I Read The Tragedy of Faust: Here’s What I Learned

Welcome back.

Earlier yesterday morning I finished reading one of the crowning achievements of western literature, The Tragedy of Faust, written by the German polymath Johan Wolfgang von Goethe between 1730 and 1790.

In today’s article, I’m going to give a brief overview of Goethe as a literary and cultural figure, provide a very general outline of the plot, summarize what the play has to say about the nature of good, evil, and redemption, and conclude with some reflections of my own.

Goethe (pronounced, more or less, Gur-ta) was German novelist, playwright, poet, scientist, critic, statesman, and even theater director.

His career is, therefore, beyond synopsis and not reducible to a single work, or even a single genre of writing. In every area of intellectual life Goethe touched, he is considered a master, and, in some cases, unsurpassed.

His influence on the German language and on the trajectory of the western literary world is hard for an anglophone reader to comprehend or relate to.

Perhaps, if Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, and Mark Twain were combined into one person, this might approximate the stature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

For these reasons, his tragic play Faust holds special significance. It is a life-spanning work, begun early in his life and concluded near its end.

The protagonist, Heinrich Faust, is clearly a representation of Goethe in many ways: a doctor and a scholar, whose studies and achievements have led him to the pinnacle of the European model of enlightenment, has nothing left to conquer.

Alone in his study, his quest for knowledge has alienated him from the world: not only has he not found happiness, fulfillment, or love, but he can think of nowhere else to look. He is experiencing, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can achieve no more.”

He has followed the enterprise of truth seeking, as he understands it, to a dead end.

Late into the night, he thinks to turn to occultism. He opens a book of runes and symbols, eventually deciding to summon the Earth Spirit.

Faust may be an impressive scholar, even an authority, but he is out of his depth when the Earth Spirit materializes: he jumps with fright and cowers from it, embarrassing himself and drawing the ire of the apparition who is taken aback and disappointed by Faust’s temerity. He departs, leaving the would-be wizard dejected.

This is Faust’s lowest point: he is in fact contemplating suicide, seeing that he can no more be satisfied with academic knowledge than he can stomach the path of occult knowledge. He has nothing left.

At the last moment, however, he is interrupted by his servant, Wagner. They briefly converse, and his despair is not so much assuaged as it is dissipated. They decide to take a stroll through the town, now that the sun has risen.

It is here that the real plot of the play begins: a black dog approaches them, follows them home, back to Faust’s study, and then reveals his true identity: Mephistopheles, the devil. Or, as he describes himself, “the spirit that negates.”

After some back and forth, the world-weary and disaffected Faust sees in Mephistopheles an opportunity, and strikes a bargain with him: grant my every desire, always at my beck and call, until the moment I say “abide moment, thou art so fair.”

Faust is going to exploit the supernatural powers of Mephistopheles in one final attempt to find that which has eluded him all this time: that magical something that will finally quell his desire for more. If Mephistopheles can satisfy Faust, Faust’s soul belongs to Mephistopheles for eternity: the archetypal Faustian bargain.

The adventures that follow are humorous, grotesque, macabre, and also heartbreaking. He encounters a simple but virtuous peasant woman, Gretchen, with whom he becomes infatuated. Enlisting the dark powers of Mephistopheles, he eventually creates the necessary conditions to seduce her, and they have sex.

Because Faust is searching for the be all and end all of experience itself, however, he is not and cannot be satisfied with this, and abandons her to pursue other strange and dark phenomena with his enabling companion.

When he misses Gretchen and decides to visit her again, however, he finds that she has gone mad, and is awaiting execution. We learn that her encounter with Faust has irreparably destroyed her family, her sanity, and her life.

The sleeping potion that Faust gave to Gretchen’s mother to ensure that she wouldn’t wake up while they were having sex proved fatal.

The man that learned of their illicit rendezvous and died in a duel with Faust in an attempt to defend her honor was her own brother, Valentine.

Gretchen became pregnant with Faust’s baby and, both abandoned by him and left without any family on his account, drowned the baby and went mad. For the crime of infanticide, she is to be put to death.

