The “rock star of neuroscience,” as Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel has aptly been termed, has produced a provocative multidisciplinary blockbuster whose many facets can scarcely be summarized, let alone criticized, in a brief review. His immensely learned effort to put the “two cultures” debate on a new footing consists of a mammoth argument constituted by seven fully elaborated, interconnected elements. Thus Kandel links 1) the development of medicine and bioscience at the University of Vienna ca. 1900 to the discovery of the unconscious 2) theoretically in Freudian psychoanalysis and 3) practically in the portraiture of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka as well as 4) in Arthur Schnitzler's innovative narrative technique, the inner monologue. He goes on to connect their pioneering explorations to 5) the work of Ernst Kris in Gestalt Psychology, especially in connection with the human face (brilliantly described here) as linked to 6) Ernst Gombrich's discovery of the importance of “figural primitives” in appreciating art as well as his pathbreaking studies of the beholder's role in perceiving something as a work of art. All that forms the prelude to the discussion of an elaborate, well-documented account of the monumental project to which Kandel has devoted his scholarly career, 7) a new science of the mind in the making (i.e., an account of the biology of seeing and feeling, that links cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology). In the end, that science should explain explicitly what artists have always known implicitly about perception and its relationship to feelings. Replete with beautiful artistic and scientific illustrations and a sparkling style, The Age of Insight is bound to dazzle any reader with enough stamina to finish the weighty tome. Moreover, bold forays venturing far beyond the bounds of Kandel's own discipline, precisely as they are the efforts of a distinguished scientist with a profound appreciation of art, are sure to provoke vigorous discussions pro and contra with wide implications for our understanding of culture, creativity, and scholarship as well as the mind. It will have to suffice here to scrutinize some of his main claims with respect to art and Vienna 1900, leaving the present state of mind and brain research as well as a host of associated methodological questions his work raises for another occasion.
Briefly, Kandel claims that Viennese modernism, concentrated first and foremost in the figures mentioned above, played the decisive role in pinpointing and exploring unconscious thought processes both cognitive and emotional that have come to form the mental phenomena that twenty-first-century biological science is in the course of explaining definitively. Moreover, he considers that little or nothing is accidental about this. For example, Gustav Klimt was capable of producing powerfully moving portraits such as that of Adele Bloch-Bauer that could continue to fascinate an art buff such as Ronald Lauder for more than fifty years. Klimt's power to move his spectator fifty or one hundred years later is rooted in his “implicit” awareness of the psychological, and ultimately biological, basis of human emotions. Explicitly Klimt learned about developments in medicine and biology at the University of Vienna's Medical School at the salon of Berta Zuckerkandl, one of several such extraordinary upper-class meeting points for the Viennese intellectual and cultural elite. That knowledge is directly reflected, for instance, in the ornamentation of many of Klimt's portraits, including “Golden Adele,” which is inspired by pictures of sperm, ova, and embryos photographed through a microscope.
What the “Viennese Expressionist” artists, as Kandel idiosyncratically terms his trio, knew intuitively as artists about the relationship between perception and emotion provided the Viennese art historians Ernst Kris (who also practiced psychoanalysis) and Ernst Gombrich with material for creating a revolution in art history based upon a number of psychological notions crucial to appreciating art, especially portraiture. These include the idea that ambiguity is essential in both creating and appreciating art and facial recognition as the perception of a Gestalt. Thus Kandel's own work (as well as that of a host of others) on the way the brain acts creatively in forming memories is an effort to produce a biological foundation for a set of ideas about what we do unconsciously that have been crucial to artists and a-fortiori art history and psychology.
Kandel's extraordinary facility for describing painting is only surpassed by his ability to explain the basis of perception and feelings in neurophysiology. That is a two-edged sword, however; the reader is easily dazzled by the amazing cleverness in articulating the ramifications involved in such a complex constellation of thought that it is easy for them to overlook how much speculation is involved (“may,” “perhaps,” “should,” “surely” are words that abound in Kandel). Similarly, the oversimplifications involved in his stunning but highly selective portrait of the relationship between science and art in fin-de-siècle Vienna will provoke criticism on the part of historians concerned with Austrian culture. Moreover, there is a sense in which Kandel's narrative, chock-full of history as it is, is scarcely history at all. Klimt and Schiele, Freud and Schnitzler, Kris and Gombrich are less part of the past than they are his contemporaries inasmuch as their discovery and exploration of the unconscious form a prelude to his new science of the mind. His past is a “Whiggish” scientist's past rather than that of an acribic scholar. Further, only Promethean discoverers count in his narrative. Lack of a sense of their embeddedness in communities (and controversies) explains how he can continually praise all of his heroes as good Darwinians without paying much attention, say, to the fact that there was a good deal of chaos in the scientific community in Vienna (and elsewhere) around 1900 concerning just what Darwinism was all about.
