's skepticism
was existential and filled with Angst. […] The true critique of language, says
Haecker, consists not in studying words in Mauthner's manner, but in
transforming language from an instrument of practical utility into an
instrument of the spirit which will change people's lives.” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 195)


“From 1919 on, he became a lonely and introverted figure. He admitted to
having been impressed by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, and he
retreated more and more into ethical attitudes of extreme individualism and
austerity. For Wittgenstein as for Tolstoy, the demands of personal integrity
were associated with a theoretical commitment to an absolute egalitarianism
and an overriding concern with his brother men. […] his decision to take up
war work in the most menial of occupations, as a hospital porter and orderly.
[…] his connections with Ludwig Ficker and the group of young avant-garde
intellectuals which was centered around Ficker's periodical Der Brenner,
published in Innsbruck, and more particularly, with the work of Theodor
Haecker, with which Wittgenstein explicitly identified his own tasks in the
Tractatus. Haecker's career as a writer was largely devoted to making the name
of Kierkegaard the household word that it has since become.” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 194)


“Philip Radcliffe, lecturer in music at King's College, Cambridge, describes
how during Wittgenstein's time as professor of philosophy at Cambridge he
used to bring him bulky scores to play over on the piano - notably, some
forgotten works by his mother's old friend Josef Labor. Wittgenstein placed
importance on the precise manner in which the scores were played, and
seemingly found in them something of that preterlinguistic significance that
Schopenhauer had claimed. Nor was his range of musical tastes and interests
limited or conventional. Hearing that G. E. Moore's younger son, Timothy, had
organized a successful jazz "combo,” […] Wittgenstein persuaded him to sit at
the piano and explain at great length the structure and development — what
Schönberg would have called the "logic" — of jazz. Within philosophy itself,
by contrast, Wittgenstein seems to have read comparatively little. […] One of
the few philosophical writers who impressed him from early on was Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg. Lichtenberg, an eighteenth-century professor of natural
philosophy at Göttingen, had been admired by Kraus and was a major influence
on Mach too. Lichtenberg's writings became very popular among Viennese
intellectuals at the turn of the century. Even more than Schopenhauer, he set
the aphoristic style of philosophizing that became fashionable at this period,
of which the aphorisms of the Tractatus are only one illustration. He wrote
about both theoretical physics and the philosophy of language, indeed, in a
spirit which (as Wright has said) shows "a striking resemblance to
Wittgenstein." […] we know directly of his admiration for Weininger, Kraus and
Loos.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 193)


“Without Greek, the humanistic Gymnasium was closed to him; as a result, he
ended up attending the Linz Realschule beginning in 1904 - just about the same
time, incidentally, that the young Adolf Hitler left that same institution!
[…] at the age of ten, he made a model sewing machine out of matchsticks that
actually worked […]. In Zurich, in Berlin and Vienna, the prime intellectual
foundation demanded of a first-rate engineer around 1900 was a thorough
intellectual grasp of theoretical physics, especially Newtonian mechanics. So
the first goal that a young man in Ludwig Wittgenstein's position had to set
himself was a proper understanding of mathematics, especially in its
application to physics.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 191)


“Margarete Stonborough (Wittgenstein's youngest sister) insisted upon being
jailed with other Viennese Jews after the Anschluss, over the expressed
objections of the Nazis, who were content to consider her and her family non-
Jews. […] Karl Wittgenstein was prepared to allow his sons even less choice
than his father had granted him in deciding on their life's work. He insisted
that Hans's extraordinary musical talents must be sacrificed to a career in
finance and industry, following in his footsteps. […] like Karl before him, he
had to escape, and escape he did, also to North America, where he finally
ended by taking his own life […]. is second son, Rudi, committed suicide in
similar circumstances, […]. [Karl] died of cancer in 1913, and so did not live
to hear of the suicide in 1918 of his third son, Kurt, who killed himself
rather than permit himself to be captured on the Italian front. Thus, Ludwig
Wittgenstein's elusive remarks about suicide […].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973,
p. 190)