While Faust is overcome with grief by what has happened to Gretchen, he does not truly love her, and is not prepared to sacrifice anything for her. He cannot save her conscience, but he tries to get her to escape the jail with him (made possible by the help of Mephistopheles). But for Gretchen, it is all over: she cannot live with what has happened, what she has done, and with the total loss of her own innocence and virtue. She stays, and dies. Faust leaves, to continue his quest.

This concludes part 1 of the tragedy. Part 2, heavily abridged in the Walter Kaufmann translation I read, concerns Faust and Mephistopheles traveling through time and to distant regions of the world, interacting with mythological and historical figures.

The play concludes with Faust, now a very old man, with the tragedy of Gretchen far behind him, now engaged in an ambitious project of land development, essentially taking on the work of civilization itself: conquering nature for the sake of human flourishing.

One elderly couple stands in his way, refusing to give up their estate to make room for his designs. He enlists Mephistopheles’ help, but his demonic companion goes too far and burns down their vineyard, killing the old couple.

For the first time, Faust expresses remorse, and is soon thereafter visited by the spirits of Want, Care, Guilt, and Distress. Care alone can reach him, and she immediately takes his eyesight from him.

It is here that Faust undergoes a sudden change: unable to see the results of his actions, he begins to direct the actions of others, not to the fulfillment of his desires, but towards what he intuitively knows to be “right” in a higher sense.

Essentially, he directs the men at his disposal to work at the limits of their ability, even the limits of their safety, in the service of work that is both beneficial and never ending. In the knowledge that men would undertake this task, at his behest, he says at last, verweile doch, du bist so schön! Abide, thou art so fair.

Faust then dies, and, before he can be taken away to hell, the sky opens and the angels remove him to heaven, where his spirit is reunited with the heavenly spirit of Gretchen.

Faust dies a reformed, enlightened man who has attained the true meaning of human life, and has exercised his accumulated power to pass it along. In so doing, his soul is redeemed, and the devil is cheated of his due.

And so the play is concluded.

Analysis

What does Faust get wrong? How does his path lead him from error to enlightenment? In what way does his ultimate realization excuse or redeem his previous errors?

Let’s start with the first glaring error: Faust is mistaken about both the nature of truth seeking and meaning.

Faust sees truth as a thing you can acquire. A commodity or currency that he stockpiles through taking on and mastering various fields of study. This is an incorrect path to truth, and I will now explain why.

The idea of seeking truth, as we understand it, could be said to begin with Socrates. There were pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece, but they did not give us methods, only specific ideas – some of them still inspire us today, most are antiquated, but none of them can be called a system of thinking.

What Socrates gave us was a method by which we could inoculate ourselves against falsehood. A method of probing into facile statements that served a kind of scalpel of logic: whatever is unclear, shallow, or contradictory is cut away by the process of inquiry.

For Socrates, truth is whatever remains after untruth has been carved away by inquiry: resistant to paraphrase, summary, or sloganeering, the truth is subtle and dignified. It is not a possession.

The purpose of pursuing truth, from a Socratic standpoint, is to purge oneself of falsehoods, to say and do nothing that you know, deep down, to be flimsy, expedient, or manipulative.

This is not what Faust has done. Faust has lived his life like a kind of academic imperialist – going from one field of study to another in the hope that his lust for conquest will one day be sated.

In other words, what he is really seeking is technical mastery. Expertise. It is fundamentally acquisitive: something is missing in his life, and he believes that once he reaches a certain threshold, or perhaps unlocks one specific secret, that he will finally be at peace.

Why is this the correct understanding of Faust? Because of the terms of his agreement with Mephistopheles. He is willing to pay the ultimate price, the eternal fate of his soul, in exchange for the one experience that will make him say “abide! Thou art so fair!”

It should be said that Faust is intellectually arrogant. He believes himself to be above his fellow man, and believes the world to be incapable of offering him anything up to his standards.

