Robert Musil and the NonModern 9781472543165, 9781441125590, 9781441122513

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for Brooke, to whom I owe all the best parts of my life

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“Die ganze Aufgabe ist: Leben ohne Systematik aber doch mit Ordnung.” Robert Musil, Tagebücher 1: 653

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Acknowledgements

This book owes whatever merits it might have to the patience and continued support of a number of very kind people. Clint Goodson has, throughout my career, provided not just guidance and technical insight: he has been a rare kindred spirit for the kind of project I have attempted here. This book is closer in achievement to the dissertation I had wanted to write for him. Since our days together in Greensboro, Gray KochharLindgren has remained a remarkable friend and an excellent role model, always answering urgent and desperate emails about Kant and Heidegger as well as supplying me with courage through the example of his own innovative work. Over the years Barry Alford has stood me many lunches in a patient though persistent effort to help me overcome my many dogmatic errors. I hope this book attests to his success, and I will always try to emulate the example of intellectual generosity he continually exhibits. More recently, I have to thank Hedy Fraunhofer for her meticulous reading of parts of this manuscript as well as for her tireless help decoding Musil’s German for me. Haaris Naqvi, my editor at Continuum, somehow saw potential in the early stages of this project and provided what at the time seemed inexplicable encouragement to bring it to completion. It would be difficult to overestimate the contributions Haaris — and others like him — make to the field of academic scholarship. Any achievement scholars make in bringing clarity to ideas belongs to them as well. I hope all these people can find parts of themselves in the following pages. Above all, Brooke Harrison has continually provided acute professional guidance as well as inestimable emotional support since we met in East Lansing more than twenty years ago. She has helped me build a life in which books like this are possible. To her, I owe everything. Some chapters or versions of chapters have been previously published. A version of the Introduction was published in Symploke¯ : A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural, and Theoretical Scholarship under the title “Latour, Musil, and the Discourse of Non-Modernity” (11 (2003): 183–96). Chapter 2 titled here “The Thought Figure of the NonModern” first appeared in only a slightly different form in Angelaki: A Journal for Theoretical Humanities as “Latour, Lyotard, and the Problematics of Legitimation” (10.3 (2005): 99–114). And Chapter 4, here titled “Order without System,” was published by Penn State University Press in

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x Acknowledgements substantially the same form in the journal Comparative Literature Studies under the title “Robert Musil’s Other Postmodernism: Essayismus, Textual Subjectivity, and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity” (44.3 (2007): 231–53). I want to thank the editors of these journals and their editorial boards for providing early venues in which to test these ideas and thereby guide this project to its present form.

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A note on Musil’s texts

The bibliography of Musil’s work is a fairly complicated matter. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Erstes Buch, was first published in German in 1930 by Rowohlt. This consists of “Erster Teil: Eine Art Einleitung,” and “Zweiter Teil: Seinesgleichen Geschieht.” In 1933 Der Mann ohne Eigneschaften, Zweites Buch appeared, also by Rowohlt. This section of the novel consists of the unfinished “Dritter Teil: Ins Tausendjährige Reich (Die Verbrecher).” In 1952 Adolf Frisé edited and published Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben Vol. 1. And in 1955 Frisé released Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben Vol. 2. This was followed in 1957 by Prosa, Dramen, Späte Briefe: Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben Vol. 3. Since then the standard edition has become either the nine-volume paperback edition or the twovolume hardbound edition, Robert Musil: Gesammelte Werke edited by Adolf Frisé in 1978 and published by Rowohlt. (It was also originally available in a four-volume edition.) These editions have identical pagination. The 1978 Frisé edition contains significant material from Musil’s literary remains, including the twenty chapters of Part III that Musil withdrew while in galley proofs from the volume that was published in 1933. It also contains drafts of the final incomplete chapters and notes he had made on the development and direction of the novel. In the nine-volume version of the 1978 edition, volumes one through five consist of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and volumes six through nine contain Musil’s shorter fiction and dramatic pieces, short nonfiction, essays, lectures, and pieces of literary criticism. In the two-volume edition, the first volume contains Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften while the second volume contains everything else. The first English translation of the novel appeared in 1953 as The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, published by Coward-Mcann in New York. This was followed by The Man Without Qualities Vol. 2 in 1955. This has since been supplanted by the two-volume 1995 edition, The Man Without Qualities translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, and published by Knopf. Volume 1 contains Parts I and II, while Volume 2 contains Part III, translations of the twenty galley chapters, and drafts and sketches of unfinished chapters. Burton Pike translated the material from the Nachlaß. The two volumes are paginated continuously.