“Leopoldine Wittgenstein - "Poldy," as she was affectionately called - was
herself an accomplished pianist. It was she who brought the blind organist and
composer, Josef Labor, to their home […]. Kurt Wittgenstein, the third son,
was a cellist; but the most talented of the children, musically, was Hans, the
eldest son, who played several instruments like a virtuoso. […] Although Karl
Wittgenstein's children adopted his Protestant outlook on life, they thought
of themselves as entirely Jewish by extraction.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p.
189)


“The eldest, Hermine, was a painter of no mean ability, whose works reveal a
mastery of technique and aesthetic sensibility. Hermine's deep admiration and
enthusiasm for Klimt, indeed, prompted Karl Wittgenstein to supply the funds
needed for the Secession Building […]. The second son, Rudi, was similarly
inclined to the theater. Margarete, the youngest of the three daughters, was
the rebel of the family and its brightest intellectual light. […] She became a
close friend of Sigmund Freud, and she helped Marie Bonaparte to arrange his
escape from Austria after Hitler's Anschluss. It was very likely Margarete who
put the writings of her favorite philosopher, Schopenhauer, as well as those
of Weininger and Kierkegaard, into the hands of her youngest brother, for she
kept her finger always on the pulse of intellectual and cultural life.” (Janik
and Toulmin, 1973, p. 189)


“In January of 1865, he left Vienna, arriving in New York in April of that
year with nothing but his violin. His stay in the United States lasted for
less than two years, and during this time he took various employments. He was
a waiter and violinist in a restaurant, a steersman on a canal boat, a bar
tender, a night watchman, a teacher at an orphanage for destitute children
and also at a Christian Brothers school in New York, where he taught Latin,
Greek, mathematics, violin and tenor horn. Karl Wittgenstein's American
experience deeply impressed him. Later on, in a series of essays which he
wrote as a successful businessman for Die Neue Freie Presse , filling three
volumes, he expressed his admiration for the standard of living attained by
the American worker in comparison with his Austrian counterpart. Not without
difficulty, a rapprochement was arranged between Karl and his father: this
led to the return of the twenty year-old son to Vienna in 1867, on the
understanding that he should be allowed to attend the Technical Institute.
Over the next twenty years, the financial world of Vienna witnessed the
meteoric rise of Karl Wittgenstein to the heights of business success. […] his
fantastic capacity for work-day and night, and days upon end, without rest. By
1895, he was an undisputed master of the technique which came to be known as
the "rationalization of industry," eventually dominating the steel industry of
the Habsburg Empire, which was located mainly in Bohemia. […] stern Protestant
morality characteristic of the world-view which Karl Wittgenstein transmitted
[…].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 188)


“Karl Wittgenstein was the youngest of the three sons of Hermann
Wittgenstein, a man of solid middle-class background who also had eight
daughters and earned his living partly by dealing in wool, partly by
purchasing inefficient farms and making them profit-making before selling
them. […] His eldest daughter, Anna, studied piano with Clara Schumann's
father, Wieck, and with Brahms; Fine was a Lieder singer who studied with
prominent practitioners of that art; Clara was a pupil of Goldmark, while Karl
himself played the violin and always took his instrument with him on trips
away from home, even at the height of his business career […]. Joseph
Joachim, who was his wife's cousin, and whom he raised with his own eleven
children; his concern for the thirteen-year-old Joachim, in fact, led Hermann
to send him to Mendelssohn to study. […] Hermann was a stern father, who would
not permit his absolute authority to be questioned. For example, he rejected a
suitor to one of his daughters without consulting her at all. This sternness
and inflexibility in due course brought him into conflict with his youngest
son. Karl very much desired to attend the Technical Institute in Vienna, but
his father considered such an education unsuitable for a gentleman and refused
to consider the suggestion at all.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 187)


