THE IMPLICIT PHILOSOPHER Hugo Von Hofmannsthal in the Tradition of German Philosophy

THE IMPLICIT PHILOSOPHER Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the tradition of German Philosophy

Carl Tertio Druml The Implicit Philosopher Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the Tradition of German Philosophy

June 2015

Author: Carl Tertio Druml 10223649 Philosophy: Thesis for the Degree of Master of Arts Universiteit van Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. Elsbeth Brouwer Second Reader: Dr. Michiel van Lambalgen

Abstract

For people familiar with the oeuvre of the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) it may seem like a strange thesis to call him a philosopher. He was a poet, a playwright, a librettist, and an essay writer: but a philosopher? In this thesis, I investigate the counter-tradition of Ger- man philosophy, as brought forth by philosophers such as J.G. Herder and F. Schlegel, and their philosophy of language. After discussing some of Hof- mannsthal’s contemporary Viennese philosophers (for example, F. Mauth- ner) and writers (for example A. Schnitzler), I will place Hugo von Hof- mannsthal in this counter tradition. Especially in his essayistic work and diaries, we can find a plethora of evidence, that shows that Hofmannsthal was not only mindful to problems of language, he was also - if not a first-tier thinker - definitely in the second row of philosophy of language. As a literary figure, his works feature an often more belletristic-aesthetic, yet his oeuvre is definitely one of the most interesting accounts of (literary) investigation of the boundaries of language, and can be seen as partly anticipating later philosophers, for example Ludwig Wittgenstein. Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The “Implicit Philosopher” and his Origin 3 2.1 HerderandHamann-ReactiontoKant ...... 3 2.2 Humboldt and Schlegel - Romantic Conception of Language . . . . 9 2.3 Nietzsche-EthicsandLanguage...... 15

3 Fin de Si`ecle Vienna and Language 20 3.1 Mauther and Mach - Philosophy and Science ...... 21 3.2 Bahr and Kraus - Cultural and Social Critique ...... 27 3.3 JungWienandSprachskepsis ...... 30

4 Hugo von Hofmannsthal 34 4.1 Hofmannsthal’sPhilosophyofLanguage ...... 35 4.1.1 Ein Brief -PhilosophyofLanguage...... 45 4.1.2 Der Schwierige -SilenceandParole...... 48 4.2 Hofmannsthal’sGeneralPhilosophy ...... 51

5 Conclusive Remarks 56

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Dr. Elsbeth Brouwer for her supervision with my thesis, her excellent feedback on my writing, and her suggestions for further readings. My warmest thanks also to Prof. Dr. Michiel van Lambalgen for agreeing to be the second reader. Additionally I would like to thank Arian Lehner for the design of the cover. Lastly I would like to thank Mag. Michael Berthold for getting me acquainted with the topic in the ﬁrst place.

i 1 Introduction

Sprechen ist ein ungeheurer Kompromiss

- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 20.20.1921

While the quote above fits the topic of this thesis perfectly: constructing the Hofmannsthal the Artist language philosophy of Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), I should start it o↵ with a contradiction: Hofmannsthal was no philosopher. He was not a philosopher, but an artist. His body and soul strived into the artistic domain, from his first poems in his tender teenage years, to his most mature work, the play der Turm, nothing can be said with more certainty than this: Hofmannsthal was an artist. One only has to consider the poetry of his youth, which was never the poetry of ayoungperson,1 or his oeuvre for the stage, which goes from poetic-lyrical plays to blunt comedies and into sublime opera-librettos; one has to read his almost mythological short stories, or the flamboyantly colored essayistic work, which has perhaps no equal in the German language. The conclusion will always be the same: Hofmannsthal could have never expressed anything outside the aesthetic form.

Hofmannsthal’s contemporary Otto Weininger wrote that there are no new Art and Philosophy philosophical or artistic ideas, because both of them are timeless,2 and exactly this is where the solution to the paradox lies: Hofmannsthal was so much an artist, that his artistic ideas crossed back into the philosophic realm. Any aesthetic inquiry into the soul of the world will, if it goes deep enough, necessarily be a philosophical investigation. In his gorgeous collection of aphorisms, the Buch der Freunde, Hofmannsthal asserts that “Das Plastische entsteht nicht durch Schauen, sondern durch Identifikation”3 which goes right into the core of the matter. According to Hofmannsthal you could not form a three dimensional opinion about any object by mere observation: only through identification can we achieve recognition. Hof- mannsthal was therefore not a mere thinker, philosophy is not a precise term for his inquiries; he identified with every matter always as an artist. Yet the dusty wooden banalities of our every day can come to life in the eye of the artist! Hofmannsthal managed to describe the lure of the cinema in the bleakest tones, to paint the “prehistoric” mountains of Austria in the most vivid color, and more than one of his discussions of other writers is actually more plea- surable to read than the very authors he discussed. As a writer and retired poet, however, one of the topics of the utmost importance to him remained the question

1“Hofmannsthal (hat) niemals, nicht einmal in den ersten Gedichten, wirkliche Jugendlyrik geschrieben (...).” Hermann Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (München: R. Piper & Co, 1964) p.149. 2See chapter quote of section 2 for the full quote. Otto Weininger, “Die Kultur und ihr Verhältnis zum Glauben”, Uber¨ die letzten Dinge (Wien, Osterreich:¨ Matthes und Seitz, 1904) p.118. 3Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Buch der Freunde [1922]”, Reden und Aufsätze III: 1925-1929, Aufzeichnungen, ed. Bernd Schoeller, Ingeborg Beyer-Ahlert, and Rudolf Hirsch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1980) p.292.

1 of the possibilities and boundaries of language. Hofmannsthal proved there, with his fondness for identification and immersion, that his thoughts surpassed mere aesthetic consideration by far. He already asked questions in his adolescence, that would only reach philosophical mainstream half a century later! Therefore Her- mann Broch called Hofmannsthal’s essayistic work his “philosophisches Tagebuch im Ereignis des Daseins”.4 But also the artist, and especially one as mindful to the tradition as he was must have been influenced by other writers and philosophers! This is also where the essay will start: there exists a German counter-tradition in philosophy, that demanded a philosophical language which is closer to a natural or artistic way of writing - this thesis will explain why Hofmannsthal was the epitome of such a development. At the same time, inquiries into the nature of language have a strong tradition in the German-speaking world: the second topic of interest is to reconstruct the material that must have influenced Hofmannsthal’s view of language and critique thereof.

The Struc- The remainder of this thesis will, therefore, be structured as follows: in sec- ture of this Work tion (2), I will explore the philosophical underpinnings that Hofmannsthal and his contemporaries built upon. It will be structured in a chronological way, with section (2.1) discussing the early language philosophy and opposition to Kant of the philosophers J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Section (2.2) will investigate the Romantic extension to the system by W. von Humboldt and F. Schlegel. F. Ni- etzsche’s view on language and subjectivity will be discussed in section (2.3). In section (3.1) we will have arrived in Hofmannsthal’s time with a discussion of his contemporaries F. Mauthner and E. Mach and their inﬂuence. Section (3.2) will introduce the famous cultural and social critics H. Bahr and K. Kraus and their impact on the (literary) contemporaries, who will be discussed in section (3.3), this section will prove to be a literary overview, and provide reasons why Hugo von Hofmannsthal should be awarded a special place within the group of Austrian Sprachskepsis-writers. The third part of the thesis, the actual discussion of Hof- mannsthal, starts in section (4). His philosophy of language will be dissected in section (4.1) and will receive special scrutiny through a discussion of his major works Ein Brief (section 4.1.1) and the play Der Schwierige (section 4.1.2). Sec- tion (4.2) explicates some di↵erent, non-analytical, aspects of his philosophy. The essay concludes in section (5).

4Broch p.148.

2 2 The “Implicit Philosopher” and his Origin

Es gibt keine neuen philosophischen Gedanken, ebenso wie es keine neuen künstlerischen Themen gibt. Das liegt aber daran, daß Philosoph und Künstlerals Individualitätenzeitlos sind, aus ihrer Zeit nie zu begreifen und mit ihr nie zu entschuldigen. Im Philosophen und Künstler liegt Ewigkeit.

-OttoWeininger,Die Kultur und ihr Verh¨altniszum Glauben, p.118

Just as science and philosophy were once indicated by the word philosophy Implicit Philosophy alone, as scientiﬁc texts once read just like philosophical tractates (and of course as philosophical tractates were seen as scientiﬁc ones), there must have always been a counter-tendency to conjoin art and philosophy, to create texts of high philosophical - and aesthetic - value. Vienna in 1900, the city of decadence and art pour l’art par excellence might be the epitome of such movements. The literary Sprachskepsis movement radicalized the philosophical ideas about language that the Romantic philosophers had advocated for, scientists wrote in aestheticizing styles and all came together in bringing forward a notion of subjectivity heightened to its extreme. Philosophy of language, the language of philosophers and questions of subjectivity are the triad of questions that had been around for a long time in the German tradition, and will also serve as the basis for the further investigation. This tendency to conjoin art and philosophy did not originate in the Romantics, but in the times of the German enlightenment, and as many other movements, one might even see Kant as its initiator (even if for negative reasons).

2.1 Herder and Hamann - Reaction to Kant Die Philosophie besteht darin, daß es gar keine Philosophie geben soll, sondern nur Aufkl¨arung.

-FriedrichSchleiermacher,5

In the introduction to his first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,Kantwrites Reactions to Kant that eventually he discarded the idea to illustrate his philosophy by using examples, for they are “nur in populärer Absicht notwendig”.6 The real connoisseur of sciences does not need such an aid. This is exactly what philosophers like Johann Gottfried Herder or Johann Georg Hamann criticized: philosophy should not be a scientific system which can only be understood by a small group, but rather a system to educate everyone.

5Friedrich Schleiermacher, quote retrieved through: Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit [1931], 17th ed. (M¨unchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, C.H.Beck, 2011) p.684. 6Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [1787], ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Werkausgab (Suhrkamp, 1968) A XIX.

3 Herder’s Uni- Interestingly, “Kant himself tended to identify with Popularphilosophie”, as versal Philos- 7 ophy Forster points out, but soon relinquished easy understanding for philosophical rigor and systematicity. Herder especially opposed the new direction of his old mentor and established a “counter tradition in German philosophy”,8 which sought to relinquish incomprehensible sophistic systems and make human beings the center of philosophy.9 Herder’s falling out with methodic philosophy, however, did not evolve in reaction to Kant itself, but is already developed in early writings such as How Philosophy can become more Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People from 1765.10 In this prize essay, Herder investigates the possibilities of using philosophy for the benefit of the people and endorses some highly modern ideas for his time.11 At the same time, Herder criticizes the systematic philosopher with his system, sitting in an ivory tower, detached from the world. For philosophy to be fruitful for the masses, the philosophers should make the people the center of their investigation, not just some abstract systems.12 This can be achieved by two things: firstly, philosophers should not remain in libraries, surrounded by books, but they should live with farmers in the countryside and live the way of (the, then, majority) of the population. Secondly, philosophers should abdicate from specialized language, but use the everyday language of the people.13 Herder pursued this kind of philosophy for most his life, and he, for example, expounded it in his fragments Uber¨ die neuere Deutsche Litteratur:

Alle Bücher, die in der Welt von Gegenständen, Verrichtungen und Vorfällen zu Hause gehören, in welcher der gemeine Mann lebt, können sich nicht in einer neuen Sprache brüsten, oder sie werden lächerlich, unverständlich und unnütz.14

Literature, like philosophy, should use the language of the people it is written for, otherwise it will not only be hard to understand, but it might even be outright useless. Yet looking at what was written in his time, Herder endorsed a rather bleak outlook:

7Michael N. Forster, After Herder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) p.14. 8p.12 9Johann Gottfried Herder, “How Philosophy can become more Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People [1765]”, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Forster (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2004) p.21. 10And hence published 16 years before the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 11For example his view on women’s education; p.21, p.26 Herder, “How Philosophy can become more Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People [1765]”. 12Herder, “How Philosophy can become more Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People [1765]” p.21. 13p.19 14My emphasis. Herder actually references to aesthetics and philosophy in this quote, rather then simply to literature. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur. Frag- mente, als Beilagen zu den Briefen, die neueste Litteratur betre↵end. Dritte Sammlung (Riga: Hartknoch, 1767) p.55.

4 Nun gehe man nach diesem Gesichtspunkte die Wochenschriften,die Erbauungsbücher,diePredigten durch, alles soll fürden gemeinen Mann sein, und wenig ist für ihn.15

Essentially, Herder was criticizing the same phenomenon that we can observe nowadays; in order to sound smarter or have a more rigid system, scholars assumed that asystematiclanguageisnecessary,wheneverydaylanguagecouldsuce.16

But Herder not only occupied himself with an appropriate use of language in Herder’s Philosophy philosophy; he also had a tremendous interest in (and influence on) philosophy of of Language language itself: some scholars even call him the “founder of modern philosophy of language”.17 While contemporary philosophers, such as the British Empiricists, considered thought and language as (in theory) separable, Herder endorsed a con- flicting view: thought and language are interconnected and dependent on one another:18 “Seele und [...] Sprache sind zwo Schwestern, in Gesellschaft erzogen, zu einander gewöhnt, und unabtrennbar[...]”.19 Without language there can be no thought. While the empiricists considered language to be a spontaneous product of the impressions we receive, for Herder it was much more of an organic product of our nation and surroundings. We could not invent language, for this would mean that we had to cross a “böhmischen Wald”20 of di↵erent means of communication, before we arrived at out own language. Our own language, however, is a development over ages, and it comes with its own worldview.21 Every language imprints in us a matter of thinking, and this leads to a problem in hermeneutics: for us to understand a text in a di↵erent language, according to Herder, we need to understand every word in its original context and all the possible references of the word. In short we can never disregard the history of the language.22 This focus on the history of language, so to say, is another point that Herder disagreed on with his old mentor Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason,Kant tried to expound the workings of the mind on an absolute basis, by solely focusing on our perception and the representations we receive. He did so while ignoring the workings of language at the same time. Herder, like Hamann (see further

15Herder, Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur. Fragmente, als Beilagen zu den Briefen, die neueste Litteratur betre↵end. Dritte Sammlung p.60. 16This is something that even other philosophers, like Schopenhauer who was much indebted to Kant’s theories, criticized in Kant: Kant used many stilted words for seeming rigor, even though contemporary words would have suced. Schopenhauer gives an example with the terms: “transcendentale synthetische Einheit der Apperception” and “Einheit der Synthesis”, and asserts that they could have easily been replaced by “Vereinigung”. Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [1819], ed. Arthur H¨ubscher (K¨oln: Anaconda, 2009) p.377. 17Forster p.55. 18Ibid. 19Herder, Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur. Fragmente, als Beilagen zu den Briefen, die neueste Litteratur betre↵end. Dritte Sammlung p.52. 20p.50 21As Foster expounds. Forster p.64↵f. 22Forster p.65.

5 down), opposed a construction of reason which did not incorporate language and the history of meanings. When we developed our mental capacities further, we also developed a language for expression:

Je mehr sich die Gegenstände erweitern, die Menschlichen Geisteskräfte sich entwickeln, desto mehr ersterben die Fähigkeiten der sinnlichen Thierseele. Die Ausbreitung der Wißenschaften verengert die Künste, die Ausbildung der Poetik die Poesie; endlich haben wir Regeln, statt Poetischer Empfindungen; wir borgen Reste aus den Alten, und die Dichtkunst ist todt!23

Thus, in order to get to know thought and our development better, it is also important to invest oneself in linguistic history. Since thought is dependent on (the) language (we speak), the implications for literature are also important. A literary person should not tarnish his thoughts and emotions with a language not beﬁtting the task:

[S]o wird für den, der meistens aus dieser Quelle schöpfen muß, für den, der gleichsam der Oberherr dieser Sphäregewesen, [...] fürihn, muß der Gedanke zum Ausdrucke sich verhalten, nicht wie der Körper zur Haut, die ihn umziehet; sondern wie die Seele zum Körper, den sie bewohnet: und so ists für den Dichter.24

To expound his point by paraphrasing Herder’s words: His contemporaries mis- understood language, because they treated is more as the clothing of the thought. They assumed the thought needs beautiful garbs, while lavish clothes actually corrupt thinking. One reason for this is that more natural language is closer to our feelings. Herder defines a primeval form of language; the language of emotion: “Es gibt [...] eine Sprache der Empfindung, die unmittelbares Naturgesetzt ist”.25 As humans evolved from animals, their language evolved necessarily with the development of their cognitive capacities, as evidenced from the quote above. The poet can be more truthful to thought, by keeping the development of language in mind, and, by not trying to invent a new (system for his) language. The last point, however, also has di↵erent implications: our primeval language, as a language of emotions and development, is necessarily a very subjective language. Everybody can feel only their own emotions (and often not even guess the others’ emotions), therefore a language that will stay true to one’s feelings, will be better at conveying one’s own subjectivity than a scientific language, which is at

23Johann Gottfried Herder, “Fragmente einer Abhandlung über die Ode [1764]”, Herders Sämmtliche Werke 32, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidemann, 1899) p.69. 24Herder, Ueber die neuere Deutsche Litteratur. Fragmente, als Beilagen zu den Briefen, die neueste Litteratur betre↵end. Dritte Sammlung p.65. 25This sentence is all in emphasis in the original. Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache [1772] (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1997) p.6.

6 best of “glänzende Trockenheit”.26 This means that a poet who writes in a natural way, will also have an approach to writing that will stay more truthful to himself, and the entire language-community that he stems from, than a scholar who tries to achieve neutral language. When historically-mindful language is more subjective, invented, systematic language àla Kant, necessarily is its artificial analogue, since it disregards the linguistic preferences of the subject and tries to be outside tradition.

