Robert Weldon Whalen, Queens University of Charlotte

A Surprising Pre-History of Post-Modernism: Franz Brentano, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, and Contemporary European Thought

And so, here we are, Philppa Berry has written, beginning the new millennium approximately where Nietzsche left us a century ago. If it’s true that “post-modernism” is intimately related to the “classical modernism” of the last century, then one might well illuminate the present by excavating the birth places of the “classic modern.” Fin-de-siècle Vienna is, of course, one of those birth places, and digging there, one might well unearth remarkably “post-modern” artifacts – egos suddenly gone fluid; intense concerns with ethnicity and sexuality; stark and sudden ruptures between language and world. But such a Viennese dig would also discover one of the most central, yet least understood figures, in contemporary thought, Franz Brentano.

And Austrian by adoption, the German-Austrian-Swiss-Italian Brentano was the central figure in Austrian philosophy for most of the last third of the 19th century. A list of his students includes key figures in modern Austrian and European thought, such as Edmund Husserl, Christian von Ehrenfels, and Kazimierz Twardowski; Brentano was associated as well with Freud and other members of Vienna’s avant-garde; his concerns parallel, and sometimes intersect with, those of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Yet Brentano, despite his centrality in Vienna, has long since moved to the cultural periphery, respectfully mentioned and then typically ignored.

This paper will argue that Brentano is a key figure in the pre-history of post-modernism, and will consider Brentano from three different directions. First, it will locate Brentano within the specific Austrian and Viennese context in which he lived, worked, and thought. Second, it will trace Brentano’s relationship with the “Vienna Circle” and track his and the Circle’s ties to that strain of contemporary thought known as ‘analytic philosophy.” Finally, the paper will locate Brentano as well in relationship to Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and other “continental” and “existentialist” thinkers. Relating Brentano to Vienna, to analytic thought, and to Heidegger and others – working out this pre-history of post-modernism – will produce surprising perspectives on both post-modernism and its progenitors.

The paper is not an exercise in technical philosophy. It is, rather, an exploration in cultural history, an effort to follow one fine Austrian hand, Franz Brentano’s, in the shaping of contemporary thought. Its specific aim is to illuminate post-modernism by closely examining a key figure of classical modernism. Its general aim is that of the symposium at large: to locate Austrian culture and its creators within the context of central, and contemporary, Europe.