“Ludwig was the youngest child of Karl Wittgenstein, a millionaire
industrialist, the peer of Skoda and Krupp in Central Europe, whose home was
one of the most important musical salons in the Vienna (and a fortiori the
Europe ) of his day. In public life, Karl Wittgenstein combined a
thoroughgoing knowledge of the latest technological advances with a keen
business sense, and he thereby became a giant in Habsburg industry and
finance. In private life, he was a great patron of the musical arts, to whose
home such musicians as Brahms and Joachim, Mahler, Walter, and the youthful
Pablo Casals were no strangers. The elder Wittgenstein was convinced that the
only genuine educational foundation for life was a rigorously disciplined
course of private tutoring, so his youngest son was educated at home until the
age of fourteen. Furthermore, the Wittgensteins seldom went outside their own
household to satisfy their cultural wants - a prerogative of the wealthy few.”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 187)


“Hertz and Boltzmann. These men had shown how the logical articulation and
empirical application of systematic theories in physical science actually
gives one a direct bildliche Darstellung of the world, in a sense of that
phrase quite different from the metaphorical description of Mauthner namely,
a mathematical model which, when suitably applied, can yield true and certain
knowledge of the world. And they had done so, furthermore, in a way that
satisfied Kant's fundamental anti metaphysical demands-namely, by mapping the
limits of the language of physical theory entirely "from within."” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 183)


“Kierkegaard's being purely individualist, Tolstoy's collective - they were at
any rate alike in strictly rejecting all attempts to give morality
"intellectual foundations" in the world of facts - whether in the accepted
codes of conventional morals or elsewhere. In this respect, all the men
involved in this development had a natural appeal to a generation of Viennese
thinkers, artists and social critics who found themselves, as a class,
alienated from the values of the society in which they lived. […] Karl Kraus
and those who shared his attitudes in regard to social and artistic "critique"
and the "creative separation" of facts and values. Given their own views, the
Krausians were naturally receptive to the direction in which the post-Kantians
had developed and, of all the post Kantian philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer

with the epigrammatic punch and elegant literary style which set him off
from his academic and professional colleagues in philosophy-was the most
widely read and influential in the Vienna of the 1890s. Before long, he was
joined in popularity by Sören Kierkegaard. Meanwhile, as Paul Engelmann
reports, there was an equally lively interest in the writings of the novelist-
turned-moralist Tolstoy - notably in his crucial essay What Is Art?, which
effectively discredited the fashionable aestheticism of the time, and revived
interest in art as the main channel of moral communication.” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 181)


“Tolstoy conceived morality as essentially based upon feeling, and art as
"the language of feeling"; speech, by contrast, was the medium of rational
thought. Hence art was, for him, the medium through which moral teachings must
be propagated. […] Tolstoy's version of Christianity is one which accepts a
life dedicated to suffering and in this respect resembles Schopenhauer's
conception of morality. At the same time, Tolstoy vehemently rejected all
dogma […].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 178)


“For Kierkegaard, the very notion of speculation itself is an object of
derision, because it can never change a person's mode of living. In
Kierkegaard's view, the greatest disaster that ever befell Christianity was
the attempt to express its truths in speculative terms. As a result,
Christianity contradicted itself. Speculative truth is a matter of universal
and complete knowledge, true for all time; whereas Christianity has to do with
the existing person, who is always in a state of becoming, always an
individual. […] the greatest possible faith becomes the greatest possible
risk, placing a total commitment in what is most uncertain, the absurd.”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 177)


“the revival of the Socratic method in the service of Christianity. It is a
"new militant science” intended to replace the older apologetic method […].”
(Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 176)


“one essential element in Kierkegaardian thought was a thoroughgoing critique
of conventional bourgeois mores […]. It is an age of abstract thought in
which passion plays no role, an age of ideas in which true feelings play no
role. In such an age of indolence, revolutions are inconceivable. It is thus
an age without genuine values […]. Kierkegaard in Copenhagen, like Kraus in
Vienna some seventy-five years later, considered the press to be the special
agent of demoralization, as a result of its impersonality and in difference
to truth. To all of this, he opposes the individual, who is the sole bearer of
responsibility and the sole subject of religious and moral experience. This
individual has become lost in the stifling crowd […].” (Janik and Toulmin,
1973, p. 175)