If Herder represents the tame bookmannish opposition to “systematic” philosophy, Johann 27 Georg then Johann Georg Hamann represents his irrational brother in arms. Hamann Hamann wrote in a dark nebulous style, using a cornucopia of obscure references to contemporaries (that often do not make much sense anymore nowadays) and to ancient literature, philosophy, and scripture. His writings made him become known as apioneerofasubjectivesensualistirrationalism,28 and later philosophers would have conﬂicting views on Hamann, such as Hegel who characterized reading him with a “Bewußtsein der Achtung und der Ungenießbarkeit”.29

J.G. Hamann’s philosophy of language, however, is easily characterized despite Hamann’s Philosophy the “Ungenießbarkeit” of his writings: language and thought cannot be separated. of Language In 1784, for example, he wrote in a letter to Herder:

Wenn ich auch so beredt wäre wie Demosthenes, so würde ich doch nicht mehr als ein einziges Wort dreimal wiederholen müssen: Vernunft ist Sprache - oo&. An diesem Markknochen nage ich und werde mich zu Tode darüber nagen.30

In the same year, he also wrote a critique of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,the Metakritik ¨uber den Purismus der Vernunft. Here he attacked Kant’s construction of pure reason as fallacious in that it ignores the means of language that underly actual reason:

Nicht nur das ganze Vermögen zu denken beruht auf Sprache, [...] sondern Sprache ist auch der Mittelpunct des Missverstandes der Vernunft mit ihr selbst,theilswegenderhäufigenCoincidenzdesgrößtenund kleinsten Begri↵s, seiner Leere und Fülle in idealischen Sätzen, theils wegen des unendlichen der Rede- vor den Schlußfiguren, und dergle- ichen viel mehr.31 26As Schopenhauer calls Kant’s style of writing. In Schopenhauer p. 376. 27Texts that deal with both thinkers usually put them in a relation to each other - one influ- encing the other - as I am not a specialist on either, I will simply present them as contemporary thinkers with similar thoughts and di↵erent techniques. 28Josef Simon, “Einleitung zu J.G.Hamanns Schriften zur Sprache”, Schriften zur Sprache,ed. Hans Blumenberg et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967) p.10. 29G.W.F. Hegel, retrieved through: Simon p.10. 30J.G.Hamann letter to Herder, retrieved through: Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902], 3rd ed. (Stuttgart und Berlin: J.G. Cotta, 1921) p.178. 31Language as the center of misunderstanding is a notion that I will discuss a bit further

7 Hamann faults Kant for using language in order to create a system which should precede language. Hamann maintained that Kant’s system, and his whole understanding of reason, derives from his language. A system of thought, according to the critique on Kant’s critical philosophy, necessarily needs to be a system of language.

Hamann As language and thought are the same thing for Hamann, it is absurd to create and the Language of adi↵erentschemeoflanguageforphilosophy: Philosophers [V]erarbeitet durch diesen gelehrten Unfug die Biderkeit der Sprache in ein so sinnloses, läufiges, unstätes, unbestimmtes Etwas = x, daß nichts als ein windiges Sausen, ein magisches Schattenspiel, höchstens [...] der Talisman und Rosenkranz eines transcendentalen Aberglaubens an entia rationis, ihre leere Schläuche und Losung übrigbleibt.32 Language should not be used in a specialized jargon, but the tradition has to be embraced to generate more understanding: An Philosophie lohnt es garnicht der Mühe zu bedenken; desto mehr systematische Kalender! - mehr als Spinnenweben in einem verstörten Schlosse.33 Especially the usage of general terms was an issue for Hamann: Für Leser von orthodoxem Geschmack gehören keine gemeine Ausdrücke noch unreine Schüsseln - - Impossibilissimum est, communia proprie dicere - Siehe! darum geschieht es, daß ein Autor, dessen Geschmack acht Tage alt, aber beschnitten ist, lauter weißen überzogenen Entian - zur Ehre menschlicher Nothdurft - in die Windeln thut.34 For Hamann, general terms, the vocabulary of the philosopher, were comparable to a dirty bowl that gets filled up with the intellectual droppings of the writers. All these problems can easily be circumvented: The optimal usage of language is one that stays true to the original meaning of words, and indefectible writings are literary, for “Poesie ist die Muttersprache des menschlichen Geschlechts”.35 Therefore, Hamann usually coupled his writings on philosophy of language with aesthetic and literary ideas.36 Simultaneously, words should be analyzed especially in their literary (and religious) meanings, since “myth and metaphor”37 are the true origins of meaning rather than abstract philosophical texts. down. Johann Georg Hamann, “Metakritik über den Purismus der Vernunft [1784]”, Schriften zur Sprache, ed. Hans Blumenberg et al., 1st ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967) p.224. 32p.223 33Johann Georg Hamann, “Aesthetica in Nuce [1760]”, Schriften zur Sprache, ed. Hans Blum- berg et al., 1st ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967) p.115. 34p.111 35p.107 36p.26 Simon ; this is also a method that we will see again in Schlegel (section 2.2) and Hofmannsthal (section 4). 37Jonathan Gray, “Hamann, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein on the Language of Philosophers”, Hamann and the Tradition, ed. Lisa Marie Anderson (Northwestern University Press, 2012) p.109.

8 With his fondness for the metaphoric, it should be apparent that Hamann also objected to rigid methods of hermeneutics: everybody should keep to their subjective understanding. In his Aesthetica in Nuce,hewritesthat“diegroße und kleine Masore38 der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur, gleich einer Sünd- fluth, überschwemmt”.39 Language essentially is ambiguity, which should not be changed. Here the “center of misunderstanding” as evidenced by the quote above40 also comes back; just because systematic language is used, ambiguity cannot be abolished, therefore, the systems are solely unnatural,or,asheputsitinhis Metakritik: the “ästhetische Lüge [transcendentaler Schriften]”.41,42

With Kant, Herder and Hamann, German philosophy had changed for ever; Kant The Counter- tradition published his Critique of Pure Reason,theﬁrstmajorphilosophicalworkinGer- man language,43 which bred a plethora of reactions and further investigations in systematic philosophical language. Herder and Hamann established the counter tradition, one where literature, language and thought would be closely intertwined; where reason would be a development, not an absolute system like in Kant. Lan- guage, as the driving factor of thought, should not be altered for more clarity, but embraced. A constructed system could never capture our true inner thoughts nor express them in any way. Within the next decades, philosophers would advance the philosophy of language both in systematic ways, like Wilhelm von Humboldt, or through aesthetic critique, like Friedrich Schlegel.

2.2 Humboldt and Schlegel - Romantic Conception of Lan- guage

In die Bildung und in den Gebrauch der Sprache geht [...] die ganze Art der subjektiven Wahrnehmung der Gegenst¨ande¨uber.

- Wilhelm von Humboldt, Uber¨ die Verschiedenheit [...] p.58

With the nineteenth century, there seemed to have dawned an era of language The Roman- tics and Lan- studies for Germany; Herder had already laid foundations to ﬁelds such as analyt- guage ical philosophy, hermeneutics and translation, and now the subsequent generation expanded on these accomplishments by founding comparative language studies

38Masore is the Rabbinical ﬁxing of the meaning of the biblical writings. Hamann uses it here as a symbol for positivistic systems that annihilate ambiguity of language. Simon p.238. 39Hamann, “Aesthetica in Nuce [1760]” p.117. 40See the quote on page 7. 41Hamann, “Metakritik ¨uber den Purismus der Vernunft [1784]” p.218. 42Hamann also seemed to follow a di↵erent agenda with his critique of language; often his obscure references are directed against the (socio-political) system, Hamann apparently tried to oppose the social leveling within the state by attacking the leveling of language through the philosopher, for if we can change the usage of language, we can change the people within. 43Simon p.262.

9 through Friedrich Schlegel, Indogermanic studies through Franz Bopp and Ger- man philology through Jacob Grimm.44 While di↵erent forms of language studies became more and more established as separate ﬁelds, philosophers also took a bigger interest in the workings of language and its interplay with thought.

Wilhelm von Wilhelm von Humboldt was one of the 19th century homini universalis: He was Humboldt adiplomat,aneducator,andanexploreramongotherprofessions.Atthesame time, one of his main interests lay in the nature of language, as he even mentioned in a letter: Im Grunde ist alles, was ich treibe, Sprachstudium. Ich glaube die Kunst entdeckt zu haben, die Sprache als ein Vehikel zu gebrauchen, um das Höchste und Tiefste und die Mannigfaltigkeit der ganzen Welt zu durchfahren.45 Humboldt was the first who postulated an interdisciplinary approach to language studies.46 He left behind a tremendous body of work on languages, yet, for the revolutionary system of language that he had in mind, his own mind was to unsystematic and flaky.47

Humboldt’s Especially from his last major work, Uber¨ die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Philosophy 48 of Language Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, we can read that Humboldt actually had a system of transcendental-language philosophy in mind.49 When Kant defined space and time as the objective prerequisites for empirical cognition, but at the same time determined by our subjective selves; Humboldt did the same for human language: “Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedanken”.50 This means that, according to him, we cannot separate thought and language. At the same time, however, since the world of representations can deceive us, and we are bound to language for our interpretation of reality, we even have to perceive it as something which is external to us.51 In his view of language he partly anticipated Chomsky, claiming that there is a di↵erence between (universal) Language and (ethnic, or even personal) language: Denn so wundervoll ist in der Sprache die Individualisierung innerhalb der allgemeinen Ubereinstimung¨ ,daßmanebensorichtigsagenkann, 44Michael Böhler, “Nachwort zu Humboldts Schriften zur Sprache”, Schriften zur Sprache,ed. Michael Böhler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995) p.236. 451805, letter to Wolf, retrieved through: Böhler p.234. 46Böhler p.237. 47In the postscript to his works, it is called a tendency for the unfinished. Böhler p.229. 48Which is the perfect example for his unsystematic way of working, his tendency for the unfinished: it is, despite being considered his major work on language, namely solely the introduction to another work of his. 49Jochem Hennigfeld, “Sprache als Weltansicht”, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 3.30 (1976): p.436. 50Wilhelm von Humboldt, Uber¨ die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einflußauf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1836) p.50. 51Von Humboldt p.53.

10 daß das ganze Menschengeschlecht nur Eine Sprache, als daß jeder Men- sch eine besondere besitzt.52 The universal qualities of language are innate, but they are activated in di↵erent ways by di↵erent languages.53 This di↵erent activation, however, is also where Humboldt’s and Chomsky’s views part ways; Chomsky would say that all languages retain the architecture of the mind, i.e. that there is only one overarching grammatical structure. Humboldt, on the other hand, would agree to some initial cognitive makeup of the mind, yet this is completely molded by the language we ﬁrst acquire, and it retains the structure of our ﬁrst language, even if we learn another one.54

While some may take such a mental, a priori-ist, representation of language to Subjectivity and say that language is an entity with objective value, Humboldt would disagree. Of Objectivity course, as mentioned above, there is the architecture of our mind which is Lan- guage, but even within nations, there are tremendous di↵erences between speakers. Humboldt even goes as far as asserting: [D]ie Individualität einer Sprache [...] [ist] auch nur vergleichungsweise eine solche [...] die wahre Individualität [liegt] nur in dem jedesmal Sprechenden.55 Every speaker speaks a di↵erent language: “Erst im Individuum erhält die Sprache ihre letzte Bestimmtheit.”56 This may sound like Humboldt would oppose Wittgen- stein’s private language argument, claiming that there is indeed a certain subjectivity to language which can never fully be translated, but such a reading is not correct. Humboldt asserted before: In der Erscheinung entwickelt sich jedoch die Sprache nur gesellschaftlich, und der Mensch versteht sich selbst nur, indem er die Verstehbarkeit seiner Worte an Andren versuchend geprüft hat.57 Yes, every person has their own language, but they also need communication to make their own language work. Language essentially is the interplay of subjectivity and objectivity: Die Sprache ist gerade insofern objectiv einwirkend und selbstständig, als sie subjectiv gewirkt und abhängigist.58 For Humboldt, the language is an objective vessel, that we fill our subjectivity into. Our subjectivity comes from our personal understanding and emotions in an objective language. Our subjectivity heightens the objectivity. 52Von Humboldt p.47. 53Von Humboldt p.56f. 54See chapter Natur und Bescha↵enheit der Sprache überhaupt (p.48↵f) in von Humboldt. 55Von Humboldt p.64. 56Von Humboldt p.64. 57Von Humboldt p.53. 58Von Humboldt p.63.

11 Translation Humboldt already spoke of a distinction between the subjectivity of the private language and its dichotomy with the shared language. This disparity essentially expresses itself in problems of hermeneutics:

Alles Verstehen ist daher immer zugleich ein Nicht-Verstehen, alle Ubere-¨ instimmung in Gedanken und Gef¨uhlen zugleich ein Auseinanderge- hen.59

Meaning that language is a duality between understanding and misunderstanding; we will always understand each other to a certain extent, but never fully. If we consider, not translation between people, but between languages, they are similar enough so there will always be some general understanding, but at the same time, they di↵er in that they express the inner character of a people:

Die Sprache ist gleichsam die ¨außerliche Erscheinung des Geistes der V¨olker; ihre Sprache ist ihr Geist und ihr Geist die Sprache, man kann sich beide nie identisch genug denken.60

The pedantic soul of the pedantic German is expressed through his language, therefore, if we learned the German language, we can become more German.

Nation and Nations are similar, because their Language-facilities have been inﬂuenced by Language their surroundings, and the perception of their surroundings was later reinforced by their language.61 Humboldt asserts that our world view is completely and utterly molded by our language, and as in the quote mentioned above, there is always misunderstanding in language, for we can never evoke the same images with other people.62 Language essentially is subjectivity:

In die Bildung und in den Gebrauch der Sprache geht aber nothwendig die ganze Art der subjektiven Wahrnehmung der Gegenst¨ande¨uber.63

Due to the di↵erences between the world-views that are created by language, there can never be one ﬁnal philosophy, i.e. all philosophies are bound by language and therefore a German will create di↵erent philosophical systems as a Frenchman. The special place that language is awarded in Humboldt’s system is that it can possibly prove philosophical ideas. His ﬁrst biographer Rudolf Haym claimed that Humboldt’s study of language was an attempt to give evidence for Kant’s critical philosophy through the structure of language.64 If concepts such as the “pure intu- itions” time and space, as Kant calls them, have a preponderance even in language,

59Von Humboldt p.64. 60My emphasis. von Humboldt p.37. 61“Der Form steht freilich ein Sto↵ gegenüber; um aber den Sto↵der Sprachform zu finden, muß man über die Gränzen der Sprache hinausgehen.” von Humboldt p.45. 62“Denn das Wort entsteht eben aus dieser Wahrnehmung, ist nicht ein Abdruck des Gegen- standes an sich, sonder des von diesem in der Seele erzeugten Bildes.” von Humboldt p.58. 63Von Humboldt p.58. 64Rudolf Haym, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Lebensbild und Charakteristik (Berlin: Verlag von Rudolph Gaertner, 1856) p.446↵f.

12 then the study of language, and only this study, will be able to tell us something objective about human nature. Since literature will become an important tool for the communication of philosophical ideas for some of the ﬁgures discussed further below, it may be interesting to also consider the tacit implications of Humboldt’s theories for literature. Lan- guage grants a strange duality between objectivity of the thing, and subjectivity of the person.65 Nowadays, one can often read (popular) articles that claim reading literature increases our empathy, and I believe that Humboldt is, aside Herder, one of the ﬁrst who would have made such a claim. As we read a book, we can increase our own vantage point, by being introduced into the subjective worlds of other people. This happens, because we delve into the world of thought of either an individual who wrote in our language, or of the collective world of thought of a di↵erent language.

When Humboldt was the scientist, investigating the nature of psychology and Friedrich Schlegel language, Friedrich Schlegel was the aesthetician who, in the tradition of Hamann, combined literary and language studies. According to Schlegel, in real, artistically valuable prose everything would have to be underlined.66 This is the case, because the ideal piece of literature is a combination of literature, science and philosophy. In one of his Athen¨aum-fragments, Schlegel even writes:

Vermischte Gedanken sollten die Kartons der Philosophie sein. Man weiß, was diese den Kennern der Malerei gelten. Wer nicht philosophische Welten mit dem Crayon skizziren, jeden Gedanken, der Physiog- nomie hat, mit ein paar Federstrichen charakterisieren kann, f¨ur den wird die Philosophie nie Kunst, und also auch nie Wissenschaft werden. Denn in der Philosophie geht der Weg zur Wissenschaft nur durch die Kunst, wie der Dichter im Gegenteil erst durch Wissenschaft ein K¨unstlerwird.67

Philosophy can only be attained by the artist. Everybody else is simply creating Potemkin-like cities of thought without any content.

The artist can attain more, because the (Romantic) poetry, for example, is Art and Philosophy “always in progress toward the unconditional highest”,68 i.e. poetry is always a process, while systems lead to stagnation:

65This is the case, because we subjectively use terms for the appearances in the world, rather than having objective terms for the things-in-themselves: “Denn die Sprache stellt niemals die Gegenstände, sondern immer die durch den Geist in der Spracherzeugung selbstthätg von ihnen gebildeten Begri↵e dar.” in: von Humboldt p.96. 66“In wahrer Prosa, muß alles unterstrichen sein.” Friedrich Schlegel, ”Athenäums”-Fragmente und andere Schriften [1798], ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2005) p.128. 67My emphasis. I believe thatWissenschaft is, in this context, rather referring to the humanities (history, philology and a systematized idealism) than natural sciences. Schlegel p.113. 68Friedrich Schlegel, Uber¨ das Studium griechischer Poesie, retrieved through: H. Jackson Forstman, “The Understanding of Language by Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher”, Sound- ings: An Interdisciplinary Journal Vol. 51, 2.2 (1968): p.153.

13 Es ist gleich tödlich für den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also wohl entschließen müssen, beides zu verbinden.69 The problem with a system, however, is that it can never be absolute according to Schlegel.70 The Romantic philosopher can also be like a romantic poem; one that philosophizes as a process, rather than in a system: Man kann nur Philosoph werden, nicht es sein. Sobald man es zu sein glaubt, hörtman auf es zu werden.71 One should not think in systems, because it kills creativity, yet a system is necessary in order to form thought. In the same way that the stagnation had been overcome in the political world by the French revolution, Schlegel expected a similar aesthetic-revolution,thatwould rejoin subjectivity and objectivity,72 by lifting the boundaries between philosophy, religion, science and art.73 In this post-revolutionary world, every work of art would be a work of philosophy, science etc.. Therefore, while Schlegel advocated for a more artistically driven philosophy, to bring about this revolution, he also tried to establish a poetics that would lead to a philosophication of art: “[Der romantischen Poesie] Ihre Bestimmung ist [...] die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührungzu setzten”.74 The optimal art, in analogy with the optimal philosophy, would be one that could express philosophical ideas while being beautiful: Der dichtende Philosoph, der philosophierende Dichter ist ein Prophet. Das didaktische Gedicht sollte prophetisch sein, und hat auch Anlage, es zu werden.75 While the beautiful is central in Schlegel’s philosophy, he seems to contest a notion of absolute truth: Könnte es nicht noch vor der Abfassung der logischen Konstitution eine provisorische Philosophie geben; und ist nicht alle Philosophie provi- sorisch, bis die Konstitution durch die Akzeptation sanktioniert ist?76 Philosophy, and with it our view of the world, is strongly determined through social convention. As a post-Kantian philosopher, he would have argued that truth is unattainable, yet the necessary aim of our intellectual endeavors.77

69Schlegel p.82. 70Friedrich Schlegel, retrieved through: Forstman p.152. 71Schlegel p.82. 72Andreas Huyssen, “Nachwort zu Schlegels ”Athen¨aums”-Fragmenten”, ”Athen¨aums”- Fragmente und andere Schriften, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2005) p.230. 73Ibid. 74Schlegel p.90. 75Schlegel p.107. 76Schlegel p.110. 77Forstman p.153.

