Fritz Mauthner’s Critique of Language

A Culture-historical Approach

Abstract

The first part of this study deals with the connection between Mauthner’s „linguistic turn“ and his never fully surmounted jewish identity crisis. From his father’s cult of linguistic purism as demonstration of a perfect assimilation to german culture he inherited the phobia of jewish accent (mauscheln) and the tendency to an anxious linguistic self scrutiny. The second part shows how the traumatic experience of the war of languages in Prague led Mauthner to doubt whether any creative intercultural dialogue could be possible. Was Mauthner’s theory of language representative of the tradition of Austrian philosophy from Bolzano to Wittgenstein? Even if Mauthner’s radical scepticism is finally in contradiction with logic and epistemology, his formative years as student at the University of Prague made him familiar with Herbart’s realism and with Ernst Mach’s positivism, two caracteristic orientations of Austrian philosophy which had a decisive influence on Mauthner’s later critique of language.