A Man with Qualities

By R.Z Sheppard

WITTGENSTEIN'S VIENNA by ALLAN JANIK and STEPHEN TOULMIN 314 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is not a household word and not likely to become one. He was one of the most demanding philosophers of the 20th century, a man who spent most of his life thinking and writing about what he concluded could not be thought or written about. His style was forbiddingly compact and aphoristic. In addition, there were his disconcerting remarks about his work being mainly a cleaning of the intellectual stables, and his ironic suggestion that what he had not written about was most valuable of all.

Wittgenstein was obsessed with the relationship between words and reality and the question of whether language clouds rather than defines what is actual. To the question, "What is your aim in philosophy?", he answered, "To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle." He was the fly, and words the sticky trap. In his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he used a rigorous logic to enclose the boundaries of language. What lay outside, he concluded, was a reality that could not be named, let alone explained. He became the patron saint of logical positivism, that dry, scrupulous wing of modern philosophy most concerned with linguistics, most scornful of the broad, uplifting phrases of the old philosophers.

Logic. If one aim of philosophy is to show a path to ethical behavior, Wittgenstein seems to have paved the way to a dead end. His own painful solution was to accept ethics as an act of faith, not logic. A bit like going around the world to get across the street. Why Wittgenstein devoted his life to pursuing the ineffable may not be explainable either, but at least it can be talked about. With caution and discrimination and color, Authors Janik and Toulmin attempt to show how Wittgenstein's theories grew out of the fertile decay of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Vienna before World War I was a heart of decadence in a glittering shell. The fusty Emperor Franz Josef ruled over a sprawling, ramshackle empire, weakened by corruption. By spending lavishly on his army, he managed to maintain the empire as what Austrian Novelist Robert Musil called "the second-weakest great power in Europe."

If the empire was a satirist's paradise, as Musil demonstrated in his mammoth novel A Man Without Qualities, it was also the most exciting intellectual center in Europe. There were Mach and Boltzman in physics, Bruckner, Mahler and Schoenberg in music, Adler and Freud in psychology. There were also dozens of writers and journalists, including the brilliant, mordant social critic Karl Kraus, whose anti-paper Die Fackel (The Torch) was dedicated to making its readers "morally aware of the essential distinction between the chamber pot and an urn."

Morals, ethics and aesthetics were closely bound in the minds of Vienna's modernists, and Ludwig Wittgenstein was born and raised at the crossroads of this culture. His father was a multimillionaire iron and steel man who also ran one of the finest music salons in Vienna. Mahler, Bruno Walter and a young Spanish cellist named Pablo Casals were frequent guests.

All the Wittgenstein children showed talent, intelligence and determination. Paul Wittgenstein, for example, became famous as a one-armed concert pianist after losing his right arm in the war. He ensured a repertory by commissioning Richard Strauss, Ravel and Prokofiev to write pieces for the left hand. During Hitler's Anschluss, a sister insisted on being jailed with other Viennese Jews, even though the Nazis, in this instance less interested in blood than iron, chose not to notice the family's partly Jewish heritage.

Among the Wittgensteins, a thread of Hebraic moral and aesthetic idealism was interwoven with the Protestant work ethic. There were ominous strains as well. Something about crumbling Hapsburg Austria seemed to demoralize many of its most gifted people. The suicide rate was high; three of Wittgen afterward.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.