14 As for his view on language, Schlegel had a similar construct of language in mind Schlegel’s Philosophy as Humboldt and Hamann: language is what separates animals from humans, and of Language the structure of humanity is to be found in the structure of language.78 The study of philology is, therefore, a science of the utmost importance, for it can tell us a myriad about thought. Philosophy can, in his opinion, only gives us answers, when we also investigated language:

Die einzige Art, die Philologie auf die Philosophie oder, welches noch weit n¨otiger ist, die Philologie auf die Philosophie anzuwenden, ist, wenn man zugleich Philolog und Philosoph ist.79

Schlegel already hinted towards, what in the previous, 20th century had become practically a mainstream position:80 the thought that a fruitful philosophy necessarily has to be a philosophy of language. The image of directionality and motion was important in Schlegel’s general philosophy, and therefore also comes back in his philosophy of language. According to him, humans have a dualistic nature, torn between the finite word that strives towards the infinite, and the infinite spirit that strives towards finiteness. This also means that language which does not embrace this directness is dead. The romantic poem is, as mentioned above, always a development, and it therefore expresses language better, and with it human nature.

The original postulates that had been set up during the enlightenment period Outcomes of the by Herder and Hamann, had developed in the Romantic period. Language and Movement thought were not only much more strongly correlated, but language was even said to be the determining factor of our worldview.

2.3 Nietzsche - Ethics and Language

[Nietzsche] war ein tellurisches Ereignis, nicht bloß sein Volk, nicht bloß den Erdteil, sondern die Erde ersch¨utternd und durch ein langan- dauerndes Beben beunruhigend.

-EgonFriedell,Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit p.1402

In the tradition which has been discussed so far, Nietzsche is, in a sense, the Friedrich Nietzsche odd one out. Considering the quintessential philosopher from the standpoint of some priors, like Herder, Nietzsche did in fact write philosophy in the right way, since he wrote it in a literary style and rather unsystematic. His philosophy is agiantcollectionofaphorismsthathavesomecommonthreadsandare,usually,

78Forstman p.150f. 79Schlegel p.130. 80See, for example section 3.1.

15 collected in thematic ways. Nietzsche even asserts that he despises schemes of organization:81

Ich misstraue allen Systematikern und gehe ihnen aus dem Weg. Der Wille zum System ist ein Mangel aus Rechtscha↵enheit.82

In another spot he writes that the best way to treat a problem is quickly: “[I]ch halte es mit tiefen Problemen, wie mit einem kalten Bade - schnell hinein, schnell hinaus”.83 Therefore, Nietzsche is staying true to Herder’s postulates, for he dealt with important topics in an accessible way, while additionally keeping it brief. Yet, he was also completely unlike Herder in other ways; while the ideal of the enlightenment philosopher Herder was to educate the masses, Nietzsche did not want his philosophy to be understood by everyone. Education is for the few, and he asserts that a broad enlightenment would even destroy thought:

[I]ch hasse die lesenden M¨ussigg¨anger. [...] Dass Jedermann lesen lernen darf, verdirbt auf die Dauer nicht allein das Schreiben, sondern auch das Denken.84

So, while his writing style ﬁtted the ideal of his intellectual forefathers, i.e. he wrote in the literary style that Herder, Schlegel (and especially) Hamann85 would have encouraged, his aim was completely di↵erent, in that it was aimed at a small circle, rather than to educate the masses.86 Herder, Hamann, Humboldt and Schlegel namely advocated for a language that minds history, that is poetic and conveys the real subjectivity of the individual, without trying to be outside of the tradition. Kant’s writing are bad(ly written) for they pretend that an absolute language outside tradition is possible; however someone like Nietzsche writes appealingly, for he minds the tradition (with literary references or references to classics) and still writes philosophy. In their philosophy of language, the aforementioned quartet launched a school of thought that investigated the connection between thought and language. Language was to be seen as the external expression of thought, and thought without language is impossible.

81Some scholars claim this to be an attack at philosophers like Kant or Hegel, and their systems J. Gray p.110f. 82Friedrich Nietzsche, “Götzen-Dämmerung [1888]”, Antichrist - Ecce Homo, Dionysos- Dithyramben und Nietzsche contra Wagner, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, New York: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, de Gruyter, 1967) 1:26. 83Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [1882]”, Morgenröthe,§ Idyllen aus Messina, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 8th ed. (Berlin, New York: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, de Gruyter, 1967) 381. 84Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra [1883]§ , ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, C.H.Beck, 2010) p.41. 85Of course apart from his zealous atheism. 86In his Twilight of the Idols, for example, Nietzsche advanced this thought in chapter Was den Deutschen abgeht, paragraph 5, where he laments the “Niedergang der Deutschen Kultur” because of mass education. Nietzsche, “Götzen-Dämmerung [1888]” p.107f.

16 While the four wrote texts aimed at the study of language, Nietzsche’s unsys- Nietzsche’s Philosophy tematic approach makes it dicult to find one position of pronounced language of Language critique. Only a hand full of aphorisms concerning the use and boundaries of language are to be found in some of his texts. Yet, he already exhibits certain ideas of language skepticism, a view which would become more widely accepted a few decades later in Vienna: Unsäglich mehr [...] liegt [daran], wie die Dinge heissen,alswassie sind. Der Ruf, Name und Anschein, die Geltung, das übliche Maass und Gewicht eines Dinges - im Ursprunge zuallermeist ein Irrthum und eine Willkürlichkeit, den Dingen übergeworfen wie ein Kleid und seinem Wesen und selbst der Haut ganz fremd - ist durch Glauben daran [...] dem Dinge allmählich gleichsam an- und eingewachsen.87 For Nietzsche, language is not God-given, as for Hamann, nor the determining aspect of the psychology, as for Humboldt. According to him, language is the development over decades and words have received their (seemingly necessary) meaning nowadays only because we are used to employing them in that way. While language is determined by its incessant practice, its connections are rather arbitrary with respect to the system used. In Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Nietzsche gives an account of language that seems to anticipate, on one hand the idea of the conceptual scheme,andontheother,Saussure’sdichotomybetween signifié and signifiant. Nietzsche writes: Dass die einzelnen philosophischen Begri↵e nichts Beliebiges, nichts Für-sich-Wachsendes sind, sondern in Beziehung und Verwandtschaft zu einander emporwachsen, dass sie, so plötzlich und willkürlich sie auch in der Geschichte des Denkens anscheinend heraustreten [...] verräth sich zuletzt noch darin, wie sicher die verschiedensten Philosophen ein gewisses Grundschema von möglichen Philosophien immer wieder ausfüllen.88 Already Nietzsche’s vocabulary, and especially the word Grundschema,lendsitself to the the first aspect. Conceptual schemes are “ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation”.89 One might claim that Nietzsche criticizes that di↵erent philosophies always coincide with the same concepts. As if there were x philosophies-in-themselves possible, and our vocabularies always coincide with the one or the other. For the second aspect, it is necessary to stress the first half of the quote, and to explicate the di↵erence that Saussure makes between signifiéand signifiant (and

87Nietzsche, “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [1882]” 58. 88 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse§ [1886]”, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 13th ed. (Berlin, New York: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, de Gruyter, 1967) 20. 89Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual§ Scheme”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973): p.5.

17 only calls their combination the sign). The signifié is the mental representation of an object or concept, independent of the language. The signifiant is the word in our language, the actual sound patterns that evoke the signifié. Saussure introduced these terms in his courses on linguistics to stress that the sound patterns we hear are not to be intrinsically equated to the concepts.90 At the same time, the signifiés and signifiants work as a network of reference: if we consider the two colors blue and white, they each have their own signifiéand signifiant, however, if we would add a word for “light blue”,91 then the network will have to change and the signifiéwill split up in two distinct ones.92 Nietzsche can be read to anticipate this idea when speaking about philosophical vocabularies; there may be philosophical concepts that always remain more or less the same, however, any number of philosophical systems of naming and reference may or may not be equated to them. A more philosophical example would be the English word “love” and the two Greek words ↵↵⇡⌘ (agape, or compassionate love) and ✏⇢!& (eros, or erotic love). While in English both signifiés fall underneath one signifiant, the net of reference is split up in Greek, where you have distinct signifiés for the distinct signifiants.

Morality and If signs are arbitrary, Nietzsche asked the next question: how is (linguistic) Language truth possible? For Nietzsche language use seems to have a moral dimension. Just as not everybody is cut out to read and write (as evidenced from the quote above p.16), our emotions and our sluggishness has led us to be “an’s L¨ugengewohnt”.93 We do not even try to perceive the entirety of a tree, for example, because we ﬁnd it easier to invent (“erdichten”) the majority of our experiences.94 Adequate, truthful language is not our aim, because, as Nietzsche claims, if it were there would never be that many languages in existence.95 Truths are, therefore, just a matter of social convention. In his Genealogie der Moral, Nietzsche claims that the problem with scientists is that “sie glauben noch an die Wahrheit”,96 for anything that wants to explain the world in absolute terms, needs to postulate a notion of absolute truth. Yet, language could never express absolute truths, for, according to Nietzsche, it is an entity of “Schein”.97 Communication is possible because we all collectively succumb to the postulated truths.

Art and One way out of this conundrum seems to be art. Art is a good remedy Philosophy against the groups that postulate truths, because in it, there exists a “Wille zur

90Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill, 1915) p.67. 91As it already exists in many languages: Greek, Russian etc. 92p.120 93Nietzsche, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse [1886]” 192. 94Ibid. § 95Friedrich Nietzsche, Uber¨ Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne (Literary Estate, 1873) p.2. 96Friedrich Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral [1887]”, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 13th ed. (Berlin, New York: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, de Gruyter, 1967) 3:24. 97Hennigfeld p.445. §

18 Täuschung”, and the lie is hallowed.98 In his work Uber¨ Wahrrheit und Lügeim außermoralischen Sinne, Nietzsche even suggests that the origin of language is in poetry. Hence, if there is no truth, and education is for the few, evidence suggests that Nietzsche sets up a hyper-subjectivist philosophy. A philosophy where every person has to make their own truth, and which can be expressed in its most easy (but also most easily corrupted) way through the arts. Finally we can summarize his view on language and truth from his essay Uber¨ Wahrheit und Lügeim außermoralischen Sinne,whichheneverpublished:

Die Wahrheiten sind Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, dass sie welche sind, Metaphern, die abgenutzt und sinnlos kraftlos geworden sind, M¨unzen, die ihr Bild verloren haben und nun als Metall, nicht mehr als M¨unzen, in Betracht kommen.99

Truths are illusions; language cannot convey truth: a standpoint that Fritz Mau- thner picked up later and used for his own theory on language, most notably expressed in his Beitr¨agezu einer Kritik der Sprache.

98Strangely, the word “L¨ugen” he uses gives this passage a rather negative connotation. Niet- zsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral [1887]” 3:25. § 99Nietzsche, Uber¨ Wahrheit und L¨uge im außermoralischen Sinne p.3f.

19 3 Fin de Si`ecle Vienna and Language

Vienna in the ﬁn de si`ecle,with its acutely felt tremors of social and political disintegration, proved one of the most fertile breeding grounds of our [last] century’s a-historical culture. Its great intellectual inno- vators - in music and philosophy, economics and architecture, and, of course, in psychoanalysis - all broke, more or less deliberately, their ties to the historical outlook central to the nineteenth-century liberal culture in which they had been reared.

-CarlE.Schorske,Fin-De-Si`ecleVienna, p. xviii

Wien, Wien Aside from music and politics, Vienna had remained relatively inconspicuous nur du allein... over the past centuries, but suddenly, around the turn of the century, there ap- peared a paradigm shift. The “acutely felt tremors of social and political disintegration” that led to a breaking of “the historical outlook central to the nineteenth- century liberal culture”, as written by Schorske in the introduction to his book Fin-De-Si`ecleVienna,100 also led to a radicalization of a triad of concepts: language of philosophers, philosophy of language and subjectivity.

The In the counter tradition discussed so far, there had been an attempt to establish Tradition Discussed a philosopher that remains mindful to the historical development of language and would not try to invent artificial language systems. This question of the language of philosophers had been advanced so far in the Romantic period, that Friedrich Schlegel demanded a new poetics that would conjoin literature, the humanities, and philosophy. A good philosopher should be a writer with impeccable style, who does not need to compromise on aesthetically pleasing language for more clarity. Herder had questioned the possibility of thought independent of language with his philosophy of language. The later-born philosophers considered the same problems and advanced them further; what is the interplay between our outlook on life and our language? Is translation between the subjectivity of di↵erent people possible? What is the connection between a people and their language? This also led to the next problem closely related to language. Is there an objectively real world, or is everybody the master of his own subjective world? How does our use of language interplay with the problem of subjectivity? Humboldt, for example, thought that our subjectivity feeds into the objectivity of language; objectivity would only be heightened by subjectivity. Considering the further development of these questions in fin de siècle Vienna, there is no way around two major figures: the philosopher Fritz Mauthner and the physicist Ernst Mach.

100p.xviii

20 3.1 Mauther and Mach - Philosophy and Science Das Ich ist unrettbar.

-ErnstMach,Die Analyse [...] p.20

If we consider their philosophical oeuvre, Fritz Mauthner and Ernst Mach are two figures virtually unknown outside of Austria101 (and inside as well), but two figures that exerted a tremendous influence on the science, philosophy and literature of their (and later) times.

Janik and Toulmin characterize Fritz Mauthner rather as a journalist than a Fritz Mauthner philosopher,102 which - in a way - is a misleading characterization since most writers in fin-de-siècle Vienna also worked as journalists.103 Mauthner begot a large philosophical output, yet “only one of his eleven major works -arefutationof Aristotle - has been translated to English”,104 which led to his oblivion. In recent years, a negligible number of papers have been written about him, but to this day, strangely, his most important work, the Beiträgezu einer Kritik der Sprache105 (1901-1902), has not been translated. This fact is even more so peculiar, since the Beiträge are a work important in the history of philosophy as well as literature. Important for the history of philosophy since Wittgenstein was acquainted with it,106 and important for literary history since it influenced both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.107

Mauthner expounded his personal understanding of philosophy in his Wörter- All Philosophy buch der Philosophie,thesecondparttohismagnumopusoftheBeiträge: is Language Critique [D]ie Philosophie ist Erkenntnistheorie, Erkenntnistheorie ist Sprachkri- tik; Sprachkritik aber ist die Arbeit an dem befreienden Gedanken, daß die Menschen mit den Wörtern ihrer Sprachen und mit den Worten ihrer Philosophien niemals über eine bildliche Darstellung der Welt hinaus gelangen können.108

101One notable exception is chapter 5 in Allan Janik and Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Wittgen- stein’s Vienna (Ivan R. Dee, 1996) p.120-167. 102Janik and Toulmin p.121. 103Karl Kraus (section 3.2), and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (section 4), who will appear later, both published many essays, the former was even a publisher of his own journal. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, and Joseph Roth, the important Austro-Hungarian writer, were chief correspondents for the Viennese Freie Presse in Paris. The list could be extended considerably. 104My emphasis. Linda Ben-Zvi, “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language”, Modern Language Association 86.2 (1980): p.183. 105Henceforth Beiträge. 106See chapter 5, p.120-167 in Wittgenstein’s Vienna or Yuchen Xin, “Wittgenstein’s Tracta- tus Logico-Philosophicus and Kafka’s Oktavhefte: A Comparative Stylistic and Philosophical Analysis”, Diss., Univsersity of Colorado Boulder, 2014, p.8. 107James Joyce would even ask Samuel Beckett to read to him from it when he was going blind. Ben-Zvi Ibid. 108Fritz Mauthner, Wörterbuch der Philosophie: Neue Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 1st ed. (München und Leipzig: Georg Müller, 1910) p. XI.

21 Bound to language, as we are, knowledge can only be conveyed through it, therefore any epistemology will eventually also be a philosophy of language. Yet, as alluded to in section (2.3), Mauthner echoes Nietzsche in asserting that meaning within language is simply a matter of convention:

Die Sprache ist nur ein Scheinwert wie eine Spielregel, die auch umso zwingender wird, je mehr Mitspieler sich ihr unterwerfen, die aber die Wirklichkeitswelt weder ¨andern noch begreifen will.109

While this talk of rules and games reminds one of the late Wittgenstein, Mauth- ner also had another commonality in thought with the late years of the greatest Austrian language philosopher: he asserted that language was ultimately just a subjective system which could dissolve:

Wo immer nun wir den Versuch machen werden, das Wesen der Erkenntnis zu entdecken, da wird es sich so genau wie die Sprache als eine soziale Erscheinung, vielleicht sogar als eine soziale Illusion enth¨ullen. [...] Der weitere Verlauf aller Untersuchung dieser Sprachkritik wird uns lehren, [...] zu dem gleichen Zweifel an der Festigkeit unseres Wissens- geb¨audes[zu] kommen.110

As the social construct which it is, language could never convey real truths, only the truths we mutually agreed upon.

Concepts When it comes to the objects and concepts that words reference to, Mauthner and Reference seems to clearly echo what Nietzsche asserted in Jenseits von Gut und Böse,that the signifiéand signifiant do not always coincide, yet Mauthner takes it out of the philosophical sphere and states it more generally about language:

Sowie aber die Wirklichkeitswelt verglichen wird, dürfte es ohne Beweis einleuchten, daß es eigentlich Allgemeinvorstellungen gar nicht gibt, daß es in unserem Gedächtnis nur ähnliche, ineinander fließende, verwaschene Vorstellungen gibt, die in Vorrat hinter dem Begri↵ste- hen, und aus denen die Phantasie immer diejenigen hervorlangt, die sie gerade braucht oder die ihr die unbewußte Assoziation zuführt. Wobei nicht zu vergessen ist, daß nur wenige Menschen beim Wort- gebrauch es auch für nötig halten, den einzelnen Begri↵oder das Wort jedesmal aus dem Vorrat der Vorstellungen zu speisen und sie so lebendig zu machen oder zu erhalten.111

Nietzsche still asserted that di↵erent vocabularies may or may not coincide with di↵erent philosophies; Mauthner seems to fully negate that possibility. If we read

109Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902] p.25. 110Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902] p.34. 111Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902] p.112.

