A World Past Logic

...And, to be sure, if one can somehow imagine Wittgenstein rising out of the mists of the Cam with no past at all, if one can ignore a good half of his writings that do not fit in with the stereotype, and if one can dismiss the moral intensity of the man's daily life by adopting him into the grand company of tolerated English eccentrics, then the Pears book will be sufficient...

...The city bred such figures as: Adolf Loos, the first and possibly greatest of the functionalist architects, who tried to trim the visual irrelevancies from Viennese life...

...Apparently, too, in the process of assembling and arranging this material, the character of their book changed from the portrait of an individual to the picture of a cultural milieu...

...It is obvious that the two authors, once they set about their task, were fascinated by the wealth of data they uncovered...

...Arnold Schonberg, determined to return music to its essential musical nature...

...The Hapsburg capital, where the most vital artists and writers were struggling against the stifling falsehoods of absolutism and Viennese gemiitlichkeil, gave Wittgenstein his aims of philosophic liberation...

...In 1953 the posthumous Philosophical Investigations appeared, and seemed so disturbingly inconsistent to those who had accepted the Cambridge notion of Wittgenstein as Russell's most brilliant disciple that they were inclined not to explain it so much as to explain it away...

...On the contrary, say Janik and Toulmin, he encouraged us to make the leap into a realm where logic and language yield to imaginative vision...

...Yet it is the vision of Vienna as a center of culture in cataclysmic change that really brings Wittgenstein's Vienna to life—not least because we are now conscious of living in the darkening twilight of that avant-garde period to which the Viennese contributed so much...

...Though Wittgenstein was greatly indebted to Moore, Russell and Frege for his logical methods, his actual philosophical ideas, they maintain, were derived not from his Cambridge associates but from the circles he knew in his Viennese youth, and from his observation of the breakdown of the fragile structure of power and lies holding the Austro-Hungarian Empire together...

...Vienna, where Freud, Schonberg, Kokoschka, Klimt, Musil, Schnitzler, and Wittgenstein were working at the same time, often in close association, was equally important-and had a special significance because of the peculiar truthlessness of conventional life there...

...Seminal writers and thinkers, they insist, can only be understood by studying the world that is manifested in their work, and by charting the "cross-interactions" between the political, cultural and social events that form the backgrounds to their careers...

...This work is a fascinating, well-developed revisionist view of Wittgenstein, more attractive than the arid portrait that emerges from the book by Pears and-although much of the evidence is circumstantial?clearly nearer to the truth...

...One cannot but find persuasive the evidence Toulmin and Janik offer that in Wittgenstein's view the great truths were beyond words, that only a leap of faith into a world past logic would enable us to fulfill our moral beings...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature" The problem of Wittgenstein's antecedents is a legitimate one for a cultural historian, or for anybody who is interested in one of the more enigmatic figures of our time...

...The case for the placement of Wittgenstein in the English tradition-as the precursor of the sterile and narrow professionalism currently passing for philosophy throughout the Anglo-American world—was presented recently with as much strength as can be mustered for it in a study by David Pears, published as a volume in Frank Kermode's Modern Masters series...

...Our error has been to assume that in showing us the limitations of language and logic he was suggesting that the boundaries he drew could not be overleaped...

...Far from seeking with puritan intellectuality to limit the aims of philosophy to the minimal propositions a critical examination of language allows us, Wittgenstein proposed that the most profound truths are those that cannot be stated in explicit and logical terms...

...Toulmin, who was Wittgenstein's student, and Janik, who began by inspecting the intriguing links between Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer, base their argument largely on a consideration of the philosopher's early background...

...their subject became a hero dwarfed by his stage...

...His public career, pursued mainly in England, led naturally to the view that Wittgenstein was a thinker who honed down the function of philosophy to a logically ruthless examination of the linguistic basis of propositions...

...At the same time, he was a man of agonized spiritual vision, comparable to Kierkegaard and Tolstoy?both of whom he admired...

...Their book—for those who accept its compelling interpretation-reveals that English academic philosophers like Pears have merely succeeded in standing Wittgenstein on his head...

...Like his predecessors and acquaintances, Kraus and Loos, he sought to bring men back to true values by criticizing false means of expression, whether visual or tonal or verbal...

...Indeed, perhaps the most noteworthy of Janik and Toul-min's achievements is an act of cultural-historical readjustment: They remind us that, for all its coruscating brilliance, Paris between 18701914 was not the only center of artistic and intellectual revolution...

...and Karl Kraus, the satirist whose aim was to reveal—long before Orwell made a fresh start on the same task—the corruption of language by false values...

...It is not sufficient for Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, who marshal a convincing combination of evidence, argument and conjecture to demonstrate how simplistic that picture is, how it fails to give a complete and just idea of a thinker who remarkably bridges the gap between the world of classic modernism and the world of today...

...This leads them into an investigation of the intellectual climate and landscape of pre-1914 Vienna, whose maze of paths they follow with explorers' enthusiasm...

...Wittgenstein's real roots were in Vienna, not in Cambridge, and he can be described with no great manipulation of the facts as an ethical philosopher, a deeply committed moralist in the Continental tradition...

...He arrived at Cambridge in 1912, found elements in the teachings of Frege, Russell and G. E. Moore to which he responded, and produced the celebrated Tractatus Logico-Philoso-phicus, with its puzzling final propositions...

...He was, unquestionably, a logician and a philosopher of language -and one of the most brilliant in either field...