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xii A note on Musil’s texts More recently, the Internationale Robert Musil Gesellschaft (International Robert Musil Society) released in 2009 Robert Musil: Klagenfurter Ausgabe, edited by Walter Fanta, Klaus Amann and Karl Corino. This digital edition that comes on CD offers electronically searchable hypertexts of all Musil’s published and unpublished works as well as transcriptions and facsimiles of all of Musil’s papers housed in the Österreichische Nationalbibliotek in Vienna. Despite its comprehensiveness and the obvious advantages it affords for working across Musil’s wide œuvre, I have chosen to provide citations from the 1978 Frisé and the 1995 Wilkins editions, as I suspect these remain the editions most commonly used by scholars working in English and German, although the day is not far off when electronic texts will replace printed texts for scholarship in literature studies. The two volumes of Wilkins’ translation are paginated continuously, making volume numbers unnecessary. This is not the case with the 1978 Frisé edition, in which Volume 1 contains Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Volume 2 contains Musil’s shorter fiction, drama, and nonfiction. Consequently, it is necessary to supply volume numbers along with page numbers for the German citations. Therefore, citations for the novel appear as MWQ followed by page number for the English and as GW followed by volume number and page number for the German.

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Abbreviations

The following are some of the more frequently used abbreviations throughout the book. AS

BGE

BT

B&T CA

GS

GW IF JG

MWQ PDM

PMC

Ernst Mach. Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical. Trans. C. M. Williams. New York, NY: Dover, 1959. Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1962. Jürgen Habermas. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1984. Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Robert Musil. Gesammelte Werke in 2 vols. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. Rodolphe Gasché. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud. Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis, MN: University Minnesota Press, 1979. Robert Musil. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. 2 vols. New York, NY: Knopf, 1995. Jürgen Habermas. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1979.

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xiv Abbreviations PS

TB WP

Robert Musil. Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses. Eds. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Robert Musil. Tagebücher. 2 vols. Ed. Adolf Frisé. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976. Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Vintage, 1968.

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Introduction: Robert Musil en marge

It has frequently been observed that Robert Musil belongs to the category of writers more often cited than read, and perhaps not often cited. At the same time, however, among European readers Musil is regarded as having produced one of the monuments of modernist fiction rightfully placed alongside Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and Joyce’s Ulysses. In 1999, for example, a collection of ninety-nine authors, critics, and Germanists voted Musil’s The Man Without Qualities the most important German novel of the twentieth century.1 The length and unfinished character of his magnum opus must certainly contribute to a general reception paradoxically incommensurate with its recognized achievement. Another reason is very likely the intellectually challenging nature of his work. Musil is undoubtedly among the most philosophical of European novelists. Given his deep and primary concern with the advantages and limitations of various modes of thinking for understanding and directing human experience in Modernity, it is not surprising that there have been many studies which articulate connections between Musil’s fiction and explicitly philosophical treatments of the problems of Modernity.2 These studies draw on various philosophical figures (Kant, Nietzsche, Mach, Husserl, Wittgenstein, for example) or movements (phenomenology, positivism, deconstruction) in order to explain Musil’s fiction. They often tend to begin from within the horizon of Western philosophy and attempt to draw Musil’s thought into that sphere. Musil, however, exhibits an explicit antipathy for systematic philosophy, referring to philosophers as despots who, lacking armies, lock up the world in systems of thought (MWQ 272; GW 1:253). Even more telling is Musil’s decision, after earning a doctorate with a dissertation on positivism, to turn down the offer of an assistantship at the Technische Hochschule München as well as one at Universität Graz in order to pursue a career as a novelist.3 And yet, as the numerous philosophical studies of Musil’s work doubtless attest, there remain what can only be described as genuinely philosophical concerns running throughout his fiction and nonfiction. The philosophical nature of his work coupled with the biographical fact of his choice to abandon an academic career in philosophy in order to become a novelist suggests that while Musil remained deeply and primarily concerned with philosophical problems, he deliberately stepped outside the tradition of Western philosophy in order to work through them. Musil’s achievements with

