Alan Saunders: The Austrian composer Arthur Schoenberg who was busy revolutionising music in early 20th century Vienna. And that's the city to which we turn today on The Philosopher's Zone with me, Alan Saunders.

In the last decades of the Hapsburg Empire, up to the start of the First World War, Vienna was opulent, elegant and daring. A group of radical young artists, architects, writers, musicians, designers and thinkers were busy overturning all the rules. This was the world in which Sigmund Freud delved into the human psyche, the artist Egon Schiele explored human sexuality and Arnold Schoenberg made atonal music. But today we're concentrating on two of the brightest stars to have arisen in this febrile world: the enigmatic artist Gustav Klimt and the elusive philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

And what links these two men? The answer is Ludwig Wittgenstein's sister Gretl, but more on that soon. Our guest this week is Dr David Rathbone from the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. David, welcome to the show.

David Rathbone: Thanks very much, Alan.

Alan Saunders: Let's begin with Gustav Klimt, who was born in 1862. What were his origins?

David Rathbone: He was quite humble background, he was the son of a gold engraver, which in the days of fountain pens and fob watches was quite an important job. But he was an impoverished man, and Klimt was sent on a scholarship to the school of applied arts, the Kunstgewerbeschule, the industrial design school, at the age of 14. His brother followed him the following year, and there they learned the trade of frieze in particular. The ornamentation of the new buildings that were going up at a rapid rate in Vienna at that time.

Alan Saunders: But he also painted, didn't he, a number of commissioned portraits? Tell us about these.

David Rathbone: Yes, so as I said Klimt was from this humble background and he had to earn his living, so he was taking commissions to paint portraits of the women of Vienna society, and one of the first, in fact, in 1905, he gets a commission from the Wittgenstein family, whose daughter Margarethe, Gretl for short, was getting married to an American by the name of Jerome Stonborough. And he paints this portrait of Gretl Wittgenstein, and it's a crucial innovation in the history of art. For the first time we see abstraction entering art, entering the field of the painting.

He'd had earlier experiments with abstract designs in the frames of the paintings, some of which got quite ornate -- metal worked frames -- being from a metal work background. But with this work, the abstract design is brought into the field of the painting itself in the background. So, behind Gretl we have this abstract design symbolising the Wittgenstein palace in Vienna, but also the milieu that Gretl had grown up in, the highly abstract intellectual world of, well, her famous brother and her other famous brother, who actually... Paul Wittgenstein had his arm shot off in the First World War, he was a concert pianist, and went on to become a famous one-handed concert pianist.

In the foreground of this work, we have a beautiful silk dress that Gretl Wittgenstein is wearing, and she seems to hover quite uneasily between this foreground and this background. Klimt is symbolising in a new way that the way in which this highly intelligent woman seems to be torn or pulled between the glamorous society of Vienna and the intellectual world in which she is embedded.

Alan Saunders: We should say that the Wittgenstein family was fabulously wealthy, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl's son and Gretl's brother, was born in 1889. Tell us about his early history.

David Rathbone: Well, Ludwig went to school in Linz, he was tutored at home until the age of 14, and then was sent to grammar school in Linz. Interestingly in the same year that another young man by the name of Adolf Hitler was sent to the same school. When they arrived at school the students were assessed for their degree of intelligence, for want of a better word, and Ludwig was put up two grades, and Adolf down one grade. So, in fact, they were three years apart at the school and never knew each other.

But Ludwig didn't have the greatest time at school, and quickly moved on first to Berlin and then to Manchester to study engineering and science. He designed a new kind of propeller, which was well ahead of its time, and eventually got restless and became dissatisfied with science and the limits it imposed upon his thinking, moved into the foundations of mathematics and logic, went back to Vienna and sought out Frege, the famous logician, who sent him off to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell.

Now Russell recognised Wittgenstein's genius very quickly, and he studied there between 1908 and 1911, before he left Cambridge and went to Norway. About this time he discovered Leo Tolstoy's abridgement of the Gospels, The Gospels in Brief, and Tolstoy had removed all the metaphysics and superstition, or what he saw as superstition, from the Gospels, and just left the barebones of social justice and personal morality.

