The Spectre in Leopold Andrianis Garden of Knowledge

Abstract

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century a foreboding of crisis and impending doom was felt by European intellectuals, ideologues, and literati. Regarding Austria in particular, a widespread omen of imminent collapse in the realm of politics, prevalent among the upper classes, reflected a general awareness that the liberal ideals upon which bourgeois culture was presumed to be founded were being eroded by fateful economic vagaries and the social cataclysms that followed upon them. The political upheavals that occurred in Europe at the fin de siecle were accompanied by a deep sense of yearning for fading religious values that were once held to ground and to legitimize society. In science and philosophy, an extreme skepticism had developed since the onset of the critical philosophy movement in the wake of Immanuel Kant's writings. Put very simply, this crisis of skepticism centred on the question whether the mind has the capability of reproducing, in Aristotelean fashion, the structures and processes of external reality. In an overarching sense, skepticism's critique of epistemological realism claimed that the mind is encased, as it were, within its own cognitional apparatus; this conditions the sensible world as a unified phenomenon of experience, but makes it impossible for objective reality per se to be deciphered and transcribed by cognition. The literary work central to this article epitomizes the epistemological crisis of the age in which it was produced. This article's objective is two-fold. First, it will consider how, in his novel Der Garten der Erkenntnis (1895), Leopold von Andrian zu Werburg (1875-1951) paints the picture of a world whose con- stituents are portrayed as fleeting appearances in the isolated consciousness of young Prince Erwin, the novel's main (and, arguably, sole) character. In Andrian's novel, reality is transformed into a dream. In the midst of his dream Erwin journeys upon a negative Bildungsweg, each stage of which leads him closer to the abyss. Second, and more importantly, this analysis will elucidate the philosophical concepts that inform the novel's content and that are the pro- venance of Erwin's ultimate nihilistic despair. Deriving from Johann Gottlieb Fichte's subjective idealism, these notions concern the phenomenon of solipsism in its relation to the nature of the thinking identity of a subject. In developing