“Probably no philosopher has ever considered himself more of a Kantian than
Arthur Schopenhauer. He ceaselessly inveighed against those philosophers who
had transformed the critical philosophy into the grandiose idealist systems of
the early nineteenth century. Hegel, in particular, was the continual object
of his wrath. […] Curiously, time has proved that Schopenhauer had much more
in common with the idealists than he ever cared to admit; he himself thought
that he was taking up where Kant had left off. His main work, The World as
Will and Representation, grew out of his marriage of Kant to Oriental thought,
the importance of which for Western philosophy he was - leaving aside Leibniz'
interest in the I Ching - the first to recognize.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973,
p. 167)


“the ideas of reason are related to morality, not essentially, but as a
scholium. The fact that reason transcends the limits of experience, then,
does not entail that what it produces beyond those limits is wholly
meaningless, but only that its products, the ideas, cannot extend our
knowledge. This theory of "the limits of reason" is of direct importance to us
here, since it was the starting point of the whole debate about language and
values, which came to a head in the Vienna of 1890-1914.” (Janik and Toulmin,
1973, p. 165)


“Planck maintained that Mach's biological theory of knowledge was every bit as
metaphysical as those theories which he condemned; he also attacked Mach's
concept of the nature of physical theory, denying that physical theories were
based solely upon sense data. In Planck's view, the physicist creates the
system of the physical world by imposing form upon it. He held that the mind
creates the mathematical structures which organize empirical facts into the
unified system that is physical science. He accused Mach of anthropomorphism,
the cardinal sin among physical scientists. To Planck, Mach's attempt to base
physics on the description of sense data involved the assumption that
"physical" states were somehow identical with “psychical” states.” (Janik and
Toulmin, 1973, p. 155)


“The aim of the construction of this world-picture would be to simplify and
systematize experience in such a way that we could more easily deal with it.
Philosophy, then, becomes the activity of thinking about the world according
to the "principle of least action." […] Mach maintained that physical theories
are descriptions of sense data which simplify experience by allowing the
scientist to anticipate further events. Mathematical functions serve to
simplify what the senses perceive through their organizing power. It is less
correct to speak of theories as true or false than it is to speak of them as
more or less useful, since it is their very nature to be descriptions of,
rather than judgments on, sensations.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 153)


“the most successful attempt to unite physics and psychology into one science
was that of Richard Avenarius, whom Mach recognized as a colleague. […] In his
"critique of pure experience," Avenarius sought to avoid the Scylla and
Charybdis of materialism and idealism by recourse to a naive realism having
affinities with the philosophies of G. E. Moore and Edmund Husserl. […] Like
Husserl, Avenarius believed that the task of philosophy is to describe the
world as we meet it in ordinary experience-" The important thing for
experience is how it is characterized, not what exists without it.”” (Janik
and Toulmin, 1973, p. 152)


“The task of all scientific endeavor is to describe sense data in the simplest
or most economical manner. […]  a thoroughgoing phenomenalist; the world is
the sum total of what appears to the senses. So, dreams constitute "elements"
in the world just as much as any other class of elements, for "inner"
experience is experience quite as much as "outer" experience is. Abstract
conceptions, ideas, representations, are similarly reduced to sense data, by
being identified as species concepts which enable us to deal with groups of
"elements" efficiently. As a positivist, Mach was absolutely opposed to any
sort of metaphysical speculation. […] rejected any position which smacked of
the slightest hint of dualism, for he said that all dualism culminates in
metaphysics. […] David Hume, the destroyer of all metaphysical claims to
truth, and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the enemy of all pseudo science, were
his philosophical heroes. Mach was, in fact, the first man to draw attention
to the philosophical significance of Lichtenberg, whose writings soon became
popular and influential in the artistic and intellectual circles of Vienna.
[…] For his conception of "psychophysics," Mach was indebted to Gustav Theodor
Fechner.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 151)


“Mach's ideas we re embraced with enthusiasm by Austrian revisionist
Marxists. The Machist version of Marxism penetrated Russian socialism through
the agency of Bogdanov, and achieved a position from which it could challenge
Leninism as a theoretical exposition of socialism. […] In the twenties, the
prominent Austrian social scientist Otto Neurath founded the Ernst Mach
Verein, a forerunner of the Vienna Circle. From poetry to philosophy of law,
from physics to social theory, Mach's influence was all-pervasive in Austria
and elsewhere.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 150)


