Encyclopaedic Nichts

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Notes

1. All English translations are by P.M.M. unless otherwise stated. This article is part of my larger study “A Quest for Abstract Literature: Medievalism and Mysticism,” funded by the Academy of Finland (125257).

2. The word is defined briefly in many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German dictionaries; for these see Volltextbibliothek Zeno, <http://www.zeno.org> (accessed 28 Feb. 2012). Mauthner at least seems to have used Rudolf Eisler's Wörterbuch der Philosophischen Begriffe, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1904).

3. See the following useful discussions on the relations between Mauthner and the writers mentioned in the text: Dapía (Borges); Eschenbacher 102 (Broch); Fuchs; Kühn (Ball, Morgenstern, Beckett, Joyce and the thesis of Mauthner as one of the great influences behind twentieth-century language-critical literature); Pilling 159–64 (Jolas, Beckett and Joyce); van den Berg (dada). For useful recent studies, see, for example, Michael Thalken, Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern: sprachkritisches Sprechen bei Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Gerber, Fritz Mauthner und Karl Kraus (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1999) as well as Elizabeth Leinfellner and Jörg Thunecke, Brückenschlag zwischen den Disziplinen: Fritz Mauthner als Schriftsteller, Kritiker und Kulturtheoretiker (Wuppertal: Arco, 2004).

4. For Mauthner, the philosophy of language and Wittgenstein, see, for instance, Kampits; Leinfellner; Weiler, Critique 4, 109–10, 125–26 passim. (Later English studies such as Janik and Toulmin, and Arens have little to add to Weiler's Critique.) Although Mauthner was a well-known writer in German-speaking culture until the 1920s, he soon became obscure. It has been suggested that his linguistic philosophy was considered too philosophical for the linguists and too linguistic or literary for philosophy (Weiler, Critique 86–87; idem, Fritz Mauthner 23; Eschenbacher 125–26; Arens 44–78).

5. Despite the promising title Nichts, Lütkehaus does not discuss the entry although the survey places Mauthner among the makers of the nichtskritischer “linguistic turn” (667, also 384). Lütkehaus supplements the nothingness canon with other “forgotten” names, too: Edouard von Hartmann, Philipp Mainländer, Julius Bahnsen, Hannah Arendt, Eugen Fink, and Gunther Anders (Lütkehaus 115).

6. It is not without interest here that Heidegger's thesis was about the medieval philosophy of language. See Heidegger 39–40 for privation and “Nichts” in the thought of Duns Scotus (or, more accurately, in the generative grammar of Thomas of Erfurt, to whom the text was later attributed).

7. See also Lütkehaus 667: “So sensationell, wie diese Kritik anfänglich erscheinen mochte, war sie freilich nicht. Fritz Mauthners nichtskritischer ‘linguistic turn,’ Bergsons antinihilistischer ‘elan vital’ waren ihr im Geiste vorangegangen. Das Nichts hatte nur beide Attacken überlebt.”

8. In discussing the term “rienniste” Mauthner acknowledges the Néologie, ou vocabulaire des mots nouveaux (1801) of L.S. Mercier. For the socialist and anarchist connections of Mauthner's radical philosophy, see his friend and assistant Landauer; see also van den Berg.