Wittgenstein s Tractatus and cultural crisis of Vienna fin-de-siecle

Abstract

This work aims to trace the relations between Ludwig Wittgenstein s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the cultural crises of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Although the author no longer lived in Vienna at the time of elaboration of his book, we assume that the Viennese cultural context is a fruitful key for its understanding. Our starting point is the characterization of three crises that marked Vienna in 1900: i) a crisis of values, represented by the increasing discredit regarding all Viennese social life pillars; ii) a crisis of the subject, delineated when the unit of the "I" was put in doubt, that is, at the moment such notion was believed not to exceed a beam of sensations and transitory experiences; iii) a crisis of language, marked by the questioning by intellectual and artistic Viennese milieu of language s capacity in express the inherent reality and feelings of the subject. We aim to show that the Tractatus, in accordance with its order of exposition, can offer an answer for each of these crises, that is to say, the demarcation of the limits of language; the affirmation of the solipsist or metaphysical subject s existence, which shows itself as a point without extension out of the world and whose will establishes the language; the defense of a unit across the ethics and the aesthetic domains, defined as transcendental attitudes that allow the subject, respectively, to expand or to decrease the limits of the world as a whole and to express the world seen sub specie aeternitatis