Mephistopheles frequently mocks him for this, and we see that away that the promise of instant and total wish fulfillment is instantly and totally corrupting for Faust: he becomes so infatuated with Gretchen that he begins bossing around Mephistopheles in a way that almost elicits sympathy from the reader.

This poor little devil, made to do the bidding of this petulant and impetuous man, who has lost all sense of proportion of over the prospect of, pardon me, getting laid, and who senselessly lavishes a modest peasant girl with entire treasure chests of gold and jewelry, on a scale that brings her more embarrassment, suspicion, and social alienation than delight.

And, why is Faust so obsessed with Gretchen to begin with? Because Gretchen is good, simple, and pure. She has substance, but is not learned or sophisticated. She has a simple way of life, working with her hands and caring for immediate family.

She has what he lacks: dutiful, honest work and human connection based on love and mutual interdependence. She has a real life and real relationships.

An already enlightened Faust would have met Gretchen recognized this. Would have committed himself to her and gone through the necessary steps of winning her over, and winning the approval of her family.

But Faust wants to have her, not commit himself to her. This is the entirety of the difference between Faust and Gretchen: she has commitments, he has conquests.

If we are to learn anything from what happens to Gretchen, from her sorrow and madness at having been reduced to a vehicle for sexual experience while being left to deal with the real consequences of that – her brother dying in an attempt to vindicate her honor, her mother dying from a sleeping potion, her pregnancy and subsequent act of infanticide, and all of this happening without Faust by her side – it is that the promise of effortless wish fulfillment leads to tragedy and disaster.

What is it that ultimately redeems Faust?

Let’s hear it in his own words:

This is the highest wisdom that I own,
The best that mankind ever knew:
Freedom and life are earned by those alone
Who conquer them each day anew.
Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives,
Childhood, manhood, and age lead active lives.
At such a throng I would fain stare,
With free men on free ground their freedom share.
Then, to the moment I might say:
Abide, you are so fair!
The traces of my earthly day
No aeons can impair.
As I presage a happiness so high,
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Let’s break down what this isn’t. He doesn’t find faith. He doesn’t commit himself to a woman. He doesn’t find meaning, necessarily, in charity or “selfless service” either.

What he finds is a categorical change in where meaning is sought, rather than in what. There is no longer any what at all, but a how. Not in acquisition, not in knowledge, not in experiences, not even in the nature of the rewards or consequences.

Redemption is found in the process of giving the moment one’s all, one’s total effort, with nothing held back. “Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives.” Real activity, with real stakes. Work that must be renewed daily. The opposite of accumulation, and, actually, the opposite of achievement in the way we think of it.

Faust comes to understand that no single experience or achievement or acquisition relieves the need for daily exertion toward worthy ends: his error, all along, was the belief that there is such a thing as satisfaction, cessation, or arrest.

Oddly enough, his final understanding is an echo of one of his musings early in the play:

It says: “In the beginning was the Word.”
Already I am stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,
I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind.
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?
It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force.
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The spirit helps me. Now it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act.

Faust speaks these lines moments before the black dog reveals itself to be Mephistopheles, reinforcing the blasphemous nature of the statement. What Faust’s final speech makes clear is that his emphasis on action was right all along, but not the spirit in which it was undertaken.

The deluded Faust of this early monologue dreams of the power to hold dominion over his world, but the enlightened Faust sees that only in the performance of the action is redemption to be found.

This realization stands outside of any commentary on what one should do, and toward what ends. It leaves the question of ends off the table altogether. And, it must be so: Faust has gone to the ends of the earth, backwards and forwards through time, in search of what, and has found nothing. Nothing real, nothing final.

What he finds is not quite the act, in the sense of cause and effect, in the sense of agency and mastery, but action itself: primal, atemporal, total, immersive, vigorous.

It can be said that this understanding is redemptive because it leaves no room for the corruption of one’s motives, because there is no motive. There is no reward. The total immersion in the action itself is the reward:

Freedom and life are earned by those alone
Who conquer them each day anew.

Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

PS – I explore ideas like this because it brings my life into alignment with my ideals. My inner picture of who I am and how I want to live in the world.

I share my thoughts publicly because I want to encourage others to do the same: to make the necessary changes that will bring the outer into harmony with the inner. This is happiness, self respect, and purpose.

To that end, I also create short form content on X/Twitter dealing with psychology of self development, and I’ve recently created a free 5 day educational email course on the same topic, “Self Development Cheat Codes.”

It goes over the 5 biggest mistakes people make when they decide they want to get their lives together, and I provide 15 specific frameworks to guide people along their journey. If you’d like to have more of a concrete method at your disposal, get the free materials here.

Thanks again.

I Read 4 Books On Turn Of The Century Paris and Vienna: This Is What I Learned

Well, it’s confession time.

From time to time, and sometimes on a daily basis, I like to indulge in something the kids today colloquially refer to as “nerding out”

(If you found that verbage to be “tortured,” just know I also like to indulge in “torture”).

I recently finished reading the 4th of 4 books I’d picked out some time ago, all on the subject of turn of the century Paris and Vienna.

Specifically, I read Jannick and Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Carl E. Schorske’s Fin de Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, and Roger Herbert’s Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society.

They were filled with profound insights about history, art, music, theater, human psychology, politics, and European culture in a broad sense.

The period of history documented by the 4 texts, each from markedly different angles and academic disciplines, was the transition into modernity as we know it.

From the hegemonic rule of the aristocracy to the cultural pluralism of the ascending bourgeoisie.

From a culture of ever increasing embellishment and ornamentation, to the point of obscuring the facts of a news story or even the functional purpose of a household object, to a sweeping movement in Spartan minimalism and curt, modern essentialism.

Whereas meaning was once concentrated in history, religious scripture, mythology and parables, it was suddenly available right here, right now: in depictions of street performers, in nubile ballet dancers being prepared for their auditions by their hunched, working class mothers, in the blank faces of people adapting to rapid urbanization, and in the rising black and gray smoke of trains and factories commingling with clouds in otherwise blue skies above verdant rural landscapes – similar in appearance but divergent in import.

Whereas art once strove to uphold an aspirational picture of humanity, it now began to critique, to relish the nonsensical, the absurd, the irreverent, and even the boring.

These were the ways in which the world was changing from, say, 1850-1915. The florid half-truths of Romanticism were drawing to a close, and stark geometry of modernism was setting in.

For those of us who have, in recent years, begun to ponder, often vexedly, how we got here, how our world came to be what it now so undeniably is, I recommend all of these texts: I wanted answers, and I found them.

What constitutes the bulk and the remainder of this article, then, are some of the major insights gleaned from each of these texts. These are all pieces of a puzzle foisted on me by my own inborn interests and unique path through life: they may mean something similar or totally different to you, and that’s part of what makes them worth sharing.

The Banquet Years

Roger Shattuck’s masterful text chronicles the origins of the French avant garde movement through the lens of four major figures: Henri Rousseau (a painter), Erik Satie (a composer), Alfred Jarry (a writer), and Guillaume Apollinaire (poet, playwright, and impresario to the Avant Garde). The four are each given a two part treatment – first, a biography, and second, a rigorous analysis of their work and their contribution to the overall cultural climate.

When I think about this book, what comes to mind?

The death of novelist Victor Hugo in 1885 left a kind of vacuum of power in the vanguard of French culture. The prevailing sense, at the time, could be summed up with the question “now what?” The last titan of the Romantic Era had died, and the movement, or movements that would eventually follow it had not yet materialized.

The Banquet Years chronicle a time where the arts were in a state of arrest – like a wildly creative and also rambunctious child waiting in daycare between the end of the school day and the arrival of his mother. The innovations of the four artists explored by Shattuck are innovations born of directionlessness:

Erik Satie constructed a photo album, so to speak, of short, baffling works for piano that sat in singular moods rather than undergo development. He was neither as emotive as Ravel or as fantastical as Debussy but was, rather, best described as quaint. At times melancholic, enigmatic, poignant, and even sinister, the pieces nonetheless go nowhere. Satie’s unique triumph is that he is unafraid of the boredom that pervades his music: he doesn’t reach for greatness, but is content where he is. Before Satie, you were at least expected to pretend to be reaching for the stars, even if you had none within you to guide you on.