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these problems, it therefore seems, is best explored not by pulling his novel and essays into the sphere of Western philosophy but by allowing his work to pull those kinds of problems out of it. In the introduction to Margins of Philosophy Jacques Derrida raises the question of whether it is possible to “determine a nonphilosophical place, a place of exteriority or alterity from which one might still treat of philosophy” (xii). The question emerges from Derrida’s effort to investigate the operations of philosophy itself all the way down to its very foundations. Those foundations include the question of what is inside philosophy and what is outside, as well as, crucially, how that very border or limit is determined and how it is legislated. Derrida’s task raises the question of whether such an investigation is even possible apart from the practices of philosophy itself, and in general he remains skeptical about escaping the logocentrism which describes the horizon of the Western episte¯ me¯. Like Derrida, Musil is also drawn to the very border or limit of the episte¯ me¯, lured there not by philosophy’s self-critique, however, but by modes of experience and reflection that are not susceptible to systematic conceptual ordering, but that nonetheless hold the promise of a more authentic or more complete understanding of human existence. Much of Musil’s engagement with the problems of Modernity — above all the question of “the right way to live” — is shaped by the problem of how to negotiate the competing claims of conceptual and non-conceptual experience he terms the “normal” and the “Other Condition,” or by the question of whether it is possible to obliterate that distinction completely and fuse the ordinary and the Other Condition. Despite its importance as a potential source of a thoroughly ethical existence, Musil eventually abandons the possibility of permanently occupying the non-conceptual Other Condition as well as drawing from it any explicit principles for orienting life. Recoiling from the conceptual abyss of the Other Condition leaves Musil within the horizon of Western Reason yet drawn to its very boundary. Rather than trying to make Musil into a philosopher as has been the tendency of many efforts to address the presence of properly philosophical concerns in his work, I want to offer an exploration of his engagement with the problems of Modernity informed by Derrida’s notion of doing philosophy at the margins. That is, I want to propose a view of Musil en marge de la philosophie.4 The desire to escape the horizon of the Western episte¯ me¯, to step outside the specific discursive practices institutionalized in Western philosophy, and yet still engage the questions it has traditionally treated has been given the name “postmodern,” in the sense of an effort to abandon the ways that specifically “modern” philosophy has typically dealt with its questions. The title of Jürgen Habermas’ book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity refers to continental philosophy’s attempts to generate answers to questions about the true, the good, and the beautiful in the

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Introduction: Robert Musil en marge 3 wake of Modernity’s turning its back on models supplied by the past. The sequence of those efforts takes the form of a “dialectic of enlightenment,” which, starting with Hegel, attempts to revise Western rationality in order to overcome the self-contradictions that arise from Modernity’s efforts to create normativity out of itself. Postmodernism, on Habermas’ account, is then the decision to give up on the possibility of rehabilitating Western reason, stepping outside the dialectic of enlightenment and appealing to something other than the versions of reason institutionalized in Western philosophy. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Habermas characterizes two general trajectories of postmodernism: one exemplified by Nietzsche’s genealogical invocation of the “mad” figure of Dionysos against that of reasoned Apollo, the other exemplified in Heidegger’s attempt to destruct the history of metaphysics in the effort to return to the beginnings of Western philosophy in order to rethink the question of human being entirely anew. As the inheritor and torch bearer of the Frankfurt School, Habermas remains deeply suspicious of the form of rationality, namely “instrumental reason” (Zweckrationalität), that has been massively institutionalized in the course of a historically unfolding Modernity. Despite this strong suspicion, however, Habermas tends to dismiss efforts to abandon the dialectic of enlightenment as critiques of Western reason which destroy reason’s ability to engage in critique. Against these “irrationalist” postmodern efforts, he advocates carrying the dialectic of enlightenment one cycle further, this time by replacing subject-oriented instrumental reason with an inter-subjective “communicative reason” that still provides grounds for rational decision making.5 His tendency to regard the possibility of critique as an all-or-nothing thing (modern or postmodern), raises a number of questions — and it points to a couple of possibilities. One of these may be that we don’t have to choose between the modern and the postmodern. Conceiving Musil as en marge and reading him against the philosophical discourse of Modernity allows us to recognize and work through the possibility he offers of something between the modern and the postmodern as these have conventionally been understood. Guided by Habermas’ account of Modernity, the goal of this book is to read Robert Musil against — in a sense, into — the philosophical discourse of Modernity in order to explore the discursive alternatives he offers to both modern and postmodern treatments of problems associated with Modernity’s effort to create normativity out of itself. Using Habermas as an interlocutor, then, this book explores three claims. First, that Robert Musil’s fiction and nonfiction constitutes an intervention in the cultural and intellectual issues that make up the philosophical discourse of Modernity. Second, that that intervention is guided by Musil’s theory of the essay and his performance of Essayismus as a discursive space and