Moreover, Kandel's account of fin-de-siècle Vienna's contribution to his science of the mind is selective in the extreme. In connection with Klimt, for example, Kandel's emphasis upon symbolism drawn from reproductive biology in Klimt's portraits, enlightening as it is, obscures, for example, the well-documented fact that these figures in his ornamentation also have to be interpreted against the background of traditional Japanese art, which pace Kandel is also at least as important as Darwin and Byzantine art as a background to his conception of portraiture (cf. the exhibition catalog Hidden Impressions, Vienna, MAK, 1990), although they are certainly not mutually exclusive. Moreover, Kandel rejects Friedrich Jodl's aesthetic objections to Klimt's university paintings out of hand, obscuring the link between Klimt and the irrationalism of the Viennese avant garde, the subjectivist “romanticism of nerves” that the Wiener Moderne represented that was so repulsive to academic Darwinists such as Jodl. This is important because it anticipates the profound subsequent moral and aesthetic (not personal) rupture between Klimt and Schiele, which is increasingly emphasized by many commentators involved in the current Schiele Renaissance (see the contributions of Johann Thomas Ambrózy, Carla Carmona Escalera, and Helena Pereña in the newly founded Egon Schiele Jahrbuch I). Thus, despite Kandel's many astute observations about the continuities between Klimt and Schiele, a gulf with significant aesthetic consequences separates them. In fact, Schiele came to be increasingly critical of Klimt and die Moderne in his pictures in ways that link him to an “ethical” conception of art analogous to the one that Klimt rejected in painting the university murals (Schorske). Grasping such a difference involves interpreting Schiele's works and not merely reacting to them. Yet, there is no place for the hermeneutics of pictures in Kandel's account of art, probably because it would complicate his reduction of mind to brain functions beyond anything that any current claimant to the title “science of the mind” might cope with, so far does the act of interpretation extend beyond the mere fact of being deeply “struck” by perceiving, say, a picture of a human face.
In any case, there are a number of problems about “the unconscious” that merit discussion but can merely be identified here. The most egregious bear upon Freud's “discovery” of the concept itself, Schnitzler's critique of Freud's view of it, the concept of “tacit” or implicit knowing confusedly appealed to as unconscious, etc. These, too, must be left for another occasion.
Nevertheless, The Age of Insight remains important to historians of Vienna 1900 for a number of reasons. First, it brings science, long missing, centrally into the picture. As such the book is a welcome companion to Deborah Coen's Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty. Science was most important in Vienna 1900, and its scientists were frequently profound humanists: Ludwig Boltzmann, for example, could dedicate his Populäre Schriften to the Shade of Schiller and allude to science and religion as different “orders” of human experience à la Pascal simply by obliquely but poignantly citing half a line from Faust, Part I. Secondly, boldly crossing disciplinary lines, for all the dangers that accompany it, has a way of refreshing, stimulating, and provoking both the layman and the historian to second thoughts about what is sometimes all too familiar—it is a sobering thought that a humanist would be hard put to write about science as well as this neuroscientist has written about art. In addition Kandel's presentation of reciprocally enlightening perspectives on perception and feelings from art and science form a genuine contribution to the “two cultures” debate. Finally, The Age of Insight is distinguished for its highly personal dimension: the story that Kandel narrates is the story of his own life, a story of how memories (in various senses of the word) of his native city drew back to thematize intellectual debts that he accrued in the course of coming into a position to help create a new science of the mind and creativity (i.e., to explain how he himself stands on the shoulders of Viennese giants). Bringing all this vividly and enthusiastically on an intellectual tightrope walk through academia is certainly no small feat.
