Viennese Philosophy in the Shadow of Nazism

Oct. 21 2020

In the aftermath of World War I, the city of Vienna was no longer the capital of the sprawling Hapsburg empire, but of the small country commonly referred to as “rump Austria.” Yet it remained a thriving center of cultural and intellectual life. One particularly influential example was the Vienna Circle, an interdisciplinary group—its best-known member was the mathematician Kurt Gödel—interested in the relationship between language and philosophy. Deeply influenced by the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself a Christian of Jewish descent, the group consisted of both Jews and Christians, but was understood to be somehow “Jewish.” Adam Kirsch, reviewing a new book on the circle, The Murder of Professor Schlick, explains:

Moritz Schlick, who turned to philosophy after earning a doctorate in physics [was the group’s leader]. . . . Schlick’s death had nothing to do with his ideas; he was killed by a psychotic former student, Johann Nelböck, who had been stalking and threatening him for years and finally shot him, in June, 1936, on the steps of a university building. But what happened next . . . was indeed shaped by what the Vienna Circle had come to represent in the ideological frenzy of interwar Austria.

No sooner had news of the crime broken than the nationalist, anti-Semitic press began to extenuate and even to praise it as a blow against degenerate Jewish thought. Schlick was accused of damaging “the fine porcelain of the national character” and of embodying Jewish “logicality, mathematicality, [and] formalism,” qualities inimical to “a Christian German state.” One writer urged that the murder should “quicken efforts to find a truly satisfactory solution of the Jewish Question.” Nelböck, at his trial, played to this sentiment, claiming that he had killed Schlick for ideological reasons.

In this deranged atmosphere, no one was deterred by the fact that Schlick was not Jewish but, rather, a German Protestant. Some of his defamers probably didn’t know this, but others simply didn’t care, since in their eyes Jewishness wasn’t defined only by religion or ethnicity. It was also a mind-set, characterized by the modernism and liberalism they saw as sources of spiritual corruption.

The great rival of Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle at that time was Martin Heidegger, who, in Kirsch’s words, “wanted to make philosophy more like poetry, whereas the Vienna Circle wanted it to be more like math.” He was also “an enthusiastic Nazi.”

Read more at New Yorker

More about: Anti-Semitism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Nazism, Philosophy, Vienna

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023