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discursive strategy remarkably well tuned to negotiate the entanglements of Modernity from a position en marge de la philosophie. And third, that Musil’s Essayismus thus represents an alternative to canonical versions of both the modern and the postmodern, one that might best be understood as “nonmodern.” Given his interest in exploring alternatives to the forms of reason institutionalized in Modernity, it is tempting to place Musil in the company of the postmoderns, reading his choice of fiction over philosophy and his exploration of the mystical experience he calls the Other Condition as an irrationalist, postmodern farewell to reason. On closer inspection, however, things are significantly more complicated than the modern/ postmodern heuristic suggests. For one thing, under the heading of precision (Genauigkeit) Musil remains committed to essential features of the kind of thinking associated with the natural sciences, which, Habermas argues, has massively informed the philosophical discourse of Modernity since the end of the eighteenth century.6 At the same time, however, Musil explicitly and repeatedly connects scientific rationality with the very same kinds of violence that lead Habermas and others to seek an overthrow of instrumental reason. Beyond this sense of the cultural danger instrumental reason threatens, Musil is convinced of the severely limited applicability of systematic thinking of all kinds to the most important domains of human experience. These commitments leave him connected to and at the same time skeptical toward many of the signature intellectual practices associated with the Western episte¯me¯. The possibility of treating philosophical questions from a position neither inside (modern) nor outside (postmodern) the dialectic of enlightenment but somehow at the very margin of philosophy becomes a little more thinkable if we complicate standard accounts of Modernity with others that are not as committed to either its continuation or its destruction. Bruno Latour has at least opened a door to such a possibility with his book We Have Never Been Modern (1993), in which he examines the long-standing conflict between science and the humanities that is otherwise known as the “science wars.” Updating the terms of the debate that in the 1950s C. P. Snow called “the two culture problem,”7 we can begin to characterize the conflict as an opposition between versions of “realism” and those of social (linguistic) “constructivism.” Whereas the former tend to regard science as discovering a world ready-made, the latter insist that science creates that world in the process of “discovering” it. Latour is an early and important figure in the field of science studies, and he approaches the phenomenon of the science wars with an interest in understanding science’s place and role in contemporary society. But Latour’s account of this conflict has implications that go beyond the sociology of science, for he sees the science wars as a particular symptom of “modernism” itself.8

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Introduction: Robert Musil en marge 5 Latour characterizes the modern intellectual constitution as consisting of two sets of intellectual practices. The practice of “purification” divides an otherwise undifferentiated world into smaller and smaller entities (humans and gods, all the way down to atoms, elections, protons, neutrons, etc.). (“Pre-modern” peoples, by contrast, tended to see the human world as continuous with the nonhuman.) More generally, purification carves up the world into distinct ontological zones: a human world of Culture on the one hand and a nonhuman world of Nature on the other. Human control is thought to be immanent in the former, absent in the latter such that natural forces alone govern the nonhuman world while human society is an entirely human product. The other practice making up the modern intellectual constitution, “Mediation” or “translation,” creates mixtures of purified entities, hybrids of nature and culture that are neither entirely human nor nonhuman (Never Been Modern 10–11). Weaponized nuclear fission, genetically altered crops, and synthesized antibiotics are examples of the work of mediation successfully integrating nonhumans into a human world. According to Latour, the science wars are a product of the distinctively modern tendency to privilege purification over mediation. He contends that concern for the consequences to the human world of introducing new nonhumans tends to slow down or stop the work of purification; it tends to stop scientific “progress.” The modern emphasis on purification has encouraged humans to regard nonhumans as raw bits of nature and themselves as purely cultural phenomena, thus triggering the opposition between realism and constructivism. Latour rejoins that supposedly independent nonhumans are always the product of human mediation, in laboratories or field work, for example. And, conversely, the human world has always been populated with nonhumans that have been successfully integrated into human society. In fact, Latour argues that we have never really been modern because we have never really abided by an intellectual constitution that imagines humans and nonhumans as existing in separate ontological zones. Revising the modern intellectual constitution involves abandoning the polar thinking that is reified in the privileging of purification. It means officially reconnecting the work of purification with that of mediation and thereby obliterating the specious distinction between hermetically separated human and nonhuman domains. One implication of reconnecting purification with mediation amounts to recognizing that explanations of the world need no longer to proceed exclusively from extreme poles of nonhuman Nature and human Culture but, rather, that those categories are themselves the products of distinctively modernist habits of thinking. Acknowledging this means no longer having to choose between the supposed “objectivity” of denotative discourses like the natural science on the one hand or the narrated “relativism” of social constructivism on the other. In other words, rewriting the

