A Cultural Excursion in Vienna: It’s All In Sacher

Petermichael von Bawey

It is good to be in London with you. The last time I saw you, you did not have to work, now you do.

You have moved ahead into the real world, whereas I am still in a realm where the abstraction or potential of existence is the topic of the day. But having received a college education, you know that life is more complex than that and you are as much caught in realizing the potential of existence as I am in struggling with the real world.

Despite my academic predilection, my brief presentation this evening is intended neither as lecture nor as speech. You are beyond that, engaged in professional activities—your livelihood—and you understand that it is not so much what happens to you that is important as what you do with your existence.

And since you were all exposed to one philosophical idea or another, you realize since your student days that a fundamental aspect of existence is that we are constantly in a position of lacking and trying to make good that lack in our existence.

That is where cultural edification or in your student days the AUP study trip comes in, ready to fill that black hole in our existence.

The study trip, as I view it, is a microcosm of joyous existence: We are on an adventure, not aware of a goal, and we are subject to the order of the day—the itinerary—yet never neglect the passion of the night, spreading energy that fuels urban life.

Having just returned from a study trip to Vienna, where we visited that grand metropolis of the former Habsburg Empire, we sensed the faded glory of Habsburg splendor still held our interest today.

The magnificent imperial apartments of the Hofburg Palace and its Spanish Riding School, the sumptuous neo-baroque staircase of the Art Historical Museum and its unmatched collection of masterpieces, the monumental gallery of Schoenbrunn Palace and its one thousand rooms, all speak for the grand imperial power of the Habsburg state.

In viewing that display of secular might, Peter Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance came to mind. Weiss recounts his own story as student of art in Berlin strolling through the Pergamon Museum and gazing at the Hellenic temple housed there; its detailed frieze depicting the last battle of the Celtic tribe that had attacked the Greek city-state of Pergamon in Asia Minor.

As he contemplated the stone renderings of the battle that brought death to the Celtic warriors and slavery to their wives and children, Weiss heard the marching of jackboots and sounds of military music coming from the large boulevard Unter den Linden, adjacent to the Pergamon Museum. It was the Berlin of the 1930s and Weiss was prey to the racial laws of that time. Yet the Pergamon frieze encouraged him to formulate the “aesthetics of resistance,” assuring him that just as the Celtic tribe, then the Greek victors, later the German emperor, who had the Hellenic frieze brought to Berlin in glorification of his rule, so the soldiers of the Third Reich would face defeat and disappear.

What would remain was the frieze, the artistic rendering of a historic event of 2300 years ago and for Weiss an example of the “aesthetics of resistance,” giving evidence that as the awesome power of states and empires disappears, art remains to bear witness of human activity.

Weiss’s notion followed us from the Hofburg to the Belvedere Palace and Gustav Klimt’s paintings of women either completely covered in decorative cloaks gazing sedately or nude seductively challenging viewers of the paintings. How tellingly Klimt captured the singular attribute of women in his time: the female as decoration or as femme fatale, her sexuality the aesthetics of resistance in Vienna’s patriarchal society.

Our tour took us to Berggasse 19, Freud’s apartment and place of work, where he conceived his theory of the human personality. Freud too produced a piece de resistance countering the civilized and formal veneer of Viennese society with the biological drives of human nature, Eros and aggression ready to violate social mores and ethics, one in the service of love and human affection, the other through destruction and annihilation of others and self.

Not far from Berggasse 19, Café Central offered a history of both: Frequented by Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, devising strategies of destruction, and by Peter Altenberg, pondering strategies of everyday life. For Altenberg, the café is where we discover who we are.

You have worries, about this or that…to the café.

She can’t meet you even if her excuse is plausible…to the café.

The soles of your shoes have holes…the café.

You have 400 dollars but spent 500… the café.

You save money and spend little…the café.

You are a government official but would rather be a doctor…the café.

You can’t find anyone who suits you…to the cafe.

You are in a crisis and pondering suicide…the café.

You hate and despise humanity yet can’t live without people…the café.

You have no credit anywhere...to the café.

