There was a lot going on the Vienna through the whole period from the turn of the century to the German takeover of Austria in 1938. In this connection, we have to discuss (as Edmonds necessarily does) one of the brightest stars streaking across the distinguished intellectual firmament of Vienna in the early 20th century: Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis itself raised the question: is this a science? Freud certainly thought it was. But what has to be true for a certain body of scholarship to be a science, or to be, perhaps more loosely speaking, scientific? The contrary term, for the Circle, was "metaphysics." The VC disdained metaphysics. Their manifesto said that the VC stood for "removing the theological and metaphysical debris of a millennia," and one is to imagine the adjective "metaphysical" pronounced with disdain as one reads that. Indeed, this is their major link with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who invented the term "positivism"...
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My recent reading includes THE QUESTION OF GOD (2002) by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr., a contrast of the worldviews of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, considered as exemplars of Christianity and secularism respectively. Early on there's a nice quote from Lewis' own memoir about his parents, I'll simply reproduce here. On his father's side were "true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness, men who laughed and cried a great deal and had not much talent for happiness." On his mother's side one encounters "a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree." The situation bred in Lewis, on his own reflection, "a certain dislike or distrust of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous." I'm not making any point here folks, I just enjoy the wording of that. But if you're curious whether th...
Irony has been out of fashion in some quarters since 9/11/2001. Later in that awful September, TIME published an essay by Roger Rosenblatt that began, "The one good thing that could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony." Yet irony has hung in there, as have critiques thereof. Christy Wampole has written the latest such attack, THE OTHER SERIOUS. She titles it that because in her view the problem with her contemporaries -- me and you, dear reader -- is not just that we over-use irony as a literary device but that irony is the default mode we adopt when we are being "serious." She wants a "recalibration" of what it means to be serious. She also, like so many writers before her, doesn't quite understand what the kids today are up to. "As a Gen-Xer, I wonder how it must be to grow up in this environment today. What does it feel like to be in high school, for example, where your life is constantly available for com...