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modern constitution involves de-privileging the practices of purification that have historically been the center of modern science. This is what it would mean to become un-modern, or nonmodern. More generally, Latour’s nonmodernism is an effort to think about knowledge production without the distinctions on which Modernity (modern science, for example) grounded itself. The thought figure of the nonmodern that his critique of modern science suggests thus opens the possibility of exploring questions and problems of Modernity without some of Modernity’s most defining self-privilegings. Drawing on Latour’s schematization of the intellectual practices of Modernity, but allowing it be more suggestive than programmatic, I want to use the thought figure of the nonmodern as a heuristic device with which to approach the possibility of treating philosophical questions at the very margin of philosophy. More specifically, I want to propose Robert Musil’s mobilization of the essay and the discursive praxis into which he develops it as an intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity en marge, one that is suggested by and clarified with the thought figure of the nonmodern. In Chapter Sixty-Two of The Man Without Qualities the narrator explains the protagonist’s dissatisfaction with the traditional opposition between thought and feeling: “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (MWQ 274; GW 1:254). Much earlier, in a fragment of an unpublished essay, Musil proposes the essay as a mediation of science on the one hand and life and art on the other: that is, as a way to open a discursive space between objective truth and subjective experience (PS 48; GW 2:1334). These domains are traditionally distinguished by the fact that the results of science admit a “far-reaching conceptual order” (PS 48; GW 2:1334–1335).9 That is, scientific knowledge is governed by the regularity of laws, which produce mathematical and logical truths. The domain of life and art, on the other hand, allows for no such systematic order. Between science and art, Musil contends, lies the essay, which “takes its form and method from the sciences, its matter from art” (PS 49; GW 2:1335). Like the sciences, the essay seeks to establish an order among “facts” of life, except that the “facts” in this case are not necessarily repeatedly available, and the connections between them are often only a singularity in the sense that they are not reducible to instances of general laws. In other words, the elements of experience are not necessarily ordered in the same way for everyone. These two conditions make it impossible to describe life in terms of the kinds of regularities the natural sciences seek and in turn offer. Musil’s conception of the essay thus concerns the possibility of a discursive space analogous to that suggested by Latour’s conception of the nonmodern: a space not inscribed with purified ontological or discursive distinctions.

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Introduction: Robert Musil en marge 7 One important possibility opened by the essay as such a discursive space is an approach to the complexities of human experience that does not reduce them to the regularities sought for by the natural sciences — yet that still aspires to a kind of precision. Beyond simply disclosing a discursive space between science and art, Musil’s mobilization of the essay develops into a discursive praxis that strategically avoids the purification Latour finds characteristic of modernism. Referred to by Musil as “Essayismus,” this discursive strategy operationalizes an awareness that the categories with which we conceptualize the world and human experiences are not as reliable, stable, or universal as they appear. Moreover, as a discursive praxis Essayismus dereifies conceptual and ontological distinctions in order to reimagine the intellectual and experiential territories onto which they have been inscribed. There is no adequate equivalent in English for the German Essayismus. The English “essayism” tends to denigrate the genre of the essay and its modes of reflection as something merely belletristic. Essayismus, of course, draws on the etymological roots of “essay,” which derive from the French “assay,” meaning weighing, trial or attempt.10 Within Musil’s conceptual universe this reference operates more closely to the sense of “experiment” as that term is understood in the natural sciences. In his hands, however, the notion of experimentation detaches itself from the idea of an accurate description of reality and bears with it an epistemological modesty that comes from abandoning the quest for a universal, monological truth. Theodor Adorno, for example, points out that the essay has historically been regarded as unphilosophical precisely because it does not strive for the universal (“The Essay as Form” 3). Essayismus as a discursive strategy of experimentation, decidedly not in the mode of episte¯ me¯, thus offers itself as one possibility for operating en marge de la philosophie: that is, apart from Western philosophy’s quest for truth, or apart from what Derrida has termed its “logocentrism.”11 Essayismus thus answers to Musil’s sense that the general cultural crisis of Modernity is not that we “have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul” (PS 131; GW: 2:1092). Essayismus is a major feature of scholarly attention to Musil, and many readers of The Man Without Qualities have commented on the novel’s combination of factual and fictive discourses. It may be useful at the start to highlight some basic elements of Musil’s Essayismus before moving on in subsequent chapters to its more technical features. A frequently cited example is the meteorological description in the novel’s very first paragraph: A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any

