Where the character of society provides scope for the open recognition and discussion of collective moral problems, and the social structure is flexible and adaptable enough to respond to these deliberations, the uncompromising sort of stand Wittgenstein took over the separation of facts and values will appear paradoxical. Where no such scope exists, the claims of extreme individualism become more understandable. If the culture and society into which Wittgenstein grew up offered no more prospect for the rational discussion of morality or values than it had offered, say, to Karl Kraus, the ultimate reasons for Wittgenstein's divorce of values and facts accordingly lay, not in any individual quirk of his personal temperament, but rather in those features of the broader social context which had led, in the first place, to the absolute alienation of so many serious-minded bourgeois intellectuals. If the realm of values was completely dissociated, for Kraus and Wittgenstein alike, from the realm of facts, this is a comment on the fossilization which had overtaken the Lebensformen of upper-middle-class Kakanian existence. Given life as it was lived in the Vienna of the early 1900s, no recognized public forum of opportunities existed for the sincere and serious-minded discussion of ethics and aesthetics. The man who truly understood the deeper character of value judgments could, thus, find room for them only in the private world of his own personal life.