This brings us back to that point you made about Karl Wittgenstein, fabulously wealthy, self-made man. He'd made his money in the Czech steel industry, but he, from his perspective, he saw that with great wealth comes great potential and great responsibility, and he became a famous patron of the arts. He saw his wealth as an opportunity to open up new fields of artistic endeavour. And so as you said he financed the Secession House, and his youngest son Ludwig took this social responsibility very seriously.

In fact, under the influence of Tolstoy, he gradually came to repudiate worldly wealth and when his father died in 1911, he inherited a fantastic fortune and he distributed that. One million marks went to struggling artists in Vienna, and the remainder he distributed between his siblings. And he was in the First World War, spent most of it in an Italian prisoner of war camp, in which he wrote his famous first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Alan Saunders: We're in early 20th century Vienna today, on The Philosopher's Zone, meeting an artist and a philosopher and a few other people too. Particularly Gretl Wittgenstein, the sister of the philosopher who also happens to be one of the subjects of the artist.

I'm Alan Saunders, this is The Philosopher's Zone and our guest is David Rathbone from the University of Melbourne.

Now of course a quick reminder that on our website you can download this program and listen again if you missed an important bit. And, not long after the program airs a transcript will go up on the site, which can be quite helpful if you want to go back and check the details of what someone has said on the show.

Wittgenstein wrote two very different books, the early Tractatus and the later Philosophical Investigations. David Rathbone wants to explain the difference between them by considering Klimt's portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein's sister Gretl first from the perspective of the Tractatus and then from the perspective of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. So let's start with the Tractatus. What does that have to say?

David Rathbone: The Tractatus presents what is known as the 'picture theory' of meaning. It's a very straightforward, almost commonsense view of meaning. According to the picture theory, meaning is generated by juxtaposing names in logical relations. Names themselves designate objects in an arbitrary manner. They themselves, strictly speaking, are meaningless. This is the profound meaning of Shakespeare's proposition, 'A rose by any name would smell as sweet.' The name of the object is an arbitrary designator. The full meaning arises when names are put in relationships. Logical relationships in propositions, which picture physical relationships between objects.

Alan Saunders: Where does this leave ethics and aesthetics?

David Rathbone: Ah, now, this is crucial, because, according to the picture theory, people, the person is a set of meanings not an object. Subjects are not objects. So, the ascription that is usually often made in ethics or aesthetics, in which we treat people as if they were objects and then ascribe properties to them. Good people, bad people, beautiful people, ugly people. This is not simply confused, it's strictly speaking meaningless and in fact pernicious according to Wittgenstein.

It's not that there are good and bad people, but there are good and bad relationships. It's not that there are beautiful and ugly people, but beautiful and ugly relationships. Let me give you an example. A knife, for example, as we know upon a moment's reflection, a knife is not in itself good or bad. An object cannot be good or bad, but rather objects in sets of relations. If you're tied to a train track, a knife is a very good thing, so you can cut the rope. But if you're being approached by a murderer with a knife in his hand, that knife is a very bad thing.

Now, this might seem like a fairly, sort of, academic distinction to make, but if you think about it, what the most insidious programs in say, for example, the Nazi eugenic programs, the mistake they were making is to think you can partition off the bad people or the ugly people and eradicate them from the world. Because, precisely, they were thinking of people as objects. This is not an innocent mistake, or an inconsequential mistake, but a profoundly misguided way of thinking.

Alan Saunders: Well, let's look at Klimt's portrait of Gretl Wittgenstein from the perspective of the Tractatus. If we do that what do we see?

David Rathbone: So, there we can see a distinction between what the portrait says and what the portrait shows. What the portrait says, what the picture says, is that Gretl Wittgenstein is a woman torn, as I said, between the abstract intellectual world and the social world symbolised by her beautiful gown. There I slip into the wrong way of speaking, it's the relationship between Gretl herself and the gown that is beautiful or not, not the gown, not the woman. So, we see in fact if you look at the face, and contrast it with the hand, you can see the hands are sort of clasped in a very awkward manner, and we can see the picture saying that Gretl is not happy in her world, not comfortable in her world.

Gretl in fact saw this herself; when she saw the portrait she was not at all happy with it. In fact, she had another artist repaint the mouth. Even then she wasn't happy, and she stuck it away in the closet where it remained until the 1950s when it was rediscovered as the highly significant work of art that it is.