Similarly, Henri Rousseau’s paintings show a flattened, cartoonish, and also slightly alien world. Beautiful, bewitching, mysterious, but also hard to take seriously, he doesn’t dive deeply into the moment like Degas nor does he totally withdraw into the imagination like Dali – as a visionary, he is lazy. As an iterating craftsman, however, he is industrious. Shattuck describes him as having found his mature style early on, preferring to perfect it rather than subject it to evolution. Again, as with Satie, the theme of arrest, stillness, and rumination.

In what ways did these observations contribute to my own intellectual and artistic growth?

Reading The Banquet Years introduced me to a number of important ideas.

There are many ways to develop, or even to refuse to develop, an idea. Development can be shown from a thousand feet or in an extreme closeup. You can simply get better at the things you like to do and do well, and that’s ok: you do not have to be driven by ideas of or pretensions to greatness. The idea of being free to play with and toy with a concept should always be available: it has to be acceptable to be momentarily aimless. The keyword being momentarily: briefly, and sporadically. Like the subjects of the Banquet Years, you may find yourself at not a deadend but a red light, and in those moments you should know how to daydream, lest you go mad.

Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society

Yale Professor Robert L Herbert taught this material for thirty years before writing this book, and thus delivers us the distillation of a lifetime of scholarship and teaching experience. It shows on every page. Rather than progress chronologically from the 1860s to the mid 1880s, the book is organized by different domains of life: the racetrack, the opera, the ballet, boating, seaside resorts, and so on.

Between 1850 and 1880, Paris underwent extensive structural changes that can best be described as the process of urbanization: it went from a medieval city to a modern city. The population tripled in a 30 year period, not from a “baby boom,” but from adults relocating. This had vast implications for every social and economic strata of society.

Herbert shows us how these changes were rendered on the canvases of, essentially, the big 4: Claude Monet, Pierre-August Renoir, Edouard Manet, and Edgar Degas (with only occasional mention of Morisot, Corot, and Caillebotte).

What are the big ideas and life lessons that I drew from this book?

Firstly, an entirely newfound appreciation for the craft of painting. These days, one could hardly be faulted for failing to think about the simple fact that, before photography, the painting was the primary visual record of the world. Everything is constructed by hand: the shapes, the colors, and sense of shadow, depth, proportion, perspective: it is all manufactured by the skill of the painter. Therefore, when looking at the work of a master, every aspect of a painting represents a decision that reveals something important about the painter himself, the presumed audience of the painting, and the actual objects or events depicted on the canvas.

Herbert does a great job of showing how the various socioeconomic conditions of the painters show up in their depictions of their subjects.

Renoir is fond of showing us smooth, glowing, almost cherubic faces exuding pacific tranquility. Herbert notes that Renoir is incapable of irony: he renders people as though they were actually angels, and he was arriving at last in heaven.

Monet also wants us to see a beautiful and beautified world: he idealized the new vision of Paris and its suburbs put forth by Haussman’s renovations, and uses the calculated geometry with which his world was being reorganized as the basis for his own compositions: a subtle endorsement of the changes sweeping the country.

Both Renoir and Monet were what you would call struggling artists, and they looked up at the Parisian leisure class with aspiring eyes, almost devoid of critique.

Manet and Degas, however, were both well to do and thus had not only greater access to but very different perspectives on Parisian society. There is more psychological depth, almost as a rule, with the two of them when compared to Monet and Renoir: we see real people, with their resentments, perversions, vices, pretenses, and also their elegance, sophistication, and worldliness. They are insiders, so to speak, and they are eager to tell us “how it is.”

Simply compare Renoir to Degas in their rendering of the ballet: beautiful aristocratic women leaning over the balconies on the one hand, and rich, fat, balding men waiting in the wings to receive the dancers backstage, on the other. In a nutshell, that is the difference.