For Altenberg, who lingered an entire day reading newspapers, receiving friends, and writing essays, the café became his site of resistance against the travails of everyday life; here he conceived his “café philosophy.”

Not far away at the Café Griensteidl Georg von Lukacs outlined his History and Class Consciousness, a social philosophy that drew attention to persistent reification in our social interactions with others. As we start from our center, the self, Lukacs argued we take others as the objects of that self, and thus objectify or reify, that is transform them into things that we find desirable or not, useful or not. We resist such reification yet persist in it ourselves, contributing to the alienation we discover others obstinately imposing upon us in our social interactions. R.D. Laing offers a useful illustration of this:

Jill thinks

  that there is something she knows    

  and that she does not know she knows it.

She thinks Jack does not know it

  and that Jack knows he does not.

Jill hopes that through Jack

  Jill will

  know that she knows

  what Jack knows he does not—

but only if Jack can realize

that Jill knows

what Jack knows Jack does not

and Jill does not know she does.

I hope you know now the foibles of reification. So be aware!

Once passed the cafes we walked down Herrengasse and entered Vienna’s Ring, facing the imposing university, its neo-renaissance façade fashioned in a deliberate historicist gesture heralding knowledge and learning.

Ernst Mach, physicist and philosopher held sway there along with Sigmund Freud and other illustrious intellectuals.

Mach had studied kinesthetic sensation, the feeling associated with movement and acceleration; he had established the principles of supersonics, the Mach number—the ratio of the velocity of an object to the velocity of sound.

Based on his studies of kinesthetic sensation, Mach held that the self is fiction, a mere hypothesis, necessary to regulate if but briefly the sensations with which we are constantly bombarded.

Camus once wrote, “If the world were clear, art would not exist.” We translated that into “If the world were clear, night clubs would not exist.” And that evening Mach’s argument was put to the test in Flex, Vienna’s supersonic club were we established—and in near Mach speed it seemed—that the ratio of the velocity of an object is akin to the velocity of sound. And we demonstrated that the “self” is fiction lost in what Freud called a libidinal energy propelled by an unknown but persistent id.

Yes, Vienna’s Flex as classroom where Mach’s and Freud’s theories were tested and validated.

The following day in Café Demel—in Altenberg’s footsteps-- with brauner und schlack—coffee with a scoop of whipped cream—and a handsome slice of Sacher Torte, all was brought together somehow: the random order of the day and the kinesthetic passion of the night.

Café Demel’s Sacher Torte, some of you may know the story, is an accidental derivative of the original Sacher Torte of the Sacher Hotel located on the other side of the Hofburg Palace. Demel’s Sacher and Sacher’s Sacher brought to mind the “non-constructionist cosmos” of Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel Laureate and Viennese economist.

According to Hayek, our existence follows a process accidental in its beginnings—consider your birth for a moment, or the stock market—and contingent, that is influenced by chance—consider your relationships for a moment, or the exchange rates—and you will realize how much chance paves the roads of our existence.

Yet we do not leave it at that, for we are keen on giving our life order, rational structures, and meaningful forms, mind you, all ex post facto justifications.

Hayek’s “non-constructionist cosmos” where accidental beginnings and contingency are dominant is a world where purpose is an afterthought, a justification of actions taken, of a life lived.

Yet it is a life lived in the freedom of choices and of refusals made, of intentions expressed and of authenticity sought. It is life where the realization that knowledge is power weights heavily upon our choices, and I hope, stimulates, at times a refusal—an aesthetics of resistance as Weiss put it—to advance the realization that knowledge is also emancipation for self and for others, and we are in need of that just as we are in need of the passion of the night to live a life worth living.

Victor Frankl a Viennese survivor of the concentration camps surmised that “…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.”

The examples I cited here are taken from everyday existence and life lived in the midst of historical events; for on a daily basis we encounter knowledge of self and others in the office, the café, the museum, the restaurant, the nightclub or the Groucho Club.

I wish that you would like to learn from such a way of living and discovering that education is along side, is tandem with existence.

And since we are in the Groucho Club, let me conclude in the words of Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles. If you do not like them, I have others.”