So, the painting, the picture itself, is a kind of proposition, a kind of statement concerning that woman in her time and place, and the milieu she's in. But, at the same time, as we know, whatever we say always has a way of saying, there's always a tone of voice, a context, a mood, a mode of delivery. And this shows what in fact cannot be said. The painting can't say its meaning for Klimt or for Gretl, but it can show these things. It shows quite a lot about Klimt and his importance in the history of art and the way this movement in art that becomes crucial in the 20th century called abstract art, is being brought into juxtaposition with the literal concrete picturing that portraits are traditionally engaged in.

Alan Saunders: Well, let's turn to Wittgenstein's later work, the Philosophical Investigations, which was published in 1951, two years after his death. It's a very different work to the Tractatus, it's also a very complex work, so it's unfair to ask you in about two minutes to tell us what it's about, but what for you are the significant factors here in that work?

David Rathbone: What Wittgenstein realises as through the '20s and '30s is that the picture theory of meaning, while it certainly has its importance in certain ways of understanding language, that picturing is only one of the things we do with language. The portrait of Gretl Wittgenstein has certainly its meaning as a picture, but it also has all these other kinds of meanings, and we do all sorts of other kinds of things with language other than picturing the world. We exhort one another, we berate one another, we give each other instructions, we share moods, we communicate attitudes obliquely, we pass judgements obliquely.

All these different uses of language don't displace the picturing relationship, but put the picturing relationship in context as one use of language. Now, crucial to the later philosophies, what Wittgenstein calls the 'private language argument', or has come to be called the private language argument, and I think it can be put quite simply by considering the contrast between Robinson Crusoe, a very familiar figure in popular fiction and Kaspar Hauser, who's not so well known. Kaspar Hauser was brought up in a dungeon. There's a great movie by van Herzog which presents this story. He didn't learn to even walk, let alone talk and interact with other people until he was about 40 years of age. And after he learned to walk and talk, people said to him, 'What was it like before you came out of the dungeon, Kaspar?' And he said, 'Well, there's nothing I can tell you. It wasn't like anything at all, because nothing happened.'

Alan Saunders: And nothing happened because he didn't have any language.

David Rathbone: Right.

Alan Saunders: And that's different from Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe's there alone on his island, he's got nobody to talk to, but that doesn't necessarily stop him going around muttering to himself in a meaningful way, because he has acquired language in human society before he ended up on the island.

David Rathbone: Precisely. He didn't grow up on the island, and all his sensations, and this is really the core of the argument, are experienced as the kind of thing anyone else would experience if they were here too. There's no one else looking at this palm tree, as a matter of fact, but if anyone else was here, this is what they would see. Now, what this consideration establishes is that what we think of as our most private things, our sensations, are in fact in a sense the most public things.

Alan Saunders: How do we see Klimt's portrait of Wittgenstein's sister in the light of Wittgenstein's later philosophy?

David Rathbone: Right. This means that the portrait is not just this one unified statement about Gretl Wittgenstein, in her biographical context. That's certainly one meaning of the picture, but this object, this work of art, has an indeterminate number of other meanings that can be elaborated. For example, its meaning as I mentioned as symbolic of the birth of abstract art, or the juxtaposition of the abstract and the concrete. In the history of art it's quite a turning point.

It also has meaning as a cultural artefact, symbolising the milieu of Vienna of 1905, and the more you understand of that milieu the more significant the work is, as expressing those sets of meanings. It would also have meaning as an economic commodity in an auction house, or on an insurer's books. It has a certain value and it can be bought and sold and traded quite apart from those other meanings. It would have a sentimental meaning, if it'd been handed down through the Wittgenstein family, and the grandchildren would view the work of art in a different way again.

It might have scientific meaning for someone analysing the composition of the paint, and the ways in which various paints and metals and canvasses are used in the history of art. It would have meaning as a biographical document, for someone writing a biography of Klimt or Wittgenstein or Gretl herself. So, I think that's about half a dozen different meanings, different faces of the one object.

Alan Saunders: Well, you can share with us your thoughts on art and philosophy by going to our website, abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone, which is also where you can hear this program again, or indeed any of our programs, including a few shows we've done on Wittgenstein over the years, including a whole program on his pretty dysfunctional family. We'll put the links up for those programs on our website at the end of the information about this week's show. I've been talking to Dr David Rathbone from the School of Philosophical and Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. David, thank you very much for being with us.

David Rathbone: Thank you, Alan.

Alan Saunders: The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, Charlie McCune is the sound engineer, I'm Alan Saunders. More next week.