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Robert Musil and the nonmodern inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature . . . The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913. (MWQ 3; GW 1:9)

The novel’s opening consists of two descriptions. The first, meteorological, description is more precise but in a way less useful than the second, ordinary language, one because it does not convey, but rather hides, how one is supposed to understand these weather conditions. That is, the denotative description does not represent the weather in connection with human interests. It signals, in this sense, a purification of the natural from the human world. Similarly, although conveying more human meaning, the ordinary language description has none of the “precision” of the scientific description, such that no two readers are apt to imagine exactly the same set of conditions. The Essayismus of the opening passage of The Man Without Qualities effects a nonmodern critique of modernist purification by simultaneously destabilizing the denotative as well as the narrative discursive modes in the passage. Denotative discourse such as the scientific description above maintains an implicit separation of nonhuman and human, purifying natural phenomena of human concerns about them. This separation is intimately tied to science’s supposed objectivity. The practice of purification becomes striking at the end of the passage when human concerns are abruptly reintroduced in the passage’s final independent clause. By juxtaposing these two discursive modes, Musil emphasizes the human interests that have been occluded from the scientific description. Conversely, the ordinary language description specifically mediates human interests and nonhuman phenomena in the creation of the hybrid entity “a fine day.” At the same time, however, the vagueness of “a fine day” appears against the background of the scientific description of the weather. In colliding denotative and narrative discourses in a single paragraph, Musil’s Essayismus points to the modernist purification characteristic of denotative discourse and gestures toward its alternative: a nonmodern, essayistic mediation of the human and the nonhuman, which takes place not quite on the page but rather in the reader’s mind as a product of the juxtaposition of these two descriptions. The critique of modernist purification carried out here by Essayismus is not simply the additive effect of juxtaposing two or more discursive modalities in a single passage. Nor is it achieved by a merely dialectical

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Introduction: Robert Musil en marge 9 movement, because the two alternatives are not resolved in a synthetic moment of Aufhebung. Both descriptions — both discursive modes — are suspended in what Walter Moser has called an “interdiscursive space” in which the tensions between the discursive modes are preserved for the purpose of mutual destabilization. Moser argues that Musil’s main target was the idea that true science had to establish an ontologically-founded correspondence with the factual world. He concludes that through fiction, “Musil showed this claim to be untenable, questioned the ontological conception of truth, and showed how its workings become impossible in specific, fictionally posited situations” (“The Fact in Fiction” 427). At the same time, however, a trained engineer and mathematician, Musil railed against those who “deny facts and call that thinking” as well as those who “blame our rationality and desire to be less rational” (PS 184; GW 2:1391). Musil was simultaneously dissatisfied with the limits of both referential and non-referential discourses, and both are targeted via Essayismus. Musil’s Essayismus, however, serves not only to dramatize the limits of denotative and narrative discourses;12 it functions itself as a positive discursive strategy constitutive of a specifically nonmodern approach to experience — an alternative to worldviews characterized by purified and reified ontological domains and concepts. This dimension of Essayismus begins to emerge in Musil’s sense of the essay as a discursive space specifically appropriate to thinking precisely about life and art, which phenomena do not typically admit precision of the ordinary scientific kind. In his discussion of the essay, Musil cites Maurice Maeterlinck’s observation that “Instead of a truth the essay gives three good probabilities” (PS 49; GW 2:1335). The idea of truth in modernist, denotative discourse is generally linked with that of a single correct description of an external state of affairs. By destabilizing denotative discourse, Essayismus draws into question the very possibility of an accurate description of the world, and, hence, the possibility of Truth as the single correct one. Consequently, any single description can be only a partial representation of the way things are, what Musil refers to as a “partial solution” (Partiallösung) (PS 49; GW 2:1335).13 However, according to Musil, partial solutions are more than simply the best one can do in the absence of reliable denotative representation. In fact, Musil characterizes the essay as “the strictest form attainable in an area where one cannot work precisely” (PS 48; GW 2:1334). Thus, Musil conceives of the essay as a discursive space specifically suited for those areas of human experience which do not admit precision in the ordinary sense. Such an area, for Musil, is one “in which it is not truth that dominates” but rather “in which probability is something more than an approach to truth” [emphasis added] (PS 49; GW 2:1335). Paralleling Musil’s idea that the domain of the essay is one in which probability is more desirable than truth, Essayismus — as the discursive

