Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 387-390

David S. Luft, Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003; xiv+257 pp.; ISBN: 0226496473 (hbk.); LC call no.: DB851.L84; US$ 35.00

David S. Luft is one of those historians for whom literature (still) carries a considerable weight for the comprehensive portrayal of a certain age. Although his area of research, that is, the intellectual history of Central Europe, with a particular focus on Viennese modernism, offers an outstandingly diverse array of scholarly and artistic accomplishments, Luft has always been sensitive to its literary heritage. An appropriate example of how Luft understands the two-way relationship between text and context may be found in his 1980 study, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1942, where, as the title suggests, the analysis of Musil's work is placed within the greater framework of (Central) European intellectual history. In this most recent book, Luft does what he knows best: Eros and Inwardness… is equally a survey of three remarkable Austrian writers and of the culture that produced them. As such, Luft keeps an illustrious company with other scholars who share his interests: William M. Johnston, Alan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, and Carl E. Schorske, to name only a few of the most influential. At the same time, Luft's book carves out its own distinctive room within a rather abundant scholarship on Viennese modernism by focusing on what its author felt to be unfairly overlooked in the English speaking research. While Robert Musil has already been acknowledged as a legitimate member of the literary pantheon of European modernism, Otto Weininger has either remained in the shadow of Freud or downright been accused of misogyny and/or anti-Semitism. At the other end, Heimito von Doderer is barely known to the North-American reader. [end page 387]

The main thread that weaves Luft's analysis into a coherent whole is the theme of gender and sexuality, which, according to Luft, may be regarded as central, not only common, to the works of Weininger, Musil, and Doderer. For Luft, their discourse on gender and sexuality, informed by the distinct background of the Austrian intellectual landscape as it was, is indicative of the different ways in which the three writers responded to a state of political and cultural crisis, the decline of liberalism in the second half of the 19^th century. It is Luft's contention that Weininger, Musil, Doderer's "lives and writings constitute a postliberal critique of liberalism from within the liberal tradition" (4). In the opening chapter of the book, "Science and Irrationalism in Vienna 1848-1900," Luft describes the political and intellectual milieu whose specific features left an indelible imprint on the lives and works of its witnesses. The chapter is structured in such a way as to emphasize the essence of what Luft believes to be the core of Austrian intellectual life in the nineteenth century and which distinguishes Vienna from its model and archrival Berlin, that is, the "combination of scientific materialism and philosophical irrationalism" (2). Responsible for the manifestation of this typical Viennese blend, as Luft points out, is the particular path that Austria followed in the years after the Enlightenment, which favored the legacy of the eighteenth-century German humanism of Goethe, Leibniz, and Wolff at the expense of the German idealist line of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. Consequently, natural sciences, biology above all, found in Austria an extremely fertile ground for development in a tradition whose ultimate illustration was the empirical radicalism of Ernst Mach. Although less interested in the political facet of Viennese liberalism than Schorske, Luft notes the importance of its rise and fall for the way in which the dynamics of this configuration unfolded. While in the 1860s and 1870s scientific materialism gained political support since its outlook fitted into the liberal rhetoric, toward the turn of the century the influence of what Luft calls "the 'other' Kantian tradition: from Kant to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche" (28) became more and more visible in the form of philosophical irrationalism. However, Luft's argument is much subtler than merely placing these two trends into a simplistic opposition. Despite its critique of the basic assumptions of scientific materialism and its awareness that the unconscious and feelings played a more important role than it had been generally accepted, philosophical irrationalism did have something in common with its counterpart: "Both… threatened liberal individualism and rationalism" (32). It is just not very clear though, at least from Luft's narrative, how scientific materialism accomplished that in the Viennese context. For Luft, the significance of philosophical irrationalism lies not only in its powerful impact on the works of Weininger, Musil, and Doderer [end page 388] but also in its fundamental concern "with gender and sexuality as well as with the relationship between thinking and feeling, consciousness and unconsciousness" (35).