What was I left to ponder?

Urbanization caused quick and drastic changes to the way people lived their lives: rather than living amongst the same 200 people for your entire life, everyone knowing you and you knowing everyone, urbanization created world where you passed by 200 brand new complete strangers every single day.

As a result, people learned to wall themselves off. Others became flaneurs: sophisticated observers of urban life. Those with the means to do so would escape the din of city life in weekend trips to quaint villages that were now seen as places for a “getaway.” You paid a premium to float about in momentary solitude “in nature” – the same nature from which cities provided safety and respite now become the quiet idyllic settings in which people recharged.

But the refreshing calm of nature, for the well to do Parisian, was a complete illusion: to actually live in the environs they merely patronized for a weekend would require a flinty ruggedness totally beyond their reach. Rapid economic growth had suddenly allowed people to rent the experience of nature on their own terms, and everyone responded to this. People who had hitherto lived as fishermen for generations suddenly found themselves taking the wealthy on little boating excursions, teaching swimming lessons, or renting out paddle boats, and buying their fish from markets.

The world was becoming the playground for the bourgeoisie, and they wanted to escape into an illusion of their own making, rather than to rule the world before them.

One cannot help but notice the link between the saturation of crowds, the larger than life expansion of the cities, and the emerging sense of alienation that follows as a direct result. A beautiful, sanitized, orderly, yet uncannily unfamiliar world lacking in warmth, in which you are never truly at home, and off of which you can never take your eyes: this is the phenomenon that was first seen by the Impressionists, but has been with us ever since. Through their artwork, we can imagine what it must have been like to experience urbanization and modernity for the first time.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

Authors Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin tackle an extremely narrow subject: the cultural milieu that produced Ludwig Wittgenstein, author of the famous and famously difficult Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (treatise on the philosophy of logic). The Tractatus has material that is both rigorously logical and seemingly mystical – while this has baffled many, Janik and Toulmin demystify Wittgenstein by situating him personally and intellectually within both the Vienna of his day, and a lineage of thinkers outside the domain of logic altogether that nonetheless account for Wittgenstein in ways logicians simply cannot.

Essentially, Viennese society in the mid to late 19th century was uniquely capable of producing great artists and intellectuals because of its restraints: most houses lacked any method of heating, and so the intellectual class practically lived in cafes during the day, all day every day. The result of this was a level of contact, communication, and collaboration between people of all different disciplines that would have been impossible even in the most open minded of universities.

Influential physicists, composers, psychologists, musicians, painters, architects, and political theorists didn’t just travel in the same circles, but could literally be found in the same salons and soirees. Wittgenstein’s family home was the site of many of these gatherings, and he was steeped in a world of a caliber most of us only dream of and almost none of us could actually contend with.

At that time, much of society was drifting into a malaise born of over saturation. The most popular genre of writing at the time, the feuilleton (a section of a European newspaper or magazine that contains light literature, fiction, criticism, and other entertaining material), had become a window into a sort of collective psychosis slowly gripping Habsburg Vienna in the midst of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Flowery and expressive language became a way of concealing and embellishing the facts of the matter, as if in service of a widespread sense of denial about the state and fate of society. While the feuilleton was the most prominent vehicle of this phenomenon, it could be seen everywhere: even basic household objects were made with such excessive ornamentation and their purpose was obscured.

This was the intellectual climate into which Wittgenstein was born, where the greatest minds of the day were concerned with a project, in each other their respective disciplines, that looked a lot like the advent of Zen Buddhism: stripping away everything but the absolute bare essentials, and militantly defending the line between substance and embellishment.

This insistence on simplicity, clarity, and minimalism, and its concomitant insistence on the admission of limiting principles could be seen in architecture, mechanics, legal philosophy, and also ethics, and this is where Wittgenstein comes in.