22 his word “Allgemeinvorstellungen” as something like general Saussurian signifiants, then Mauthner denies them. To him, language is more of a sea of subjective signifiants that we all name in mutually agreed upon signifiés, despite not actually knowing whether we can convey our information - the only help is to use our non-linguistic sensory input.

If language is such a subjective unstable entity, what then is it useful for? Art and Philosophy Mauthner sees one prime importance in language in the transmission of emotions through (linguistically driven) art:

Hier will ich aber nur darauf hinweisen, daß auch diese wahrhaft grauenhafte Entdeckung nur erklärenhilft, warum die Sprache wohl ein herrliches Kunstmittel, aber ein elendes Erkenntniswerkzeug ist. Denn der Dichter will immer nur eine Stimmung mitteilen. Seine Seelensitu- ation. Was der Stimmung zu Grunde liegt, das Wirklichkeitsbild, hält die Poesie nur zusammen, wie der Strick einen Rosenkranz. [...] Anders in der wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung. Hier soll nichts Stimmung sein, hier ist nicht ein sinnfälliger Vorgang. Die Mehrdeutigkeit jedes einzelnen Wortes wird durch kein Ganzes vorher gemildert oder gedeutet, und so kann am Ende kein Ganzes entstehen.112

The reason for the failing of language in a scientiﬁc context is its triumph in an artistic context: there is never an absolute truth, but always ambiguity. We have seen above that Mauthner asserts that we are bound to language for all of our expression and epistemology; however, what is his position on conjunction of thought and language? Mauthner saw, as mentioned before, language ultimately just as a system of social convention, yet he did follow Hamann in saying that thought and language coincide:

[E]s gibt kein Denken ohne Sprechen, das heißt ohne Worte. Oder richtiger: Es gibt gar kein Denken,esgibtnur ein Sprechen.113

Even more so, he continued speaking of thought without language, and separated instinctive thoughts from reason114 -yetforanythingtranscendinginstinctwedo need language. While Mauthner held views analogous to Hamann in his construction of reason and language, he also endorsed similar views as the Romantics when it comes to the connection of language and culture. Where Herder and Humboldt constructed language already as the memory of a nation,115 Mauthner does exactly the same thing.116 However, while memory had a positive (or at least neutral) connotation with his ancestors in thought, Mauthner clearly also sees some disadvantages:

112Mauthner, Beitr¨age zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902] p.93f. 113My emphasis. Mauthner, Beitr¨age zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902] p.176. 114p.180↵ 115See sections (2.1) and (2.2). 116p.179

23 Es steckt also in dem Gebrauch der Muttersprache eine unverh¨alt- nism¨aßiggroße Masse von ererbtem, nicht erworbenem, nicht nachkontrolliertem Gute, das auf Treu und Glauben benutzt wird.117

Mauthner criticizes the unreﬂected usage of words, claiming that a word which is used without thought is not more than the instinctive thought as found in animals.

Metaphysics Due to everything discussed so far, Mauthner not only doubts the possibilities and Science of science within language, he outright called its endeavors metaphysical:

Was die Wissenschaft dazutut, ist also wieder mythologisches Beiwerk. Sie müßthe ehrlich sagen: Hier, an der untersten wie an der obersten Grenze des Wahrnehmbaren, versagt uns mit der Sprache das Denken. Wir können nichts mehr beobachten, nichts mehr vorstellen, nichts mehr wissen. Und selbst die Widersprüche, auf die wir stoßen, sind nicht klar gewußthe Widersprüche, sie sind in Wahrheit metaphysisch, spielerisch, witzig, also dumm.118

If all the scientiﬁc cases that cannot be perceived by the naked eye are metaphysical because or language fails us, our entire world view will be based on metaphysics, but not on truths.

Ernst Mach While Mauthner doubted the possibility of truth because of the limits of language, Ernst Mach went a di↵erent way. Inﬂuential physicist by trade,119 Mach was a stark opponent of metaphysics and supported an extreme nominalism. Only what we perceive with our senses can be considered true:

Meine sämtlichen physischen Befunde kann ich in derzeit nicht weiter zerlegbare Elemente auflösen: Farben, Töne, Drücke, Wärmen, Düfte, Räume,Zeiten u.s.w.120

Which, as Egon Friedell121 points out in his revealing Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, leads even to the rejection of the Kantian categories as the makeup of our minds122 -accordingtoMach,everything is an impression.

Hyper- Since we perceive everything through our senses, Mach has a vastly di↵erent Empiricist Truth approach to truth than other many others; for instance, when we put a pencil into atankofwater,andweseeitasbuckledduetothemodulationoflightwavesin the water, how are we to decide which one is real: the buckeld pencil we perceive

117p.180 118p.262 119A young Albert Einstein was indebted to his theories. Janik and Toulmin p.133. 120Ernst Mach, Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1906) p.8. 121Egon Friedell was a journalist, actor, writer and cultural philosopher. His principal work is the Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, a 1500 page “personal” history of Western civilization from the medieval times up until the First World War. 122Friedell p.1386.

24 inside, or the straight pencil we perceive outside of the water?123,124 This approach even holds for dreams: Auch der wüsteste Traum ist eine Tatsache, so gut als jede andere. Wären unsere Träume regelmäßiger, zusammenhängender, stabiler, so wären sie für uns auch praktisch wichtiger.125 Dreams are generally not considered as depicting part of the “real world”, because they do not have continuity (“beständigkeit”), the same goes for the aforementioned pencil; Mach asserts that for us to ascribe importance to an appearance, it needs to have at least some continuity. However, continuity constructed in this way is an incredibly subjective thing. For a short gedankenexperiment we could imagine a person whose dreams are always in perfect continuum with one another. When he falls asleep, his dream picks up exactly where his last dream ended. We all would readily allow for such apersontoattributegreaterimportancetohisdreams.Yet,Machwouldsaythat his dream world - despite being clearly a dream-world -wouldbeas real,andas true,astheworldheperceiveswhenheisawake.

But Mach’s writings did not only shake the belief in an objective truth in the Unsalvagability of the I sciences, it also shook much older ideals. Schopenhauer called Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum the “wahre Stützpunkt aller Philosophie”.126 Yet Mach opposed even a rigid view of identity. While there certainly is a limited amount of continuity in the self,127 the “I” is subject to tremendous change: Wenn ich mich heute meiner frühen Jugend erinnere, so müßte ich den Knaben [...] für einen Andern halten, wenn nicht die Kette der Erinnerung vorläge.128 Yet, if we continue this train of thought, we arrive at a di↵erent extreme, the notion that the “I” cannot be saved: 123Ernst Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psy- chischen [1886], 9th ed. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922) p.8. 124At this point one observation should be made; according to Janik and Toulmin, Mach constantly asserted that he was no philosopher (p.134), yet, he not only echoes some of Schopen- hauer’s theories (i.e. that what we perceive is the truth: “Die angeschaute Welt in Raum und Zeit (...) (ist) vollkommen real (...)”) but he even uses some of the same images, like the buckled pencil: “der ins Wasser getauchte Stab”. And even dedicates an entire chapter to “der Wille”. In Schopenhauer p.35,43; the chapter on “der Wille” is in Mach: Erkenntnis und Irrtum, chapter VIII.. 125Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen [1886] p.9. 126p.470; he also defends this vantage point beautifully: “Zwar widerstrebt das Bewußtseyn eines Jeden, welches sich schon gegen das Erklären der anderen Objekte für bloße Vorstellungen auflehnte, noch mehr wenn der eigene Leib bloß eine Vorstellung seyn soll; welches daher kommt, daß Jedem das Ding an sich, sofern es als sein eigener Leib erscheint, unmittelbar, sofern es in den anderen Gegenständen der Anschauung sich objektivirt, ihm nur mittelbar bekannt ist.” in: Schopenhauer p.39. 127Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen [1886] p.2↵. 128p.3

25 Nicht das Ich ist das Primäre, sondern die Elemente (Empfindungen). [...] Die Elemente bilden das Ich. Das Ich ist keine unveränderliche, bestimmte, scharf begrenzte Einheit. [...] Das Ich ist unrettbar. [...] Man wird auf das Ich, welches schon während des individuellen Lebens vielfach variiert, ja im Schlaf und bei Versunkenheit in eine Anschau- ung, in einen Gedanken, gerade in den glücklichsten Augenblicken, teil- weise oder ganz fehlen kann, nicht mehr den hohen Wert legen.129

Mach’s aim was to destroy the worship of the “I”, seeing as it is of no real continuity, and we die every day a bit,130 it should only be logical to give up our illusions and embrace the unsalvagability of the I.

Mach’s While Mach’s general view on metaphysics was very popular, in his hyper- Philosophy of Language empiricist philosophy, he held views on language that his contemporaries opposed. Basically, for him, language was simply the development of sounds we made as we encountered objects:

So wenig spezialisiert die Lautäußerungen der Tiere auch sein mögen, so ist die Menschensprache doch nur eine weitere Entwicklung der Tier- sprache. Sie entsteht, indem bei größerer Mannigfaltigkeit der Er- lebnisse die Laute sich weiter modifizieren und spezialisieren, durch Nachahmung sich in dieser Spezialisierung verbreiten und durch Tradi- tion sich erhalten.131

This tradition that Mach writes about, basically the history of a language, hard- ened the “Merkzeichen”132 which are our terms. The only part of language that is not a random genesis of our perceptive faculties is specialized jargon of science, which is formed with the help of our cognitive faculties.133

Mach and In todays world, where the sciences are strongly separated (from one another and Mauthner’s impact on from the humanities), it may be hard to imagine that a scientist like Mach was an Culture institution that no artist could circumvent. Egon Friedell134 deemed Mach so important, that he dedicated a section of his history of western civilization to him!135 Both Mauthner and Mach had radicalized thoughts that had been developed in the romantic (and early modern) periods, the former had shaken the foundations of language, and the latter wrecked the traditional view on objectivity. Time was

129p.19f 130p.4 131p.81 Mach, Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung For more on Mach’s theory on the origin of language, consider p.79-83. 132Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen [1886] p.266. 133Ibid. 134See footnote 121. 135Pages 1385-1388; Interestingly he did not even mention Fritz Mauthner. Hugo von Hof- mannsthal, who will take a very prominent part later in this thesis, is mentioned twice, not as a person, but because of his accurate characterizations of historical figures.

26 not only ripe for a radical literary extension of the Romantic view on language, Vienna’s streets were already fermenting a new type of language skepticism.

3.2 Bahr and Kraus - Cultural and Social Critique Wir haben kein anderes Gesetz als die Wahrheit, wie jeder sie empﬁndet.

- Hermann Bahr, Die Moderne p.14

136 The figure of Ernst Mach had exerted a tremendous influence on many writers, Hermann Bahr but of course also on the cultural critics. Hermann Bahr, for example, the cultural philosopher, who is considered the prophet of modernism137 and organizer of Aus- trian literature,138 is one of those figures that Mach influenced tremendously. By profession a journalist, he worked as a playwright, was known as an astute cultural critic, and formed a circle of young writers with their headquarter in the famous CaféGriensteidl.139 In his collection of essays Die Uberwindung¨ des Naturalismus Bahr claims that Austrian literature has overcome the naturalism movement and defines the aim of the Austrian movement, by clearly referring to Ernst Mach:

Wir haben kein anderes Gesetz als die Wahrheit, wie jeder sie empfindet. Der dienen wir. Wir können nichts dafür, wenn sie rauh und gewaltthätig ist und oft höhnisch und grausam. Wir sind ihr nur gehorsam, was sie verlange. Manchmal aber verwundert es uns selbst und erschreckt uns, wir können uns aber nicht helfen. Dieses wird die neue Kunst sein, welches wir so scha↵en. Und es wird die neue Religion sein. Denn Kunst, Wissenschaft und Religion sind dasselbe.140

The central statement is truth, but not an objective truth. Recall Mach’s magnum opus Die Analyse der Empﬁndungen und das Verh¨altnisdes Physischen zum Psychischen (in section 3.1), and its advocated subjectivity of being. At this time, subjectivity was even more of a religion than just a Weltanschauung. Mach had claimed that only our impressions could be considered real, and that even our dreams may be considered like that as long as they are continuous with one another. If a renowned scientist, such as Mach, claims that everyone experiences a di↵erent world, that only our subjective perception of it is real, then there can only be one major conclusion: the writer, and not the naturalist, but the impressionist

136See, for example, the discussion of Schnitzler in section (3.3), and Hofmannsthal section (4). 137As the the publication of his diaries is called. 138Gotthart Wunberger, Die Wiener Moderne: Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981) p.42. 139One of the caf´es that helped to establish Vienna’s reputation of a city of caf´es. Location where many writers and artists would meet. It still can be found in the center of Vienna on Michaelaplatz 2. 140in Die Moderne Hermann Bahr, Kritische Schriften II - Die Uberwindung¨ des Naturalismus [1891], ed. Claus Pias (VDG Weimar, 2004) p.14.

27 is closer to the truth than anybody else,seeingashereallyseekstoexpressthe impressions and emotions he receives, and since he does not search for objective truth like the naturalists.

Jung-Wien This hyper-impressionist/subjectivist stance of Hermann Bahr can be almost seen as the manifesto of the group of writers that have meanwhile become renowned for being language skeptics: the Jung Wien writers. In the literature, the aim of Jung-Wien was defined as challenging “the moralistic stance of the nineteenth- century literature in favor of sociological truth and psychological [...] openness”.141 Yet, Hermann Bahr, who was himself also a Jung-Wien author once wrote more truthfully: [E]ine Gruppe, vielleicht eine Schule von jungen, meist Wiener Litter- aten [...], die durch au↵ällige Werke, einige auch schon durch schöne Versprechungen in der Gesellschaft bekannt, ja sie selber meinen wohl sogar: berühmt wurden.142 An assertion which is the most honest characterization of the movement, in that it says that every writer was part of Jung-Wien.

What is Papers often equate a certain kind of literary language skepticism with the Sprachskep- 143 sis? Jung-Wien group, which I find problematic. While there have been certain thoughts on language, which were strongly established in the Viennese literary scene (see the discussion of Schnitzler below or the chapter on Hofmannsthal144), others which must be seen as being in the same circles were definitely not poets of Jung-Wien (such as Rainer Maria Rilke) or not even usually considered as writers (such as Alfred Kubin, see both below145), and still endorsed very similar views.146 Furthermore, was there one common strand of language skepticism? The an- swer seems to be no. The question of how philosophers should write, had received amoregeneraltreatmentbypolemicKarlKraus,whocriticizedthewayhiscon- temporaries (mis)used language. At the same time philosophy of language, and especially questions which may be best summarized by quoting Wittgenstein: “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt”147 had received more main-stream literary attention. There seems to be a clear distinction between figures that investigated the former, language of philosophers, (for example Kraus) and the latter, philosophy of language, (writers as discussed in section 3.3). Scholar Richard T. Gray introduces Saussurian terminology to illuminate these di↵erences between di↵erent actors’ critique of language. He makes a clear distinc- 141Carl Emil Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York, N.Y.: Vintage, 1980) p.212. 142Hermann Bahr, Kritische Schriften IV - Studien zur Kritik der Moderne [1894], ed. Claus Pias, 2nd ed. (Weimar, 2011) p.58. 143For example: Alice Leal, “Linguistic Scepticism and the Jung-Wien Towards a New Perspec- tive in Translation Studies”, trans-kom 7.1 (2014): 99–114. 144Sections (3.3) and (4) respectively. 145Both in section (3.3). 146A more detailed account will, sadly, be outside the scope of this thesis. 147Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1922], 2nd (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003) 5.6.

28 tion between (a) langage, “the fundamental capacity of language in general”, and (b) parole,the“speciﬁcutterancesofindividualspeakers”148 According to him, this distinction is interesting insofar, as it immediately di↵erentiates between particu- lar writers of that time: the poets Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler could be, according to Gray, grouped as langage skeptics (a), while the polemic Karl Krauss and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would rather be criticizing parole (b).149 However this distinction that Gray introduces150 may be a bit confusing when we closely look at the terminology. Saussure deﬁnes langage as general human speech, of which all languages are subsets;151 meanwhile parole is “the executive side” of language, i.e. speaking.152 Yet, Saussure rather speaks of both as idealized forms; langage is a general concept, all languages fall within it; the same goes for parole, which is a more general term describing the utterances of a person, yet without any valuation. Langage nor parole,canbe“wrong”sincetheyaremorefundamen- tal capacities. A critique of these concepts, if we take them in their Saussurian meaning, is thus non-sensical. We may therefore conclude that what Gray means is, if we stated it in the same terms that we used throughout the thesis, that one can separate the writers that (a) criticized language in general (a question of philosophy of language), and (b) the writers that criticized the (mis)use of language (the language of philosophers so to say).

Journalist and polemic Karl Kraus, as alluded to above, was never troubled by Karl Kraus problems of philosophy of language, rather, convinced by “his own ability to wield this power [of language]”,153 he critiqued the aestheticizing and psychologizing misuse as it was utilized by his contemporaries. While his contemporaries might have claimed, just like Hofmannsthal did, that there is a troubling disparity between the word and reality, we have to express the truth as we experience it, Kraus would have argued something else: that we have to stop lying and find the truth as it is. He seems to even have endorsed a hyper-realist view on language, as apparent from some of his aphorisms: “Wer nichts der Sprache vergibt, vergibt nichts der Sache.”154 His trouble was solely the corruption of language and how writers catered to the tastes of their audiences. One aphorism of his satirical journal Die Fackel exhibits this nicely: “Keinen Gedanken haben und ihn ausdrücken können: Das macht den Journalisten.”155 Kraus’ attacks were often directed at the jour-

148He also gives a third category langue, “the body of utterances possible within a given language” which is not interesting for this present paper. In: Richard T Gray, “Aphorism and Sprachkrise in Turn-of-the-Century Austria”, Orbis Litterarum 41.4 (1986): p.346. 149I disagree with a clearcut distinction like that, as I will demonstrate further down. 150Notabene on grounds of some other research research. 151De Saussure p.9. 152p.13 153R. T. Gray p.345. 154Karl Kraus, Uber¨ die Sprache, ed. Heinrich Fischer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977) p.7. 155Karl Kraus, AAC-Fackel: ”Die Fackel. Herausgeber: Karl Kraus, Wien 1899-1936”,ed. Karl Kraus (Vienna: AAC - Austrian Academy Corpus, 2007) F281/282,29 (...)