In the second chapter, "Otto Weininger's Vision of Gender and Modern Culture," Luft proposes a reevaluation of the highly controversial Geschlecht und Charakter. Although one of his explicit goals is to familiarize North American readers with Weininger's work, Luft achieves more than that by revealing how, due to some internal inconsistencies, the book lends itself to various misinterpretations or, better yet, oversimplifications. Luft does not attempt to justify Weininger's beliefs, which so many critics have comfortably labeled as misogynistic or anti-Semitic, but to render their deeper motivations and thus clarify why this text appealed to some of the best minds of Weininger's contemporaries. Luft's reading places Weininger in the right context and defines Geschlecht und Charakter as an impassionate response to the excessive scientification of reality brought about by modern era and its obvious moral emptiness. "What is central to Weininger's thought is not misogyny or anti-Semitism but rather a crisis of liberal rationalism and individualism in the face of modern society" (86). This shift in emphasis enables Luft to get to the fundamentally ethical root of Weininger's study, of a Kantian origin, according to which the masculine type alone, derived from Kant's moral, religious self, displays the authentic features of a genius. Luft shows that Weininger took great pains in trying to demonstrate that, far from being a measure of social freedom, woman's genuine liberation consisted in the ultimate overcoming of her inner femininity, that is, pure sexuality. Weininger's suicide however, Luft argues, pointed out, in a rather bitterly ironic fashion, the extent to which those high hopes were not tenable in reality.

By calling Robert Musil "the central figure" in his book (x), Luft already suggests that Musil's work might be regarded as an appropriate example of how a Viennese intellectual could have handled the challenges of his time. If in his previous study on Musil the focus fell on the German component of the writer's identity, in Eros and Inwardness… Luft turns to Musil's Austrian side. In doing so, Luft connects Musil's attempt to rise above the bipolar essence of modernity, one that placed science and feeling in a complete opposition, to his native background. It is true that Musil had a solid scientific training and thus deemed empiricism worthy of a higher esteem than, say, Weininger did. It is however equally true that his dissertation on Mach was critical rather than enthusiastic. In his chapter "Love and Human Knowledge" (my emphasis), Luft chooses to emphasize the Musil's endeavors toward equilibrium in order to illuminate his integrative vision of modern culture. Musil appears as a reconciliatory figure whose discourse on gender and sexuality plays a crucial role in [end page 389] bridging the realms of thinking and feeling. The second volume of The Man without Qualities explores at great length "Musil's utopia of a possible relationship between a man and a woman" (129), which is the natural longing of any human being, painfully divided, especially in Western culture, into a half of a self. Unlike Weininger, who sought to purge the masculine self of any trace of femininity, Musil welcomed what Luft calls "an androgynous balance of gender qualities in the mind" (132).

Although the last chapter "Sexuality and the Politics of the Fascist Era" is the most biographical of all, since its protagonist, Heimito von Doderer, is virtually unknown to the English speaking reader, it also includes a detailed account of the philosophical underpinning of Doderer's mature work, particularly of his so-called Vienna novels. Luft's discussion on Eros and apperception enlightens Doderer's struggle to come to terms with his own sexual obsessions as well as the writer's desire to maintain the importance of sexuality, seen as "the most important door of apperception" (161). Doderer advocated the necessity of achieving apperception, that is, "the ability to be aware of the obsessiveness and encapsulations of the self" (158), as a way of avoiding the danger of "pseudology," by which he meant the false reality that the lack of such self-awareness may produce. Austria of the first half of the 20^th century, dominated by various neuroses and political ideologies, provided Doderer with a suitable example of the form pseudology could assume. Doderer's reflections on apperceptions, recorded in the diaries written between 1940 and 1950, mark his intellectual transition from anti-Semitism and National Socialism, what Luft calls "resistance to modernity" (139), toward a "reconciliation with modern life" (171), an attitude that underlies Doderer's latter stage of creation, including his masterpiece The Demons.

In a rather austere tone yet quite persuasively, Eros and Inwardness… examines one of the turning points in the intellectual history of (Central) Europe. Weininger, Musil, and Doderer were extremely sensitive to the topical issues of their time when gender, sexuality, and anti-Semitism came at the forefront of public discourse as the culture that shaped them crumbled before their very eyes. As such, Luft's narrative tells the same old story about the role and responsibility of intellectuals in moments of crisis.

Sorin Tomuţa

University of Alberta