“by the year 1900, the linked problems of communication, authenticity and
symbolic expression had been faced in parallel in all the major fields of
thought and art - by Kraus and Schönberg, Loos and Hofmannsthal, Rilke and
Musil. So the stage was set for a philosophical critique of language […]. the
three philosophical traditions with which they were most familiar. These were
(1) the neoempiricism of Ernst Mach, with its emphasis on "sense impressions"
and natural science; (2) the Kantian analysis of "representation" and the
"schemata," regarded as determining the forms of experience and judgment, and
its continuation by the antiphilosopher Arthur Schopenhauer; and (3) the anti-
intellectualist approach to moral and aesthetic issues put forward by that
other antiphilosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, and echoed in the novels and essays
of Leo Tolstoy. […] a Bohemian apostate Jew who, as a drama critic in Berlin,
straddled in his own person the frontiers between philosophy and literature.
The man was Fritz Mauthner, a writer whose Sprachkritik Wittgenstein himself
referred to later in the Tractatus, and whose skeptical aims and discursive
methods he explicitly contrasted with his own more formal and rigorous
approach to the philosophy of language.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 136)


“Musil too was an admirer of Mach; yet he was a "Machian" in a more
significant sense than Broch or Hofmannsthal, since he had been trained both
as an engineer and as an academic philosopher. Musil's doctoral dissertation
for the philosophy faculty in Berlin was in fact on Mach; and he gave up a
promising career in philosophy only with the success of Torless in 1906, when
he turned down academic appointments at Munich and Berlin. Given the state of
academic philosophy, Musil decided that the fundamental problems raised by
philosophy, psychology and modern logic simply could not be solved. So he
abandoned it for literature, just as Broch, who had a similar background, was
to do later.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 136)


“Schönberg used to defend his so-called "atonal" music-while disavowing the
term-against those who attacked it for its dissonance, by reminding them that
the musically untutored had similarly at tacked all the classical Viennese
composers, whom they considered to be writing dissonant monstrosities. But
Haydn and Mozart did not write for the untutored, and never aimed at "sounding
good." The audiences for which they composed were made up of such nobles as
Esterhazy and the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, who were themselves amateur
musicians and, so, aware of the subtleties of the compositions they had
commissioned and capable of appreciating their technical aspects. Schönberg
then turns the argument against modern "music lovers," who do not understand
anything about music but "know what they like." […] all of Schönberg's
compositions represent attacks on the pseudo-sophistication of bourgeois
aestheticism. His work as a composer becomes, simultaneously, a critique of
society, somewhat as Loos 's architecture did.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p.
128)


“Mahler's legacy to Schönberg lay in the dominance of "authenticity " over
"convention" in matters of sound; one did not compose in order to produce
pleasant sounds, but in order to express one's personality. Schönberg embraced
this idea whole-heartedly, but he insisted that future composers would have
this way open to them only if they subjected themselves to the most rigorous
discipline. To Mahler, self-expression and self-discipline alike came
naturally and spontaneously; therein is the explanation of his exceptional
life's work. […] Style; which Schönberg defines as "the quality of a work," is
based upon "natural conditions expressing him who produced it.” It is an
expression of the integrity of the composer, and an index of the authenticity
of its aesthetic qualities.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 127)


“he resembled Hanslick also in detesting all composition which aimed at
effects of a kind other than musical; both Hanslick and Schönberg felt only
scorn for Wagner's racist romanticism, and for the personal cult with which
Wagner surrounded himself. […] “In music," Schönberg wrote, "there is no form
without logic, there is no logic without unity"; and he considered that Wagner
was performing a great service to music in making the first conscious attempt
to unify opera from within the musical score, independently of the action on
the stage. Mozart and other great opera composers had done this
unconsciously, but Wagner's was the first explicit effort to formulate a
principle by which it might be accomplished.” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p.
123)


“Schönberg was a many-sided and self-taught genius. Quite aside from his music
and music theory, he was also a first-rate painter and a member of the Blaue
Reiter group of Expressionists […].” (Janik and Toulmin, 1973, p. 119)