29 nalist (and especially his most detested form of the feuilleton156), but they never left the realm of faith in language. Language may be used as shallow and (to him) abhorrently as possible, yet he would have never renounced its possibility for achieving truth. Thus Karl Kraus was not even as radical as Hamann; as discussed before (section 2.1), Hamann also criticized the misuse of language by his contemporaries. The great di↵erence, however, was that Kraus would not have investigated the interplay between language and cognition.

Many of Kraus’ contemporaries however would have disagreed with him on the issue; if we think of Viennese language-skepticism nowadays, we usually think of Hofmannsthal’s Chandos-letter 157 and skepticism concerning the possibilities of language; i.e. literary treatment of questions of philosophy of language.

3.3 Jung Wien and Sprachskepsis

Die Phantasie auch des nüchternsten und beschränktestenMen- schen ist nämlichimmer noch hundertmal packender und pittoresker als alle gesprochenen Worte der Welt; die schönstenund tiefsten Verse könnennicht annähernd ausdrücken,was der einfachste Galeriebesucher unartikuliert empfindet.

-EgonFriedell,Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, p.1512

Poetry One of Hofmannsthal’s colleagues (and acquaintances) who also was mindful to questions of philosophy of language is Rainer Maria Rilke. Despite having been of Old-Austrian origin,158 he was never considered a part of Jung-Wien. His only novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge is a prime example for his issue with language, and so is his poem Ich f¨urchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort:

Ich f¨urchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort. Sie sprechen alles so deutlich aus: Und dieses heißt Hund und jenes heißt Haus, und hier ist Beginn und das Ende ist dort.

Mich bangt auch ihr Sinn, ihr Spiel mit dem Spott, sie wissen alles, was wird und war; kein Berg ist ihnen mehr wunderbar; ihr Garten und Gut grenzt grade an Gott.

156The Feuilleton was and still is the arts section of Austrian newspapers, then notorious for being an artistic outlet for many writers. 157See section 4 for a discussion of his views and especially subsection 4.1.1 for the famous letter. 158The Alt¨osterreicher are the German speaking persons from all parts of Austria-Hungary that are not Austria nowadays; i.e. Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Ruthenium etc.

30 Ich will immer warnen und wehren: Bleibt fern. Die Dinge singen h¨orich so gern. Ihr r¨uhrt sie an: sie sind starr und stumm. Ihr bringt mir alle die Dinge um159.

Here, Rilke is polemically playing with the same themes that I brought up in Nietzsche’s Uber¨ Wahrheit und Lügeim außermoralischen Sinne (section 2.3); the problem of the arbitrariness of names, the lack of actual meaning behind the references and the dichotomy between signifiéand signifiant. Why is one thing called Hund and the next Haus? During the poem, the lyrical I is getting more and more anxious, after he just wondered about the meaning of a given word in the first stanza, he almost starts indicting a more sensible use of words, and in the third stanza invokes a better use of words.

While poets like Rilke were plagued by questions of reference, other artists had Dreams and Words di↵erent issues with the usage of language. Die anders Seite is the only novel by the painter Alfred Kubin, and widely unknown. While he was definitively not a proponent of Jung-Wien,160 his novel is clearly influenced by their topics: dreams and sexuality, and their thoughts on language. The narrator moves to the so called Traumreich to work; first an inspiration for his work, it starts changing more and more into a quixotic nightmare until he flees. After finishing his path of su↵ering, he is admitted to a mental institution in the epilogue. Kubin was interested in the borderline cases of language, namely:

Wie es möglich ist, innere Bilder sowie den Inhalt von Träumen und des Unterbewussten zu kommunizieren und die paradoxe Problematik, etwas ausdrücken zu wollen, über das eigentlich nicht mehr gesprochen werden kann. [...] Auch für Kubin, wie für die Literatur der Sprachkrise, wird so der Zusammenhang zwischen Epiphanie, Unaussprechlichkeit- stopos und der Darstellung des Schweigens relevant.161

He, however, expresses his form of language skepticism through his treatment of storyline, rather than through direct reference to the problems of language. One instance is the narrator’s disbelief in the ﬁrst report he hears about the Traumre- ich.162 The same problem, how to express the unsayable, was also urgent for Kafka. While not a Viennese author, Kafka can be seen in the same tradition of typical

159Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ich fürchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort”, Die frühen Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1909) 91. 160Alfred Kubin was never famous as a writer, Die andere Seite (1909) is his only novel. He is, however, known as a painter, and there for his dark, sinister dreamlike style. While mostly in black and white, he became associated with Der blaue Reiter around Kandinsky 161Magdalena Haglmüller, “Zeichen der Sprachkrise in Alfred Kubins ”Die andere Seite””, Diss., UniversitätWien, 2011, p.71. 162Alfred Kubin, Die andere Seite [1908] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009) p.13.

31 Austrian phantasmic realism163 as Kubin, yet he investigated the problems of language more directly. When Kafka was a✏icted by tuberculosis in 1917, he started writing a collection of aphorisms known as the Die Z¨urauer Aphorismen,inwhich he dealt with philosophical questions that troubled him; he also made references to the problems of language:

Die Sprache kann f¨uralles außerhalb der sinnlichen Welt nur andeu- tungsweise, aber niemals auch nur ann¨ahernd vergleichsweise gebraucht werden, da sie entsprechend der sinnlichen Welt nur vom Besitz und seinen Beziehungen handelt.164

Kafka encountered the same problem as his Viennese contemporaries, foremostly Mauthner165 and Hofmannsthal. How can something like language work, and how could we criticize its use if our only way to express this is through language, the medium we try to criticize?

Arthur A similar problem is encountered by Arthur Schnitzler’s hero Mr. Huber, from Schnitzler his story Ich. As the tie-vendor walks down the street and encounters a park, which has a sign saying “Park”, he starts doubting the meaning of words. Why would such a speciﬁcation be necessary? Everyone knows that there is a park there, the Viennese Schwarzenbergpark to be more precise. The more he thinks about it, however, the more he starts doubting the possibilities of expression; it is not that easy after all:

Ganz klug, daß dort an einem Baum die Tafel ,,Park” hing. Nicht alle Menschen waren so geistesgegenw¨artig und scharfsinnig wie er, daß sie ohne weiteres wußten, dies ist ein Park, und dies ist eine Halsbinde.166

His doubt seems to manifest itself especially when it comes to the written word, leading him to question the connection between a news paper clipping of an earthquake and the real earthquake.167 Over time, however, he concludes that a sign specifying the object is something useful, and starts attaching little notes to everything. The story concludes with his wife having brought a doctor who ﬁnds Mr. Huber at home with a sign attached to him saying “Ich” (“I”); the return of Mach’s unsalvagability of the I.168 How can we justify the word “I”? Mach claimed that there is no self, just continuity; is the continuity of the word “I” enough to justify our existence? Unlike Rilke, for example, Schnitzler also clearly takes a side on language skepticism; while a grain of it may be healthy and natural for educated people (of his time), the doubt can

163Haglm¨uller p.64. 164Franz Kafka, Die Acht Oktavhefte [1918] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1987). 165Who had also been born in Prague like Kafka. 166Arthur Schnitzler, “Ich”, Traumnovelle und andere Erz¨ahlungen (Fischer Taschenbuch, 2008). 167Schnitzler, “Ich”. 168Das Ich ist unrettbar. See section (3.1).

32 quickly go into the ridiculous. Mr. Huber thinks words will dissolve reality or, even worse, lose their meaning, therefore he has to attach them to everything, and even himself. However, while the problems stated above were clearly questions into the possibilities of language in general, of the philosophy of language, Schnitzler was not oblivious to problems of usage of language. In a note on his unpublished tragicom- edy Das Wort 169 he expresses:

Unsere gesamte Moral besteht vielleicht nur darin, aus diesem unpräzisen Material, das uns das Lügen so leicht, so verantwortungslos, so entschuld- bar macht, aus der Sprache etwas besseres zu machen. Mit Worten so wenig zu lügen als möglich ist.170

This quote as well as the later discussion of Hofmannsthal (consider section 4 below) shows that Gray’s analysis of the language skepticism of the time only scratches the surface; there is not always a clear demarcation to be made between questions of (a), of the philosophy of language, and (b), of the language of philosophers, as evidenced by Arthur Schnitzler, or more prominently so by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

It becomes apparent that the movement of Sprachskepsis is nothing but a slightly Sprachskepsis Revisited unprecise general term for all the writers which exhibit language-theoretical con- siderations in the fin-de-siècle. It simply was part of the zeitgeist then, to put a stronger emphasis on the theory of language as well. Literature and other forms of art just had overcome naturalism, the maxim to depict everything as naturally as possible. Movements like impressionism, expressionism and others had been formed in opposition to naturalism, and it is one of the necessary reactions against anaturalisticlinguisticexpressiontodoubtthepossibilityforanynaturalismin language, since language and impression do not coincide. However, if a zeitgeist has identified some leitmotifs for a certain era, it will not only spark the artist’s imagination, as it did with the literary Sprachskepsis movement, it will also spur the minds of the great thinkers and lead to a true philosophical investigation of a topic. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, the people involved were not only the usual suspects Fritz Mauthner, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna circle, it was also one young aesthete named Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

169The comedy should have been a critique of exactly that; tragicomical events happening because of how the characters (mis-)use language. 170My emphasis Arthur Schnitzler, Das Wort, Tragikom¨odie in f¨unf Akten. Fragment,ed.Kurt Bergel (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1966) p.27.

33 4 Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Was [Hofmannsthal] ber¨uhrt, wird Anmuth, Lust und Sch¨onheit.

- Hermann Bahr, Studien zur Kritik der Moderne p.103

Who is Hofmannsthal was no philosopher in the classical sense. The most insightful charac- Hofmannsthal? terization comes from Hermann Bahr: “Loris, der Hugo von Hofmannsthal heisst, schreibt Prosa und Verse, Kritisches und Lyrisches. An der Prosa merkt man den Lyriker gleich”.171 He was through and through an artistic writer, anybody who knows even his non-ﬁction would make a similar statement as Bahr. Hofmannsthal never communicated his thoughts in a strictly analytical way; his thoughts had to be conveyed through aesthetic form. However, Bahr continues:

Aber an den Versen wieder merkt man den kritischen Philosophen: sie sind mit quälenden Gedanken, moralischen Fragen und athemlosen Zweifeln der Bildung ängstlich beladen, dass man ihnen lieber die freiere Gelassenheit ungebundener Aphorismen wünschen möchte172.

Large parts of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s work are essentially a philosophical work. Hermann Bahr noticed it already in 1894(!), when Hofmannsthal was only twenty years old writing mostly poetry under the pen-name Loris.Well-nighadecade before Ein Brief and more than a quarter of a century before Der Schwierige,the philosophical mind of young Loris was already clear to Hermann Bahr. And the distinction between philosopher, scientist and poet was, in the Vienna of that time rather arbitrary, as Janik and Toulon point out in their work Wittgenstein’s Vi- enna.173 Then, art was an important vehicle for the bourgeoisie in the “instruction in metaphysical and moral truth”.174 No wonder that writers would see it as a mission to be philosophers, ethicist and aesthetician - in short, to be an implicit philosopher in the tradition of Herder, Hamann and Schlegel.

Hofmannsthal Schlegel had demanded an aesthetic revolution, where philosophy, humanities in the 175 Tradition and literature would be conjoined in a philosophical “gesamtkunstwerk”; language, as the ultimate expression of humanity and the spirit, would necessarily be in the center of such an endeavor. In the enlightenment and romantic eras, the study of language had been placed in the center of the study of cognition; Nietzsche smashed the idols by dissecting the word and its reference, and lifting the word to the center of our moral misunderstanding. Young Loris had an exceptional education; he had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition and placed himself in it, historically as well as ex-

171Bahr, Kritische Schriften IV - Studien zur Kritik der Moderne [1894] p.68. 172Ibid. My emphasis. 173“As it is, we overlook the interdependence of the di↵erent Viennese arts and sciences.” (p.18); page 92 for some examples. In Janik and Toulmin. 174p. 45 175If I may misappropriate the term from music.

34 plicitly.176 He did not only echo Schlegel in his view of aesthetics and philosophy, but endorsed it with body and soul.177 As a poetic wunderkind,178 questions of language had reached his attention very early in life and never left his focus. A general philosophy of his can also be distilled from his works, yet his philosophy of language is of bigger relevance for the present objective.

For the purpose of a comprehensive study of his philosophy, I will use a number Material Used of his works which range over his whole life-time. His early period is featured in one of his poems and the most famous of his lyrical plays. The middle period is featured with the formative work Ein Brief, and another one of his letter-novellas. His late period is featured with a play and his collection of aphorisms. The sca↵olding that is provided with these snapshots in Hofmannsthal’s proliﬁc life is tied together with the rough threads that are his sporadic diary entries, and the ﬁne silk that is his essayistic work - his “philosophical diary”179 -whicharetakenfromhisearly days until the year of his death.

4.1 Hofmannsthal’s Philosophy of Language

Die Worte an sich sind nichts: wie wir sie brauchen, um das Uns¨agliche zu verschleiern, darin liegt alles.

- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Diary 1896

As a poet, Hofmannsthal was interested his entire life in the topic of metaphors. The Metaphor In 1897, Hofmannsthal wrote a short essay (or perhaps rather a long aphorism) on “the metaphor”. In it he criticizes a comment on poems that states that they have been adorned with metaphors. As if a poem could exist without metaphors, Hofmannsthal maintains: the metaphor is the true language of the poem. Yet, he goes further in asserting that the only people who actually understand language are poets for they are the ones “die sich des Gleichnishaften der Sprache unaufh¨orlich

176An example would be his work on the German enlightenment writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. A hundred years earlier, Schlegel had written a famous treatise on the very same writer as well, and Hofmannsthal deals with the topic in his own way, but also through the example of his intellectual forefather. For the present purpose, however, both texts are not as important, since they are not so much philosophical works, as much as philological. 177“Und doch gibt es keinen schönen und auch keinen bedeutenden Gehalt ohne eine wahrhaft schöne Darstellung, und der Gehalt kommt erst durch die Darstellung zur Welt (...)” in “Schöne Sprache” Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Drei kleine Betrachtungen [1921]”, Der Brief des Lord Chan- dons: Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Matthias Mayer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000) p.192. 178Hermann Bahr beautifully illustrates their first encounter and how shocked he was to learn that “Loris” was still a teenager. In his study Loris in Bahr, Kritische Schriften IV - Studien zur Kritik der Moderne [1894] p.101. 179As Hermann Broch called it: “(Seine E)ssayistische Produktion; sie begleitet Hofmannsthal auf seinem ganzen, mit dem siebzehnten Jahr anhebenden schriftstellerischen Weg, war stete Selbstbesinnung und Selbsterklärung, sein philosophisches Tagebuch im Ereignis des Daseins.” in Broch p.148.

35 bewusst bleiben”,180 for language essentially is metaphor. At the same time he breaks with the notion that objective meaning in poems is possible:

Die Leute suchen gern hinter einem Gedicht, was sie den ,,eigentlichen Sinn” nennen. Sie sind wie A↵en, die auch immer mit den Händen hinter einen Spiegel fahren, als müsse dort ein Körper zu fassen sein.181

He clearly echoes Bahr’s maxim of the truth as everyone experiences it; every person experiences a metaphor di↵erently, and it is a strange concept to look for objective truths when everybody can experience their own truth. Hofmannsthal was reproached182 for turning Mauthner’s works into artistic works; Mauthner’s Beitr¨age,forexample,saysomethingverysimilaraboutthe metaphor (as above):

Dabei stimmt es gut zu meiner Lehre, daß nämlich die Sprache durch Metaphern entstanden ist und durch Metaphern wächst, wenn dichter- ische Phantasie die Worte immer wieder ergänzen und beleben muß.183

However, as evidenced from above (and from many of his diary entries), Hof- mannsthal was expressing his thoughts about the metaphor earlier than Mauth- ner.184

Cognition The metaphor already occupied a special position in Hofmannsthal’s view on and Language language long before Mauthner’s magnum opus had been published. In the aforementioned essay Bildlicher Ausdruck,hementionsthattheonlywaytoexpressthe world in a sensible way, is through the metaphor.185 The ﬁrst thoughts dealing with the metaphor, however, must have originated already years earlier, as evidenced from a diary entry from 1893. There he linked the genesis of metaphors to our cognition:

Das Entstehen des metaphorischen Ausdrucks ist ein geheimnisvolles Ding: der Anschauung eines Vorgangs substituiert sich plötzlich un- willkürlich die Anschauung eines anderen nur in der Idee verwandten Bildlicheren, Körperlicheren. [...] Einfluß der Sprache auf das Denken. - Sprache ist überhaupt nur Bild. Manche erstarrt wie Hieroglyphen, haben nur Münzwert, manche lebendig, wirken direkt auf die Nerven.186

180Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Bildlicher Ausdruck [1897]”, Der Brief des Lord Chandons: Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Matthias Mayer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000) p.45. 181Ibid. 182R. T. Gray p.335. 183Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902] p.113. 184In his letter to Mauthner from November 3rd 1902, Hofmannsthal even writes: “Meine Gedanken sind früher ähnliche Wege gegangen, vom Metaphorischen der Sprache manchmal mehr entzückt, manchmal mehr beängstigt.” - retrieved through: R. T. Gray p.335. 185Von Hofmannsthal, “Bildlicher Ausdruck [1897]” p.45. 186May 1893 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen”, Reden und Aufsätze III: 1925-1929, Aufzeichnungen, ed. Bernd Schoeller, Ingeborg Beyer-Ahlert, and Rudolf Hirsch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1980) p.360.