The authors place Wittgenstein as the culmination of a line of ethical thought spanning the works of Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and, tangentially, Leo Tolstoy: where do ethical principles come from? Do they come from religious doctrine? Do they come from logic? Are they deduced from observation of nature? Is an ethical life found in community? In the church? Deep in the soul of an individual?

Wittgenstein answered these questions by way or negation: by insisting on silence in all areas about which one cannot possibly speak clearly. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is his attempt to delineate with merciless precision the realm of what can be said from the realm of the ethical, which is entirely ineffable.

It has to be treated as ineffable to insulate it from performative language games, or sophistry. And for this reason, it is seen by some as a text about logic and, by others, as a text about ethics. In fact, it is both: he proceeds to what he believes can actually be said clearly, and we are left to infer that whatever falls outside its scope can be deemed, in terms of truth seeking, to be utterly incoherent.

Just as Zen Buddhism rejects all of the culture, pageantry, and mythology of Mahayana Buddhism to preserve the essential core of meditation, and denies the practitioner any and all satellite features (it is a bicycle, not an SUV), Wittgenstein essentially redraws the boundaries of language in a way that only permits that which makes perfect sense. The rest deserves only silence.

Fin de Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Whereas Roger Shattuck frames the French avant garde as a period of experimentation born of playful, if alcoholism-fueled irreverence, and given license by the aloofness and conservatism of the deeper reservoir of French culture that knew it wasn’t going anywhere, Carl Schorske’s rendering of the Viennese avant garde is the exact opposite: a society on the brink an apocalyptic collapse at the hands of forces they themselves set in motion and yet could not contain, their art and music like screams into the void that fell on deaf ears until long after it was too late.

If that sounds hyperbolic, remind yourself what became of a disaffected Viennese painter who unfortunately discovered a gift for oratory, a bottomless pit of hatred and megalomania, and an impressive appetite for amphetamines.

The main thrust of Schorske’s book is the illumination of a kind of backfiring magic trick: enlightenment liberalism fills a void left by the fallen Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and bourgeoisie is in ascendance as the aristocracy fades. And yet, even as society is hopefully looking to a golden age of upward mobility, rationalism, and secularism, the forces that dethroned an oppressive hegemony are yet unable to unite the forces it freed: now that power has passed from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, everyone wants their share, and more. Nobody can agree on where society should go, and nobody has a mandate to rule.

High minded principles are unable to resolve ethnic, religious, and nationalistic divisions, and so those who feel most superior in their philosophy must watch the world they were promised slip from their grasp before their eyes.

In this context, the world received the artistry of Gustav Klimt, where his female subjects represent every possible form of relationship between a rational society and the emotional, irrational dimension it simultaneously depends on and struggles to “domesticate.”

In this context, Sigmund Freud reduces the societal to the psychological: an individual can resolve within him or herself the forces that are out of control at the collective level through psychoanalysis.

In this context, Arnold Schönberg contains the chaos of the world in a musical system called Twelve Tone Serialism, where each note has to be used once before any can be repeated, where soaring emotions and spiraling anxiety are hit with the cold shower of academic rigor.

Schorske’s collection of essays are some of the most sobering I can recall: there are times when the arts, even at their peak, are more like hospice care than a true intervention. In times of instability, society does not rise to the aspirations of its intellectual elites but falls to the level of its tribal conflicts, and the arts are merely a beautiful passenger to this sinking ship, serenading all the way down.

How to conclude?

What I hope to convey here through this four part book report is the way a series of books can expand one’s knowledge in expected and unexpected ways. I had specific ideas of what I might learn from all four books, and my hopes were fulfilled. They were also greatly exceeded, both to my delight and dismay. I saw for myself how much sheer information is necessary to produce a book worth reading, a book that can actually be called a work of scholarship. Rather than satisfy my curiosity, my entree in the subject by way of these 4 volumes only increased it. Now my interest feels serious, even urgent, and it cannot be denied. This is like having a dog: both a joy and a responsibility.

Like all my newsletters, I feel as though there is far more that was demanded of the subject than I was able to deliver, but, as always,

Thank you for reading, and talk to you soon.

-Jas