Loos, Musil, Wittgenstein, and the recovery of human life

The chapter explores common themes in modernist authors such as Loos and Musil and connects them to Wittgenstein's philosophy. It argues that Loos, Musil, and Wittgenstein all develop (in distinctive ways) a modernist awareness of how art, morality and the region of values falsify spiritual needs under the form of grandeur, sentimentality, moralism, ornament, and pretence. The aesthetic and the region of the higher are falsified because their current expressions sublimate ordinary activities and needs as matters of style and ornament. So a criticism of the inauthentic in art and the spiritual is also a criticism raised against the lack of a proper command of our human forms of life.