36 The metaphor is interesting insofar as it gives us an image that our cognition links to another image. However, is the connection of a linguistic, or of a cognitive nature? Is our thought influenced by the metaphor or is it the other way around? Hofmannsthal, like Hamann, saw great importance in the ambiguity of language and understanding; yet how did he link language and thought? Was he more influenced by thinkers like Hamann, saying that thought and language coincide? Or was he more influenced by someone like Mach who saw language and cognition as two distinctly separate entities? One of his later diary entries on the metaphor helps us in constructing his view of that topic. In 1925 he wrote in his diary:

Im Gleichnis kommt das ,,Glied” des Denkens zum Eigenleben, und es wird ein Teil von dem Raub, den das Sprache gewordene Denken am Leben begeht, diesem r¨uckerstattet.187

The allegory defies the influence of language and gives us back some freedom from language, by expressing our thoughts through experience that has turned into words. Therefore, I think it is fair to claim that Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s theory of language states that language influences thought,yetthereisanaspecttocognition independent of thought (and thus independent of language as well), but we have forgotten that fact. In his diary he noted in 1894 or 1895:

Worte sind versiegelte Gefängnisse des göttlichen ⇡⌫✏µ↵188 der Wahrheit. Götzendienst, Anbetung eines ✏◆oo⌫,Sinnbildes,daseinmalfür den Menschen lebendig war, Mirakel gewirkt hat, durchflammende Of- fenbarung des göttlichen Geheimnisses der Welt gewesen ist; solche ✏◆o↵ sind die Begri↵e der Sprache. Sie sind für gewöhnlich nicht heiliger als Götzenbilder, nicht wahrhaftiger ,,reich” als eine vergrabene Urne, nicht wahrhaftiger ,,stark” als ein vergrabenes Schwert.189

Recall that Nietzsche had pointed out the dichotomy between signifiéand signifiant half a century earlier; Nietzsche had hinted towards what Saussure started writing about during Hofmannsthal’s life time: that words and concepts only have arbitrary connections.190 Hofmannsthal was sensitive to the very same issues - what is the real meaning behind words? While Nietzsche claims that every word can only be seen in connection to every other word, and while Mauthner claims that we use a myriad of words in an unreflected way, Hofmannsthal asserts that we could not

187November 1925 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.582. 188⇡⌫✏µ↵ - is either the breath of life or divine inspiration. 189Undated 1894 or 1895 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.390. 190See section (2.3) for a more detailed discussion.

37 even “control the original meanings”,191 for we have forgotten the original meanings of words and therefore they are locked in sealed prisons. Language as with Nietzsche and Mauthner, is an entity of “Schein”.

Ambiguity Language is creating the illusion of completeness, of a world that makes sense. and Language Yet Hofmannsthal claims that language essentially is ambiguity:

Die Sprache Sie ist das große Werkzeug der Erkenntnis, sie ist das große Werkzeug der Verkennung. In ihren schwebenden Bildern verbirgt der Geist sich vor sich selber. Sie scheint uns alle zu verbinden, und doch reden wir jeder eine andere. [...] Sie scheint mitten ins Denken hineinzuführen und führtin Wahrheit hinaus: Sie umstellt das Denken mit unsichtbaren Netzen, und kein Geist kann sich ihr je entschwingen. Redend genießen wir uns selbst, redend entfremden wir uns selbst. Wenn sie wie ebbendes Meer zurücktritt, das nackte Gerüste Leben entblößt - solche Augenblicke ertragen wir kaum. Wer ihre Macht um sich einschränkt, der wird sie in sich anschwellen fühlen, vor ihr ist kein Entrinnen; sie ist das Gedächtnis selbst, um sie nicht zu sehen, muß man den Kopf in die Falten ihres eigenen Mantels drücken. Sie redet aus jedem Mund anders und verrät unerbitterlich die Seele.192

When Hofmannsthal asserts: “redend genießen wir uns selbst, redend entfremden wir uns selbst”, it sounds very much like when Nietzsche said that we lie to ourselves in language. We do understand but we can never fully understand, for our language seems to postulate truths, however they are always subjective truths. In the section on Humboldt (2.2), we saw that the great German homo universalis held the view that all understanding is always also a misunderstanding. Hofmannsthal held similar opinions as Humboldt, in that language always means misunderstanding and we can never fully grasp the meaning of what others say; but at the same time we need each other to create language (and language to understand each other):

Was wir machen ist gleich. Wir lügen nicht. Wir fühlen den Sturz des Daseins. Wir setzten nichts voraus. Wir spinnen aus uns selber den Faden, der uns über den Abgrund trägt, und zuweilen sind wir selig

191To use the - more clear - way that Mauthner put it: “Es steckt also in dem gebrauch der Muttersprache eine unverhältnismäßig große Masse von ererbtem, nicht erworbenem, nicht nachkontrolliertem Gute, das auf Treu und Glauben benutzt wird.” in Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1902] p.180. 192Undated 1896 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.413.

38 wie W¨olkchen am Abendhimmel. Wir scha↵en uns einer am anderen unsere Sprache, beleben einer den anderen.193

Language, for Hofmannsthal as for Humboldt, is a paradoxical entity, for we cannot truly understand each other, yet we do need one another to create language. Whereas Mach says that the individual, the “I” is an artiﬁcial entity which can be led back to continuity, Hofmannsthal seems to give this Machian unsalvagability of the I his own spin:

Das Individuum ist unaussprechlich. Was sich ausspricht, geht schon ins Allgemeine ¨uber, ist nicht mehr im strengen Sinne individuell. Sprache und Individuum heben sich gegenseitig auf.194

The “I” cannot be expressed and therefore not saved, however, many “I”s can create a community.

Language is a social phenomenon, therefore, according to Hofmannsthal, it is Morality and Language also a construct of morality:

Die Sprache (sowohl die gesprochene als die gedachte, denn wir denken heute schon fast mehr in Worten und algebraischen Formeln als in Bildern und Empfindungen) lehrt uns, aus der Allgemeinheit der Er- scheinungen einzelnes herauszuheben, zu sondern; durch diese willkürliche Trennungen entsteht in uns der Begri↵wirklicher Verschiedenheit und es kostet uns Mühe, zur Verwischung dieser Klassifikationen zurück- zufinden und uns zu erinnern, daß gut und böse, Licht und Dunkel, Tier und Pflanze nichts von der Natur Gegebenes, sondern etwas willkürlich Herausgeschiedenes sind.195

There is no good and bad, there is no light or dark; all our concepts are just social constructs that do not coincide with reality. Our reality is ordered by the terms we use. Again, one is reminded of Nietzsche and the moral dimension of language. Nietzsche negates the possibility for objective truth because of the boundaries of language. It is a social construct and an entity that we use to lie to ourselves. In a way, Hofmannsthal also asserts that we use it to lie to ourselves196 and expresses a surprisingly strong moral relativist stance: there are no natural (moral) categories, only the ones in our language. In an almost too polemical style for the otherwise aloof, impersonal writer,197 Hofmannsthal investigates the moral ambiguity of language in his short observa- tion198 Ironie der Dinge further. The essay is based on the quote:

193Undated 1905 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.465. 194August 1921 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.560. 19521.03.1891 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.324. 196See, for example the long quote on page 38. 197His aloofness is, according to Hermann Broch, an attempt of the denial of the “I” which can be seen throughout his work. Broch. 198It is one of three short essays published under the title Drei kleine Betrachtungen.

39 Nach einem unglücklichen Krieg müssen Komödien geschrieben werden.199

This almost aphoristic sentence leads Hofmannsthal to philosophize on the irony of life and the problems of his country after a war, where an intellectual, a man of the word so to say, earns less money than a worker.200 The word has value only when acountryisnotlyinginshambles;otherwise,thecommodityisalwaysmightier than the pen.

Language There is, however, a major problem with a societal communion through lan- and Society guage even when the country is not lying in shambles. In his second small observation, Der Ersatz f¨urdie Tr¨aume,asadpieceonhowcitylifecripplestheability to dream, Hofmannsthal condemns language as the tool of society:

Und im Tiefsten, ohne es zu wissen, fürchten diese Leute [die Pro- letarier] die Sprache; sie fürchten in der Sprache das Werkzeug der Gesellschaft. [...] Uber¨ dem Vortragssaal steht mit goldenen Buch- staben: ,,Wissen ist Macht”, aber das Kino ruft stärker: es ruft mit Bildern. Die Macht die ihnen durch das Wissen vermittelt wird, - irgendetwas ist ihnen unvertraut an dieser Macht, nicht ganz überzeu- gend; beinahe verdächtig. Sie fühlen,das führtnur tiefer hinein in die Maschinerie und immer weiter vom eigentlichen Leben weg, von dem wovon ihre Sinne und ein tieferes Geheimnis, das unter den Sin- nen schwingt, ihnen sagt, daß es das eigentliche Leben ist. [...] Diese Sprache der Gebildeten und Halbgebildeten, ob gesprochen oder geschrieben, sie ist etwas Fremdes. [...] All dies läßt eher eine Verzagtheit zurück, und wieder das Gefühl,der ohnmächtige Teil einer Maschine zu sein, und sie kennen alle eine andere Macht, eine wirkliche, die einzig wirkliche: die der Träume [...] Ja dieser dunkle Wurzelgrund des Lebens, er, die Region wo das Individuum aufhört Individuum zu sein, er, den so selten ein Wort erreicht, kaum das Wort des Gebetes oder das Ges- tammel der Liebe, er bebt mit. [...] Vor diesem dunklen Blick aus der Tiefe des Wesens entsteht blitzartig das Symbol: das sinnliche Bild für geistige Wahrheit, die der ratio unerreichbar ist.201

The bleak quote is again reminiscent of Humboldt. Language is a tool of society, we cannot really evade its reach. In his diary Hofmannsthal puts the thought more poignantly:

Das Wort ist m¨achtiger als der es spricht.202

199Hofmannsthal apparently found it in the fragments of the German poet Novalis. von Hof- mannsthal, “Drei kleine Betrachtungen [1921]” p.183. 200p.185 201Der Ersatz f¨ur die Tr¨aume in von Hofmannsthal, “Drei kleine Betrachtungen [1921]” p.188f. 20213.07.1919 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.306.

40 Especially the lesser educated masses are thrown back and forth from the word. It is a tool that oppresses them (but not only them) and it is something that needs to be evaded somehow. Our dreams can help us, yet in city life, which is based on the word, we have forgot how to dream. The word is mightier than the individual, for it can void it.

The connection between language and society, however, is not a purely nega- Nation and Language tive one for Hofmannsthal. Just like Herder, Humboldt and Schlegel, he asserted that our national language inﬂuences how we think, i.e. that the German is more pedantic and the Frenchman more romantic because of their respective tongues. According to Hofmannsthal, you cannot separate the two concepts of language and the nation, in a diary note on his Buch der Freunde,hethereforewrotethemdown in one breath:

Buch der Freunde. Disposition Geist Von der Sprache / Nationen / Von den Menschen [...]203

A nation simply could not be disconnected from their language. Yet a language is not only the expression of the nation’s spirit; Hofmannsthal also endorses a view were language and nation are interplaying in the way that the linguistic prerequisites mold our experience of the world:

Das wir Deutschen das uns Umgebende als ein Wirkendes - die “Wirk- lichkeit” bezeichnen, die lateinischen Europ¨aer als die “Dinglichkeit”, zeigt die fundamentale Verschiedenheit des Geistes, und daß jene und wir in ganz verschiedener Weise auf dieser Welt zu Hause sind.204

He even goes as far as saying that we live in di↵erent worlds because of the di↵erent languages we speak. Hofmannsthal, however, was a literary ﬁgure and not a psychologist. Therefore it should be of no surprise that usually, when he wrote on the nation and its language, it was a literary investigation. In his speech/essay Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation, Hofmannsthal claims that a language could never be mere method of communication:

In einer Sprache finden wir uns zueinander, die völlig etwas anderes ist, als das bloße natürliche Verständigungsmittel; denn in ihr redet Vergangenes zu uns.205

203Undated 1919 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.555. 204Von Hofmannsthal, “Buch der Freunde [1922]” p.294. 205Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation [1927]”, Der Brief des Lord Chandons: Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Mathias Mayer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000) p.226.

41 Language is unsuitable for communication, because it is heavy with meaning from bygone generations. Hofmannsthal really speaks of language in the same way as the philosophers of the tradition discussed, he calls language the memory of a people, yet he gives it a very Hofmannsthalesque spin: Sprache. Volksgeselligkeit in sich. [...] Ein Volk wird durch Gedächt- nis seiner selbst mächtig. Die Sprache ist das Traumgedächtnis des Volkes.206,207 Language is not only a memory, but it is a dream-memory. This ties in with Hofmannsthal’s general philosophy which will be discussed further down.208 In his Buch der Freunde he asserts: Indem man von der Wirklichkeit irgend etwas Zusammenfassendes aus- sagt, nähert man sie schon dem Traum, vielmehr der Poesie. Anything coherent about reality leads us to dreams or poetry - we are back with language and ambiguity for nothing is more subjective than a dream or poetry.

Solutions Up until now, it has become apparent how Hofmannsthal fits in the tradition and Escapes discussed in the previous sections, however, a great philosopher is not only a person that spins further the thoughts discussed by his priors, but one who can also provide possible solutions to the problems at which he pointed. What is the way out of the problems of language that Hofmannsthal proposes? Young Loris had no scruples or problems when using language at age 20, yet he already started hinting at possible solutions. During his transition from poetry to other forms, and especially to drama (a transition which culminated in the fictitious letter: Ein Brief section 4.1.1), Hofmannsthal wrote a few plays in verse, such as the piece Der Tor und der Tod.TheyoungnoblemanClaudio,witha beautiful diction, is visited by Death who shows him how he never connected to anyone around him and was not very good at actively doing things. Death takes him away. After Claudio sighs out his soul, The Grim Reaper walks o↵stage with the words: Wie wundervoll sind diese Wesen, Die, was nicht deutbar, dennoch deuten, 20629.09.1924 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.573. 207This image of language as a dream is something that was apparently very present in the zeitgeist then. Mauthner writes: “Die Sprache (ist) der ewige Traum der Menschheit.” in Mauthner p.499, and Wittgenstein writes: “Aber ist es nicht unser meinen, das dem Satz Sinn gibt? (...) Und das Meinen ist etwas im seelischen Bereich. Aber es ist auch etwas Privates! Es ist das ungreifbare Etwas; vergleichbar nur dem Bewußtsein selbst. Wie könnte man das lächerlich finden! es ist ja, gleichsam, ein Traum unserer Sprache. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen [1953], ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 358. 208See§ section (4.2).

42 Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen, Verworrenes beherrschend binden Und Wege noch im Ewig-Dunkeln ﬁnden.209

Even though the nobleman would seem more like the autobiographical character of the play, Hofmannsthal’s language skepticism becomes apparent in the last lines of Death. He anticipated here already questions that would trouble him a decade later with Ein Brief, and follow him throughout his work. While it is not a pronounced language skepticism as later, he lets Death raise questions of hermeneutics. Why do people interpret things that should not be interpreted in radical ways? The only relief we can catch - in the bleak motif of his early work - is death.210 Only later211 Hofmannsthal would realize a di↵erent way out of language issues, a way that anticipates Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen to some extent. Where in the play Der Tor und der Tod Hofmannsthal saw the only escape of the problems of language in death, over the course of his time, he realized that language is not all there is to life. As mentioned before, Hofmannsthal did think that there was something behind language, i.e. a thought hidden behind language, and the way to reach it was through experience, however, not life-experience, but experience in a more philosophical way: the empirical intuition. The Chandos letter212 may be the best example of this idea, but also in other works, such as Das Buch der Freunde, Hofmannsthal hints towards this possibility of escaping:

Geistreicher und sch¨oner als Sprachkritik w¨are ein Versuch, sich der Sprache auf magische Weise zu entwinden, wie es in der Liebe der Fall ist.213

Love, as the ultimate human experience, is one way of escaping the unavoidable claws of our language. This is due to the fact that only love is able to disentangle the problems that are generated by language - a notion that may be seen as one of the bases of Hofmannsthal’s play Der Schwierige which will be discussed further down. This dichotomy between word and action, also came to influence Hofmannsthal’s literary aesthetics. Hofmannsthal gave a fictitious account of a conversation with the composer Richard Strauss, under the name: Die ägyptischeHelena.214 In this essay, Hofmannsthal shocks the composer when he claims that:

209Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Tor und der Tod [1893]”, Die Wiener Moderne: Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910, ed. Gotthard Wunberger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981) p.464. 210Hermann Broch called the main topics in Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre the triad: Life, Dream and, Death. Broch p.115. 211See section 4.1.2 for a detailed discussion. 212Section 4.1.1. 213Von Hofmannsthal, “Buch der Freunde [1922]” p.294. 214In which he writes about the creation of the libretto of the same name.

43 Ich mißtraue dem zweckvollen Gespr¨ach als einem Vehikel des Drama- tischen. Ich scheue Worte; sie bringen uns um das Beste[.]215

Richard Strauss is confused by the poets account; how could a play work without words? Hofmannsthal mentions a series of “Kunstmittel” that are more important than words on stage, namely:

Wie ich die Handlung f¨uhre, die Motive verstricke, das Verborgene anklingen lasse, das Angeklungene wieder verschwinden - durch Ahn-¨ lichkeit der Gestalten, durch Analogie der Situation - durch den Tonfall, der oft mehr sagt als die Worte. [...] die Kunstmittel des Musikers.216

This essay may be the text where Hofmannsthal gives the most pronounced account of his own dramatic language-aesthetics. His language-skepticism led him so far as to characterize the driving factor of a play not as the words as uttered by the characters, but in the actions they take. The defining thing in a play (and for Hofmannsthal also in life) is to use actions: “um das Gemenge ahnen [zu] lassen, das durch die Maske des Ichs zur Person wird. Darum nannten die Alten ja Maske und Person mit dem gleichen Wort”.217 Only through their actions, not through their language, can a person be more then a masque. The notion of evading the claws of language by experience returns in several of Hofmannsthal’s writings. In 1907, he published his fictitious collection of letters: Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten, by an Austrian/German who had returned to Germany after years abroad. In the first letter already, the protagonist complains that getting used again to the “Gebrauch einer Kunstsprache”218 is dicult. The diculty for the fictitious author, however, does not stem from language itself, but seems, over the course of his letters, to be a more general uneasiness with the use of language. This uneasiness, is not only a problem in use; the narrator laments that how his contemporaries use language has something unsettling:

Wie sie guten Tag sagen und wie sie dich zur T¨ur begleiten, wie sie eine Tischrede halten und wie sie von Gesch¨aften reden, wie sie in ihren Zeitungen schreiben und wie sie ihre neuen Stadtteile bauen - das ist alles aus einem Guß. Ich meine, das paßt eins zum anderen: denn in sich ist nichts, was sie tun und treiben, aus einem Guß: ihre linke Hand weiß wahrhaftig nicht, was ihre rechte tut [...] Darum sag ich dir ja, daß

215Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “”Die ägyptische Helena” [1927]”, Ausgewählte Werke in zwei Bänden II: Erzählungen und Aufsätze, ed. R. Hirsch (Stuttgart, Zürch, Salzburg: Europäischer Buchklub - Fischer Verlag, 1957) p.768. 216The last sentence is actually exclaimed by Strauss in disbelief, however, since the conversation is a fictitious account of Hofmannsthal, to express his own dramatic aesthetic, we can interpret it as his own words. von Hofmannsthal, “”Die ägyptische Helena” [1927]” p.769. 217Ibid. 218Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten [1907]”, Ausgewählte Werke in zwei Bänden II: Erzählungen und Aufsätze, ed. Rudolf Hirsch (Stuttgart, Zürch, Salzburg: Eu- ropäischer Buchklub - Fischer Verlag, 1957) p.477.

