While most people today know about the influence of London, Paris, and New York on modern thought, Vienna makes few appearances in people’s discussions. However, Vienna, and such individuals as Sigmund Freud and Robert Musil, had a profound impact on modern thinking. The intellectual scene in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire in Central Europe, in the later part of the 19th century and the earlier half of the 20th century was influenced by the acceptance of modern sciences and the reception of philosophical irrationalism.

The tradition of philosophical irrationalism that developed in the Habsburg and German lands is influenced by the diverse cultural and linguistic identities of these regions. Historiography of this region has time and again hit against the problem of writing about the intellectual tradition of a region whose territorial boundaries changed vastly over time. But historians have found ways to contend with this problem. The historian Karl Dietrich Erdmann, in his book Die Spur Österreichs in der deutschen Geschichte: drei Staaten, zwei Nationen, ein Volk?, for instance, argues that the political division and re-division of the German lands did not eradicate intellectual and cultural continuities of the people living within its territories. Ideas were transmitted within a common cultural framework rather than across borders that were remapped several times.

Similarly, the pre-eminent Austrian historian Robert Kann argues that intellectual trends such as Austrian liberalism were the product of the mixture of conservative German tradition and the Romantic Austrian movement. A united German nation at the turn of the 18th century was merely a notion and regional allegiances was the dominant form of patriotism. The Austrian Empire, on the other hand, was a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society under the sway of the Habsburg rulers. The amounts of German territories under the control of the Habsburg rulers secured Germans a dominant position in cultural and intellectual fields, and Vienna was the intellectual and political capital of this foment.

Viennese intellectuals at the turn of the 19th century were entrenched in thinking about gender and sexuality in ways distinct from the rest of Europe. People who wrote about sexuality and eroticism in 20th-century Vienna had the irrational in mind. The irrational became relevant with the “rediscovery” of the female deities Aphrodite and Athena and a modern interpretation of what they represented: female sexuality and female wisdom and aggression respectively. The famous historian Carl Schorske provides an example of this fascination for the feminine in his discussion of the Ringestrasse project which was a program of beautification and aesthetic expression rather than a utilitarian vision of Vienna:

In 1860, the first leaflet presenting the development plan to the public recorded iconographically the ideology of the new sponsors. The meaning of the female figures flanking the map is clearly stated in the legends: on the right, ‘Strong Through Law and Peace’ (i.e. not through military force); on the left (where the spirit of art is literally dressing her mistress, Vienna), ‘Embellishment through Art.’ (Schorske, 31)

The world-renowned originator of the technique of psychoanalysis, the neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939), looked at the sexual experience as subjective and irrational. He argued that these subjective irrational experiences influenced behaviour more than rational thought processes. In a similar way, the Austrian thinker and novelist Robert Musil (1880 to 1942) attempted to understand the human condition in the modern world of the 20th century. Musil tried to balance the importance of the rational and the irrational and to integrate them. He grappled with creative ways of writing about sexual feelings and the sexual experience. But Freud’s and Musil’s focus on the irrational were not unique. Irrationalism was, in fact, a philosophical legacy that leaked into all fields of sciences and arts in fin-de-siècle Vienna and can be traced back to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 to 1860).

Connected by the legacy of philosophical irrationalism Schopenhauer, Freud, and Musil argued that human beings are made up of irrational drives and impulses that govern their actions. Although, most humans feel that they are perfectly rational and can control their actions through rational thought and logical evaluation, the reality is that human beings are simply a pool of feeling and experiencing organisms whose actions do not fall into rational categories and are not controllable. So, in essence, the intelligent human is no different from an insane human when it comes to which of their actions are under their control and which are not. Freud’s works have been analysed extensively and studied by psychologists as well as literary theorists, but a lesser-known fact is that he was part of a definite history of philosophical irrationalism which emerged as a distinct intellectual pattern in the Habsburg German lands.

In Civilization and its Discontents, for instance, Freud attempts to write a narrative about the history of humankind. This history is written from a psychoanalytical perspective and not from a religious viewpoint. Freud argues that the source of unhappiness for people is human civilization itself. Human civilization is created such that it inhibits the desires of individual members of society. The outcome for most people is a feeling of guilt associated with their desires which are either repressed or expressed through channels that are not acceptable in civilized societies. Guilt is the predominant emotion that rankles in civilized societies creating essentially citizens who are, as the title of his work suggests, discontented.

Freud further argues that to become a part of civilization, members had to submit to the authority of the male leader who enjoyed sole privileges of procreation and primary access to food. Under this system, the other members had to suppress their desires since its uninhibited expression meant punishment. Suppression, first imposed by external authority and later imposed by internalization of authority in the form of conscience, causes unhappiness among members of civilized societies. The result is a continuous struggle between individual desire and repressive forces that serve to contain them, and this is the cause of unrest in societies.

Freud’s works provided a valuable perspective about the forces behind the two world wars of the 20th century. However, Freud’s unique contribution to the fields of literature, psychology and sociology stems from the fact that he created a framework about talking, thinking and writing about unconscious forces and instincts that was until then not articulated. In other words, Freud offered a way of conversing about such aspects of human societies as sexuality, feeling, and desires that had hitherto not found adequate expression in literature. There is a lot written on Freud across the fields of psychology, literature, sociology, history and philosophy and more will undoubtedly be written.

The scholarship on Musil, however, is restricted to scholars focusing on Austrian literature. His three-volume novel, which remains incomplete, The Man without Qualities is regarded as a modernist masterpiece alongside those of the Irish modernist James Joyce (1882 to 1941), the French novelist Marcel Proust (1871 to 1922), and English feminist writer Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941). Musil's other fictional works include Young Törless (1906), a story about brutal bullying in an upper-class Austrian military school; The Perfecting of Love, a novella which explores the inwardness of a woman (1911); and Three Women: Grigia, The Portuguese Lady, and Tonka (1924), short-stories exploring three heterosexual relationships with different outcomes. Through the depiction of characters constantly engaged in a search, Musil’s fictional works suggest that solutions, if they exist, are found in the domain of the ambiguous and not in the domain of morality.

Musil was more than a novelist. He was a philosopher, essayist, and an engineer. And Musil was also shaped by Schopenhauer’s philosophical irrationalism. Musil’s body of writings as well as Musil himself were cultural products of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and his works were unique in their ability to grasp the irrationalist tendencies of the period. Having lived from 1880 to 1942 in Vienna, Musil witnessed the culmination of one World War and the acceleration towards another. His life and work were profoundly affected by World War I (1914 to 18) as well as by the rise of Nazism. When the Nazis took over Austria in 1938 with the Anschluss, Musil and his Jewish wife Martha Marcovaldi escaped to Switzerland.

Musil's works reveal a remarkable, almost prophetic, insight into the violent undercurrent and decadent atrophy of European culture. His critique of dichotomies unearths his concern about the dominance of petrified, irrational ideologies. The ways in which Musil engages with these dichotomies – science and arts, man and woman, possible and probable, rationality and emotion, ethics and morality, passivity and action – in his fiction unveils a painstaking attempt to negotiate them in an intellectual plane. Consequently, the uniqueness of Vienna’s intellectual milieu, one that allowed for the development of the peculiar strain of irrationalism which, through Freud, became so influential in 20th-century western civilization, cannot be disputed.