44 ich sie [die Deutschen] nirgends ﬁnden kann, nicht in ihren Gesichtern, nicht in ihren Geb¨arden, nicht in den Reden ihres Mundes.219

Hofmannsthal states in this letter that language is too much of an absolute system, in a world that has ceased to make systematic sense, an absolute language cannot exist. This thought is, in a way, the radicalization of Schlegel’s views on the system.220 Not only is a system bad for the spirit, it is also outright wrong in todays world.221 The Briefe des Zur¨uckgekehrten culminate in the account of the protagonist of having seen an exhibition of Van Gogh paintings. The sublime intensity of the colors of the paintings redeem him for the world. As in other writings of Hofmannsthal, the turning point occurs not through linguistic dalliance, but through silent experience. Only after experience, the actors can ﬁnd their way out of skepticism, and into action - this is what happened to the returner above, and to Lord Chandos below.

4.1.1 Ein Brief - Philosophy of Language

Wahre Sprachliebe ist nicht m¨oglichohne Sprachverleugnung.

- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, p.290

Hofmannsthal liked the form of the fictitious letter as a vehicle for story-line and Lord Chandos to convey his (language-)philosophical ideas. Yet, it is not the Briefe des Zurück- Letter gekehrten that engaged the posteriority, but his famous letter Ein Brief,which is “commonly regarded as the central literary document reflecting the crisis of language”.222 In this fictitious (and rather autobiographic) letter from 1902, Hugo von Hof- mannsthal writes from the perspective of Philipp Lord Chandos to his friend Fran- cis Bacon. Once a promising young author, Chandos has not written anything in the past years since he has lost the ability to think or speak about anything in a coherent way:

[E]s ist mir völlig die Fähigkeit abhanden gekommen, über irgend etwas zusammenhängend zu denken oder zu sprechen.223

219Von Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe des Zur¨uckgekehrten [1907]” p.484. 220See section (2.2) for Schlegel’s views. 221This thought is something very similar to what Adorno claims in his Philosophy of New Music, about why modern music does not work with tonality anymore. Modern society does not have clearcut structures, therefore, since music is reﬂective of culture, it cannot work with bygone systems. Hofmannsthal, one might argue, does the same for language: if modern society does not have a clearcut structure, we should not pretend language to be absolute. But more on that in section (4.2). On Adorno’s thoughts consider the introduction to Theodor W Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik [1949] (Stuttgart: Suhrkamp, 1995). 222R. T. Gray p.337. 223Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief [1902]”, Der Brief des Lord Chandons: Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Matthias Mayer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000) p.50.

45 Therefore the ﬁctitious narrator has withdrawn completely from any literary production. His problems with language, however, exceeds simple lack of production. Now, even when approached with texts he had produced himself, it takes time to recog- nize their titles:

[D]aß mich in Ihrem Brief, der vor mir liegt, der Titel jenes kleinen Traktates fremd und kalt anstarrt, ja daß ich ihn nicht als ein geläufiges Bild zusammengefasster Worte sogleich au↵assen, sondern nur Wort für Wort verstehen konnte, als träten mir diese [...] Wörter [...] zum ersten Mal vors Auge.224

Chandos entire character changed when he started doubting language. Where he once used to think that the mental and physical worlds were no opposites,225 he has completely altered his mind and considers language now to be an overestimated instrument of power (“überschätztes Machtmittel”).226 He does not even know how to consider lies at this stage, since he did not find words to punish his little daughter for telling falsehoods.227 These are questions that Hofmannsthal has dealt with all his life, as mentioned above, for if truth and morality is relative (as apparent in the aforementioned essay Ironie der Dinge,p.40),wheredoesthisleavethelie?Isn’t the lie just the ordinary medium of expression if there are no objective truths? Why should someone be punished then for lying? Now, while this essay is a fictitious account, Hofmannsthal poses questions that must have concerned him in real life. Can we live in a civilized manner without language? “Seither führeich ein Dasein, das Sie, fürchte ich, kaum begreifen können, so geistlos, so gedankenlos fließt es dahin.228 Amanwithoutlanguage cannot lead a proactive life.

Philosophical Hofmannsthal suggests two ways out of this conundrum: Chandos mentions Considera- tions one, and another one is hidden implicitly in the text: Chandos speaks of the pragmatic use of language (1) (the “romantic” way) and (2) the way through action (the “Hofmannsthal” way), is hidden in the text. The pragmatic way (1) is the one where Chandos mentions that if he stripped his language of the “aufgeschwollene Anmaßung”,229 that is the developed language of the poet and the educated masses, he could be free of his doubts. Grenier suggests that Hofmannsthal lets Chandos strive for the natural language of the lower classes - what the Romantics would have called “unverbildet” - as opposed to the “genus sublime” of the educated spirit.230 This, according to Greiner, is the

224p.47 225p.49 226p.47 227p.51 228p.53 229p.50 230Bernhard Greiner, “Die Rede des Unbewußten als Komodie: Hofmannsthals Lustspiel ”Der Schwierige””, The German Quarterly 59.2 (1986): p.241.

46 same thought that Wittgenstein developed in his Tractatus. While Greiner makes an interesting point, I do not fully agree with it. The way through action, and especially (which is still a Romantic ideal) the hallowing of the mundane, are what Hofmannsthal sees as the escape from language:

Eine Gießkanne, eine auf dem Feld verlassene Egge, ein Hund in der Sonne, ein ärmlicher Kirchhof, ein Krüppel, ein kleines Bauernhaus, all dies kann das Gefäßmeiner O↵enbarung werden.231

It is more the sublime beauty of the simple experience - and deﬁnitely of a non- linguistic experience - which is the only bliss for the poet who has lost the faculty of language. There, however, is also where Hofmannsthal and Wittgenstein conjoin again (but for di↵erent reasons than Greiner mentioned). In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes:

Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystis- che.232

Chandos found the mystical to be the sublime inexpressible experiences of every day (country)life. Therefore Hofmannsthal calls this letter:

Chandos-brief. Die Situation des Mystikers ohne Mystik.233

Hofmannsthal characterized his thoughts in a letter to his friend, the poet and playwright Anton Wildgans:

Es ist das Problem das mich oft gequält u. beängstigt hat (schon im ,,Tor und Tod”, am stärksten in dem ,,Brief” des Lord Chandos, [...]) -wiekommtdaseinsameIndividuumdazu,sichdurchdieSprache mit der Gesellschaft zu verknüpfen, ja durch sie, ob es will oder nicht, rettungslos mit ihr verknüpft zu sein? - und weiterhin: wie kann der Sprechende noch handeln - da ja ein Sprechen schon Erkenntnis, also Aufhebung des Handelns ist - mein persönlicher mich nicht loslassender Aspekt der ewigen Antinomie von Sprechen und Tun, Erkennen u. Leben.234

While writing this letter, Hofmannsthal was in the process of writing his play Der Schwierige,whichwouldonceagaindealwithquestionsoflanguageandwouldﬁnd a solution which was rather Wittgensteinian.

231Von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief [1902]” p.53. 232Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1922] 6.522. 233Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ad me Ipsum”, Reden und§ Aufs¨atze III: 1925-1929, Aufzeichnun- gen, ed. Bernd Schoeller, Ingeborg Beyer-Ahlert, and Rudolf Hirsch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1980) p.601. 234Hugo von Hofmannsthal, letter to Anton Wildgans, February 14, 1921 retrieved through: Ursula Renner, “Nachwort zu der Schwierige”, Der Schwierige, ed. Ursula Renner (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000) p.179.

47 4.1.2 Der Schwierige - Silence and Parole

Das Wort ist m¨achtigerals der es spricht.

- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Diary 13.07.1919

Theatre and As mentioned above, art was seen as the prime tool in the aesthetic and moral Philosophy education of the cultural elites, at the same time, the theatre has always been a central place in Austrian culture. Unsurprisingly, Hofmannsthal loved the play as form, and even wrote in his adolescence:

Das Drama ist die vornehmste Kunstform, weil darin am meisten ver- schwiegen wird.235

This “Verschweigen” became the center of Hofmannsthal’s play Der Schwierige.236 By 1909, Hofmannsthal had already asked a lot of questions about language, in his early play Der Tor und der Tod,inhisEin Brief,andinaplethoraofother works. In October of the same year, Hofmannsthal wrote in his diary:

Dachte über das nach, was mir vorgestern abends Stau↵enberg über die Fürstin Lichnowsky gesagt hat: Daß Sprache überhaupt eine ihr nicht gemäße (wenngleich die einzige ihr zur Verfügung stehende) Form, sich zu äußern. Kann ich verstehen. Es führt mich weiter: Sprechen ist ein ungeheurer Kompromiß, fürjedermann - nur dies wird selten bewußt, weil es das allgemeine Verständigungsmittel darstellt.237

The seed for his comedy Der Schwierige lies within this sentence: “Sprechen ist ein ungeheurer Kompromiß” - how can we ever speak with one another. How is not only conversation possible, but any action within the framework of language?

Der The way of looking into these issues lies, for Hofmannsthal, in creating a play Schwierige about a person with a dicult relation “zur Rede und zur Tat”.238 The protagonist, Hans Karl, is a man without intentions239 who deeply mistrusts language, but always agrees to do what the other characters ask from him. His nephew asks him his help to court Helene, the woman that Hans Karl (or Kari as he is called) himself loves, his former lover wants to rekindle their relationship, while her husband asks Kari for help with his marital problems; the examples could be multiplied, but it should already be apparent where the comic issues in the plot will surface. Already from the very ﬁrst scene, it is clear that the play is a comprehensive critique on the boundaries of language: when the old servant and the newly-hired

235Undated 1893 or 1894 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.372. 236Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige [1921], ed. Ursula Renner (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000). 23705.10.1909 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.502. 238Hugo von Hofmannsthal in a letter to Raoul Auernheimer on the 20.20.1921, retrieved through: Renner p.173. 239Hofmannsthal even thought about calling the play Der Mann ohne Absicht. Renner p.180.

48 one speak. Both talk at cross purposes, and, while the younger one only looks out for his own benefit, the older one explains that the best way of understanding their master, Graf Hans Karl Bühl, is by reading his body language.240 The three acts of the play continue in a similar fashion: allegorical figures241 in allegorical situations that do not really reach one another because of the problems of language, and their “dicult” (schwieriger)protagonist.ItculminatesinKarigettingengaged to Helene without them even touching once in the play, nor actually expressing their engagement in a socially required way.

What was the aim of writing the play for Hofmannsthal? The protagonist Philosophical Considera- Kari is a figure that can neither speak nor act. Renner therefore expounds that tions Hofmannsthal asks: (1) how can speakers still act? and (2), does the individual not have to sacrifice their own subjectivity to break into the social?242 At the same time, I believe that the questions of the language skeptics, questions of (3), philosophy of language more in general as discussed in section (3.2), the general questions concerning the boundaries and possibilities of language, are still acute in the play. Question (1) has gained more impetus after the second World War when philosophers such as Searle243 and Austin244 defined all utterances as actions (i.e. speech acts). Hofmannsthal tried a di↵erent approach. As he wanted to call the play first “The Man without Intention” (Der Mann ohne Absicht), he thought to put the intention in the center of our linguistic utterance. Any speech act with no (own) intentionality will be riddled with parapraxis and paradox.245 Hofmannsthal expounds this thought in his diary:

Das einzelne Wort, die einzelne Geb¨arde ist nichts wert. Wir ertragen keine minder komplizierte Botschaft mehr als die eines ganzen Wesens. Dies auch auf geistigem Gebiet: Beethoven, Nietzsche. Die ganzen Hieroglyphen wollen wir lesen.246

Words without intention cannot be understood, we always need to understand the whole “hieroglyph” that is the person (with all their intentions and ﬂaws). This explains that, when Hans Karl approaches Helene on behalf of his nephew, his

240The old servant says: “Wenn er anf¨angt, alle Laden aufzusperren oder einen verlegten Schl¨ussel zu suchen, dann ist er in sehr schlechter Laune.” about his master Hans Karl in von Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige [1921] Act I, Scene1, p.8. 241For Hofmannsthal, anything in society can be seen as allegorical: “Das Gesellschaftliche kann und darf man nur allegorisch nehmen.” in von Hofmannsthal, “Buch der Freunde [1922]” Der Schwierige makes its metaphoric quality apparent from the beginning on: the setting is a pre-WWI Viennese society clearly set after the war. 242Renner p.179. 243For example: John R. Searle, “What is a Speech Act?”, Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black (Cornell University Press, 1965) 39–48. 244For example: John Langshaw Austin, “Performative Utterances”, Philosophical Papers (Ox- ford University Press, 1979) 233–252. 245Renner p.181. 246Undated 1907 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.490.

49 intentionless intention of helping the relative is not only foiled by the conversation, but Kari achieves not yet his own proposal but the opposite of what he wanted (or actually didn’t want) for his nephew: nothing at all.247 This conversation may not be the climax of the plot, but it deﬁnitely is one of the climaxes of language skepticism in the play. The second thing that Hans Karl says to Helene in their conversation is:

Es kommt vor, daß es einem zugemutet wird [zu reden]. Durchs Re- den kommt ja alles auf der Welt zustande. Allerdings, es ist ein bißl lächerlich, wenn man sich einbildet, durch wohlgesetzte Wörter eine weiß Gott wie große Wirkung auszuüben, in einem Leben, wo doch schließlich alles auf das Letzte, Unaussprechliche ankommt. Das Re- den basiert auf einer indezenten Selbstüberschätzung.248

This is the scene where some scholars have established a connection between Hof- mannsthal and Wittgenstein:

Der Ansatz der Sprachskepsis ist im “Tractatus” und im “Schwierigen” vergleichbar. Es ist die Frage, wie Aussagen über den Sinn oder Wert der Wirklichkeit in dieser möglich sind bzw. - in Hofmannsthals Akzen- tuierung - wie eine Position des Dauernden, der “höheren Notwendigkeit” in der Welt einander nivellierender Berechnungen erreicht werden kann.249

One di↵erence, obviously, is that the playwright Hofmannsthal asks such a question in the framework of a comic unraveling of plot, while the philosopher Wittgenstein dedicates a tractate to the question. More importantly, however, is the di↵erence between the standpoint of the philosopher and the one of the poet contrasted by their di↵erence in emphasis: Wittgenstein, after all, is a language philosopher and logician, and puts his focus on truth and meaning. For Hofmannsthal, the problem has much more of a psychological dimension: all speech is a self-overestimation. This leads us also to, what I labeled above as question (2), the sacriﬁce of subjectivity in the sociality of conversation. Graf Altenwyl, Helene’s father, expresses this problem as a crisis of his generation:

In meinen Augen ist Konversation das, was jetzt kein Mensch mehr kennt: nicht selbst perorieren, wie ein Wasserfall, sondern dem anderen das Stichwort bringen. Zu meiner Zeit hat man gesagt: wer zu mir kommt, mit dem muß ich Konversation so führen, daß er, wenn er die Türschnallen in der Hand hat, sich gescheit vorkommt, dann wird er auf der Stiege mich gescheit finden. - Heutzutage hat aber keiner, pardon

247Von Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige [1921] Act II, Scene 14, p.106↵f. 248p.107 249Greiner p.239↵.

50 f¨ur die Grobheit, den Verstand zum Konversationmachen und keiner den Verstand seinen Mund zu halten [...]250

Conversation should not be self-presentation and ostentation, but a mutual process. The Selbstüberschätzung that Kari laments later, is not an overdose in self confidence, but rather a belief that what one says is important (in any way) and understandable. Wittgenstein’s private language argument seems to be anticipated here - one person can never be enough in a conversation, it always takes a group to lift utterances to language. This can only be done by sacrificing one’s own subjectivity to break into the social. However, Hofmannsthal gives a slightly di↵erent spin than the famous Austrian language philosopher does; for Wittgenstein it is a language specific argument. Hofmannsthal investigates this sacrifice as something more: we want to read the whole “hieroglyph” that is one person, with all their linguistic and non-linguistic acts.251

4.2 Hofmannsthal’s General Philosophy Gut und B¨osehat keine Gewalt: ich glaube sie nicht, weil ich sie nicht vom vitalen Urgrund des Erlebnisses her empfangen habe.

- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ad Me Ipsum p.624

Hofmannsthal did not choose the genre of the play only to convey his philosophical How to philosophize? ideas. In his Philosophie des Metaphorischen,heassertsthattheformofthe Platonic dialogue should be revived, in more timely, modern garbs:

Man müßte eine anspruchslose und wenig pedantische Form wählen. Etwa den platonischen Dialog, [...] Zwei oder drei recht moderne junge Menschen, unruhig, mit vielerlei Sehnsucht und viel Altklugheit; und auf den Boden der großen Stadt müßteman sie stellen, der aufregend bebt und tönt wie Geigenholz.252

The Platonic dialogue is a form befitting philosophy since it always presupposes an antagonist. In his third observation SchöneSprache, Hofmannsthal defines the ideal language as one that always stays in contrast with another individual:

Auf Kontakt mit einem idealen Zuhörer läuft es [...] hinaus. Dieser Zuhörerist so zu sprechen der Vertreter der Menschheit und ihn mitzuschaf- fen und das Gefühl seiner Gegenwart lebendig zu erhalten, ist vielleicht

250Von Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige [1921] Act II, Scene 1, p.70. 251It should be noted, however, that Wittgenstein does not disregard the non-linguistic side of the “hieroglyph”, he just adds it to the argument, while Hofmannsthal distinctly separates the two. Additionally it should be noted that Hofmannsthal sees language as something very negative when compared to Wittgenstein. 252Hugo von Hofmannsthal Philosophie des Metaphorischen, retrieved through: Magdolna Orosz, “’Aber was sind Farben wofern nicht das innerste leben der Gegenst¨ande in ihnen hervorbricht!’ Hugo von Hofmannsthals ’Farbenlehre’” (2006): footnote 5.

51 das Feinste und St¨arkste, was die sch¨opferische Kraft des Prosaikers zu leisten hat.253

A deﬁnition which explains why Hofmannsthal has been interested in the play, the dialogue254 and other forms that require an ideal adversary.255

General Considering Hofmannsthal’s view on language, there is one important observa- Philosophy tion to be made: the problem of language is always connected to the problem of the human being in this world.256 In Ad me Ipsum, Hofmannsthal tried to motivate his own literary output on a autobiographical and philosophical level. In an entry on his play/libretto Elektra, Hofmannsthal gives, what some scholars have claim to be the main motivation of Hofmannsthal:257

Gehalt: Ubergang¨ von der Prae-existenz zur Existenz: dies ist in jedem Ubergang¨ jedem Tun. Das Tun setzt den Ubergang¨ aus dem Bewußten zum Unbewußten voraus.258

For Hofmannsthal, everything we do in life is only an attempt to break out of or initial state, of pre-existence, and to get into existence. 259 Pre-existence He defines pre-existence as a “glorreicher, aber gefährlicher Zustand” which can be seen as the unreflected, conscious initial state260 of the human. In this state, we still have a belief in the wholeness of the world surrounding us. In a sense, Hofmannsthal is echoing Schlegel here, when Schlegel said:

Es ist gleich tödlich für den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also wohl entschließen müseen, beides zu verbinden.261

Hofmannsthal would have developed the very same thought as follows: we have asystemwhichweneed,andwhichis“glorious”forbeingwhole.Yetaswe (intellectually) mature, we start to understand that the world is not a simple, whole entity, and we lose this unabated belief in the entirety and notice that we cannot support artiﬁcial systems in the random world of nowadays. Hofmannsthal expresses262 this problem with the escape from pre-existence and an old world that is whole in works like the Briefe des Zur¨uckgekehrten;hedid not choose the protagonist accidentally to be a traveler that only returns after

253“Schöne Sprache” in von Hofmannsthal, “Drei kleine Betrachtungen [1921]” p.194. 254Of which he wrote many on literary theory, for example. 255This may also be the reason why Hofmannsthal never wrote longer narrative fiction and could never finish the fragment of his novel Andreas. 256Richard Brinkmann, “Hofmannsthal und die Sprache”, Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 3 (1961): p.71. 257In Greiner, p.228; or Brinkmann p.72f. 258Von Hofmannsthal, “Ad me Ipsum” p.611. 259Von Hofmannsthal, “Ad me Ipsum” p.599. 260As opposed to the reflected, unconscious state. 261For more on Schlegel consider section (2.2), this quote in: Schlegel p.82. 262As hinted towards in section (4.1).

52 decades abroad to the realms of his youth. The returned protagonist was a child in pre-existence then, believing in a pastoral Germany from the sketches of Albrecht Dürer, he realizes upon his return, that, while how they speak “paßt eins zum anderen”, i.e. everything seems like to be a system which fits, in reality their left hand does not know what the right hand does.263 Hofmannsthal seems to even lament an entire people to be stuck in the phase of pre-existence. The problem is that while they speak, they seem to assume a “fitting” world, yet our world is random.

If pre-existence is so glorious and dangerous, how should we understand exis- Existence tence? We should see Hofmannsthal’s notion of existence a bit like the Socratic “I know that I know nothing”264 - Brinkmann explains that for Hofmannsthal: “[muß] das höhere Wissen [...] gewonnen werden zunächst um den Preis der Auf- gabe sicheren Wissens”.265 In this light, a di↵erent vantage point is added to Hof- mannsthal’s language skepticism: the unbroken faith in language is a symptom of pre-existence, by noticing its boundaries, by understanding the faults of language, we can surpass this initial state of being. Thus Hofmannsthal writes at one point: Exzessive Skepsis hat auch etwas Dummes. Man wird immer im Netz gefangen - außer wo man handelt - da wird man erlöst [...].266 Which leads us back to the escape from the claws of language through the realm of action.

Hofmannsthal’s philosophy of language has already been discussed at length in Mach and Hofmannsthal section (4.1), it may therefore be interesting to also look into some di↵erent aspects of his general philosophy and how they tie in with the philosophy of language. In his essay on the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, Hofmannsthal deﬁnes the symptom of his generation as “Wir schauen dem Leben zu”.267 Agenerationof spectators and (self-)psychologists has been raised, according to Hofmannsthal, that preferred “die Analyse des Lebens und die Flucht aus dem Leben”,268 but could not act itself. While this reservedness of the people hindered them from escaping the state of pre-existence, it is also an interesting problem in light of Hofmannsthal’s Machian ontology.

263Von Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten [1907]” p.484. 264As known in popular culture, the original meaning is slightly di↵erent. For example in: Plato, “Apology”, Euthyphrio - Apology - Crito - Phaedo - Phaedrus, ed. and trans. Harold North Fowler (Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1914) 21d. 265Brinkmann p.74. 266Undated 1927 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.590. 267He continues with a beautiful metaphor: “Wir leeren den Pokal vorzeitig und bleiben doch unendlich durstig: denn (...) der Becher, den uns das Leben hinhält, hat einen Sprung, und während uns der volle Trunk vielleicht berauscht hätte, muß ewig fehlen, was während des Trinkens unten rieselnd verlorengeht; so empfinden wir im Besitz den Verlust, im Erleben stets das Versäumen.” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Gabriele d’Annunzio [1893]”, Der Brief des Lord Chandons: Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Matthias Mayer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000) p.24. 268p.25

53 The influence of physicist Ernst Mach on Hofmannsthal has already been alluded to in section (3.1). Mach said that only what we perceive is the reality, there is a subjective component to this world, and even a dream could be considered as real as our left hand, if it were continuous. Hofmannsthal attended Mach’s lec- tures,269 and must have clearly been impressed with this view on the world. If the impressionist can express a real world, and even dreams are real, then a languorous poet such as himself is as powerful as a god! His tragedy Der Turm, for example, is a piece where this love for the dream and implication for life becomes apparent. The protagonist Sigismund, a figure reminiscent of Hamlet, was raised in prison, and his captor would only let him out at night to marvel at the stars. He was led to believe that life is a dream and dreams are life. Later, when it comes to acting, this becomes his Achilles heel: when asked to actively do things he refuses since: Wir wissen von keinem Ding, wie es ist, und nichts ist, von dem wir sagen könnten, daß es anderer Natur sei als unsere Träume.270 Sigismunds life-skepsis goes so far that he is unable to act - he was, to use Hof- mannsthal’s image, caught in a net and found no salvation through action. Der Turm, however, was Hofmannsthal’s last great work, a work perhaps where he tried to overcome Machian philosophy. In his aforementioned collection of aphorisms, the Buch der Freunde,Hofmannsthalclearlystillwasundertheinfluenceof Mach: Indem man von der Wirklichkeit irgend etwas Zusammenfassendes aus- sagt, nähert man sie schon dem Traum, vielmehr der Poesie.271 This is also where his philosophy ties in with Mach. A dream would not di↵er from the real world in any way, if neither the world nor our dreams have any continuity anyways. It does not make a di↵erence whether we speak coherently about the world or about a dream. At another point in the same book, Hofmannsthal asserted that “alles geglaubte besteht, und nur dieses”.272 If the impression is our real world, there must be many “real” worlds, so to say, and they will often not coincide.

Mach’s con- The last aspect of Hofmannsthal’s philosophy interesting in light of the tradition cept of continuity in Hof- discussed is the problem of continuity. Mach taught that every dream is only not mannsthal considered more important in our daily lives, because it is not continuous with our other dreams; in perfect continuity, we would consider them as real as the world around us.273 Already in Hofmannsthal’s early work, for example his poem Terzinen,heplayswiththeproblemofcontinuity: 269Janik and Toulmin p.133. 270Act 5, Scene 1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Turm [1927]”, Ausgewählte Werke in zwei Bänden I: Gedichte und Dramen, ed. Rudolf Hirsch (Stuttgart, Zürch, Salzburg: Europäischer Buchklub - Fischer Verlag, 1957) p.302. 271Von Hofmannsthal, “Buch der Freunde [1922]” p.267. 272Von Hofmannsthal, “Buch der Freunde [1922]” p.259. 273Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen [1886] p.9.

54 Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt, Und viel zu grauenvoll, als daß man klage: Daß alles gleitet und vorr¨uberrinnt

Und daß mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt, Her¨uberglitt aus einem kleinen Kind.274

Or in his diary around the same time:

Wir sind unsrem Ich von Vor-zehn-Jahren nicht n¨aher, unmittelbarer eins als mit dem Leib unserer Mutter. Ewige physische Kontinuit¨at.275

Continuity plays a big part in the ontology of Hofmannsthal, yet it is not - as his questions about existence and pre-existence - a question that immediately inter- connects with his philosophy of language.

As a poet, however, it should be of no surprise that most of his general-philosophical questions are questions that interconnect with language. The entire problem of reaching existence from pre-existence is, albeit also a more general problem, something that can easily be reduced to its linguistic manifestation. As long as we still believe in the wholeness of life, in the realistic expressiveness of language, we are still trapped in pre-existence. On one hand a good state because it is easy - ignorance is bliss - on the other hand, however, it is a dangerous state because it keeps us trapped in ignorance. Existence similarly is good and bad: it is bad for it takes away all our security in life. Existence is the problem of Lord Chandos:276 As soon as we realize that language has no meaning, words will decay in our mouths like moldy mushrooms. And this hyper-skeptic approach is also the danger. “Exzessive Skepsis hat auch etwas Dummes”277 - this is also where existence is a good state: The world is like a dream; we do not question our surroundings, we believe that everything makes sense, yet as soon as we realize that it is a dream, all walls will start to look like the theatre-sca↵oldings that they are. The di↵erence is, in pre- existence we believe that the dream determines us; in existence we can determine the dream.

274Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Terzinen ¨uber Verg¨anglichkeit [1894]”, Gedichte, ed. Mathias Mayer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2009) p.21. 275Undated 1894 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.376. 276As discussed in section (4.1.1). 277Undated 1927 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.590.

55 5 Conclusive Remarks

Den Philosophen k¨ummert, was die Menchen dachten, den Physi- ologen warum und den Dichter wie (freilich jeden jedes, aber das eine eben zumeist).

- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Diary 30.01.1891

Further One question that may remain after the last section is, whether Hofmannsthal was Questions? alone in being a writer who exerted such e↵orts in hiding a philosophy of language in his texts. In section (3.3), a few important literary ﬁgures were discussed, and it was hinted towards commonalities in their thought with Hofmannsthal. While it is true that the Viennese soil begot a generation of exceptional writers, I think they all were interested in di↵erent topics, and therefore they should not be lifted onto the same ground as Hofmannsthal. Arthur Schnitzler, for example, who was mindful to the questions of language as well, must be considered more of a psychologist, than a language-philosopher. He hid many references to psychoanalysis and Freud’s theories in his works.278 In my studies I have, however, not encountered one writer who wrote as adamantly on language as Hugo von Hofmannsthal within the literary group at the turn of the century.279

Vienna and Yet, more philosophical research remains to be done in the literature of that Philosophy period in Vienna. The transformative names: Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy, Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis, Arnold Sch¨onberg in music, to name a few, are almost exclusively known, while others, such as philosopher Fritz Mauthner (discussed in section 3.1) and Hermann Bahr (discussed in section 3.2), fall through the cracks. An additional aim of this thesis was, therefore, to also promote the lesser known thinkers who deserve to be better known, and to demonstrate that a ﬁgure like Ernst Mach, who is still known as an important physicist, also had a tremendously important impact on the humanities at that time.

Hofmannsthal The main point, however, was to clearly establish a tradition and environment in the Tradition in which to place the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. From the time of the Ger- man enlightenment, through the Romantics, up until Nietzsche and his tremendous influence on Vienna, language had been a main point of focus for many philosophers. Herder, Hamann and Humboldt (discussed in section 2) launched a view on language, making it a much more prominent topic in the study of human cognition and thought: language influences the way we think, the way we perceive our surroundings, in short our entire vantage point. Nietzsche radicalized the view on language by being one of the first to show that language is just an arbitrary system.

278His famous Traumnovelle, that Stanley Kubrick turned into the movie Eyes wide Shut,is only one of many examples. 279The exception is perhaps Karl Kraus, who was discussed in section (3.2), albeit the aim of his language critique was di↵erent.

56 While Immanuel Kant was the prime philosopher reprimanded for not considering our language in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, his writing style was also in the cross-ﬁre for being too artiﬁcial and too much divorced from reality. Herder demanded a writing style that would be closest to how people spoke, closest to our natural language. Friedrich Schlegel advanced on that thought by demanding a (re)joining of philosophy and literature. An aesthetic revolution should come about in which the sciences would be included in the written arts.

The aesthetic revolution never came, but Hofmannsthal might have been a Die konservative conservative revolutionary. Noltenius calls Hofmannsthal’s aphoristic work the Revolution “Konservative Revolution”,280 a word which he misappropriated from one of Hof- mannsthal’s essays.281,282 In his essay, Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Na- tion, Hofmannsthal speaks of this kind of revolution - in the tradition of Romantic philosophy - in order to create a new national feeling through works of literature. However, I would argue that Hofmannsthal was a conservative revolutionary, but more in the Schlegelian than in Noltenius’ (or his own) sense.283 Hofmannsthal really took Schlegel’s demands to heart and conjoined literary genres with the expression of deep philosophical thoughts. The best example is surely the play Der Schwierige284 where he went into problems of speech and language. Examples have been discussed at length above. Yet, while he was a tacit ﬁghter for the Romantic aesthetic revolution, and while he certainly radicalized their thoughts on language and poetry, he clearly also was a conservative, but rather in a literal, than negative sense. One only has to consider the conservative settings and forms he used: for example in the libretto for Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier which is set almost 200 years before Hofmannsthal was born285 or his love for the letter-novel, a form that was most popular around the release of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774).

As for Hofmannsthal’s view on language; he radicalized a lot of ideas that Hofmannsthal and had been around earlier. From his early years on, when he was still writing as Language Loris,untiltheyearofhisdeathhequestionedtheplaceoftheindividualbetween language and the world. How can we express ourselves? How can we understand each other? What is language good for?

280Rainer Noltenius, Hofmannsthal, Schröder, Schnitzler. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Mod- ernen Aphorismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969) p.9. 281Von Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation [1927]” p.245. 282Apparently it was first used by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx: “Sprechen wir es o↵en aus: der Aufstand von 1830 war weder eine nationale Revolution (er schloß drei Viertel Polens aus), noch eine soziale oder politische Revolution; er änderte nichts an der inneren Lage des Volkes; das war eine konservative Revolution.” about the Polish revolution in 1830. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, “Reden auf der Gedenkfeier in Brüssel [1848]”, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972) p.523. 283Well, since he instituted the Salzburger Festspiele, the epitome of Austrian high-culture, and is still regularly played on stages, even his kind of revolution could be argued for. 284As discussed in section (4.1.2). 285The designated time is: “In Wien, in den ersten Jahren der Regierung Maria Theresias.” Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Rosenkavalier [1911] (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2008) p.5.

57 Language is an obstruction in our endeavor of breaking out of our initial state of pre-existence, the view of a world that is systematic and makes sense, into the more reflected, almost Socratic, denial of knowledge and systematicity in existence. Im Gleichnis kommt das ,,Glied” des Denkens zum Eigenleben, und es wird ein Teil von dem Raub, den das Sprache gewordene Denken am Leben begeht, diesem rückerstattet.286 This diary entry may be seen as the defining aphorism for Hofmannsthal’s view on language. There is a world, which is more or less real and perceivable, but there is also language, “das große Werkzeug der Erkenntnis” and “das große Werkzeug der Verkennung”.287 Language constantly stands in the way of cognition, but it is also the only tool we have to reach enlightenment. Hofmannsthal knew Nietzsche well,288 and this is probably also where he was introduced into a more moral stance of language critique. Good and bad are concepts of language; mere observation does not give evidence for anything of that sort.289 There are impressions, and then there is language - which is necessary for expression - but language can also stand in our way of any kind of philosophical development.290 This is perhaps even the real motivation for writing the famous Chandos-letter Ein Brief -theworldoflanguagedoesnotmakesense;letusreturn to a world of simple sensory input and countryside life.291

The Austrian Hofmannsthal was a revolutionary as a literary figure in his view on language Schlegel and how he lifted its treatment out of - for whats expected of a literary figure -amereaestheticlevel.Similarlyhewasarevolutionaryinthat,despitehis present reputation for the easy, enjoyable, character of his operas, he would not have written for the audience alone, but only if it would not be inconsistent with his own artistic vision. In Ad me Ipsum,hewrites:“IchverließjedeFormbevor sie erstarrte”,292 where the erstarren is referring rather to the abilities to convey information. Therefore he stopped writing poetry in his adolescence, because he had overcome the genre, overcome the form. At one point he even said that had he died after his last play in verses, he would have had a complete biography,293 286November 1925 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.582. 287Undated 1896 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.413. 288He even translated some of his work into French. Mathias Mayer, “Nachwort zu Hof- mannsthal’s Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte”, Der Brief des Lord Chandons: Schriften zur Literatur, Kultur und Geschichte, ed. Mathias Mayer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000) p.259. 28921.03.1891 von Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen” p.324. 290The quote I am referring to, as found on page 39, is also were Hofmannsthal explicitly holds a view similar to the Wittgenstein of the Philosophische Untersuchungen. Hofmannsthal calls our linguistic classifications arbitrary; Wittgenstein calls this the “grammatische Fiktion”. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen [1953] 307. 291The countryside is also a very important image for§ Hofmannsthal, since unlike in the city, people on the countryside can still dream, and “Träume sind Taten”. von Hofmannsthal, “Drei kleine Betrachtungen [1921]” p.187. 292Von Hofmannsthal, “Ad me Ipsum” p.624. 293Mathias Mayer, “Nachwort zu Hofmannsthal’s Gedichten”, Gedichte, ed. Mathias Mayer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2000) p.103.

58 for he would have achieved everything of one genre. Over the next 30 years, he distinguished himself as a playwright, an essayist, and even released a collection of aphorisms for his friends. If he had not been taken away in his 55th year by asuddendeath,whoistosaywhetherhewouldhavegrownboredoftheplay and tried out the philosophical tractate? However, one thing is clear: Hugo von Hofmannsthal was the Austrian equivalent of Friedrich Schlegel,294 and he might have been the greatest implicit philosopher Austria ever had.

294The stress on one of the many intellectual godfathers of Hofmannsthal may seem strange at this point, yet I do believe that there may be good reasons to actually dedicate a further study to the comparison of the two. Both were literary ﬁgures that wrote essays concerning culture and aesthetics, concerning old masters and contemporary writers. They both liked similar forms - one only has to think of the similar nature of the Athenaeum and the Buch der Freunde -however, the connection is rather a literary than a philosophical one, therefore it was not so interesting for the present purpose.

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