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strategy most appropriate to this domain — is closely associated in The Man Without Qualities with a heightened sense of the arbitrariness of the actual. In Chapter Four the narrator explains that alongside a sense of reality there must also be a sense of possibility, which Musil refers to as “Möglichkeitssinn.” The narrator describes this as “the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than what is not” (MWQ 11; GW 1:16). The narrator later explains that a person with a sense of possibility suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. (MWQ 269; GW 1:250) Eventually for Ulrich the provisionality of the actual “became an idea no longer associated with the vague word ‘hypothesis’ but with the concept he oddly termed, for certain reasons, ‘essay’” (MWQ 270; GW 1:250). In regarding what is possible as no less real than what is actual, Möglichkeitssinn does not categorically reject the fundamental modernist distinction between what is and what is not, but it does de-privilege it. That is, it no longer treats the distinction as in any sense a priori, given, or concrete, retaining it instead as a provisional analytical category: useful to think with but not, therefore, “real.” In this way, Essayismus as an extension of Möglichkeitssinn strategically avoids the purification of distinct ontological domains Latour finds characteristic of modernism. Simply by avoiding modernist purification, Musil takes an important step in the direction of the nonmodern, but the discursive practice of Essayismus continues this movement away from modernism by configuring an individual’s engagement with the world in terms of a nonmodern mediation of human and nonhuman domains. By privileging possibility over Truth and even over Reality, Essayismus points beyond a critique of denotative discourse and beyond an alternative way of seeing the world to function as the discursive strategy that is ultimately productive of an alternative way of being in the world, what Musil terms the Other Condition (PS 185; GW 2:1392). The Other Condition involves in part an alternative experience of the relation subject and object. In the ordinary condition, Musil explains, “a thin line connects the individual with his object and attaches itself to both the object and the person at only a single point, while all the rest of the person’s being remains untouched” (PS 185; GW 2:1392). In all such “objective” relationships, Musil argues, the self is “bracketed” (ausgeschaltet) in a way that produces a kind of “alienation” (PS 186; GW 2:1393). No such alienation obtains in the case of the Other Condition.

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Introduction: Robert Musil en marge 11 What is common to all instances of the Other Condition is that “the border between self and non-self is less sharp than usual” (PS 186; GW 2:1393). Instead of being alienated “One participates in things (understands their language). In this condition understanding is not impersonal (objective), but extremely personal, like an agreement between subject and object” (PS 186; GW 2:1393). Musil goes on to characterize the other condition as “a dereification of the self as of the world” (PS 187; GW 2:1394).14 In an essay, the title of which, “Exact and Human,” points to the conventional opposition Musil is concerned to abandon, Michel Serres discusses Musil’s fiction in connection with the problem of the gap between the knower and the known. Serres sees Musil as a model for negotiating “the fluctuating boundaries of order and disorder where the common border between subject and object is always bracketed” (17). The Other Condition is that condition in which the border between subject and object is no longer bracketed. And it is arrived at via Essayismus: that is, via a discursive strategy adapted to the domain of the essay, which Musil describes as existing between domains which admit a far-reaching conceptual order and those which do not (PS 48; GW 2:1335). The project of this book, then, is to read Musil into the philosophical discourse of Modernity in order to explore his engagement with traditionally philosophical problems from a position at the margin of the Western episte¯ me¯, one neither conventionally modern nor postmodern, but something that can best be characterized as nonmodern. Despite its susceptibility to objections, many of which I explore in subsequent chapters, Habermas’ book, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, offers a robust account of the trajectory of philosophical reflection in and about Modernity against which to examine Musil’s intervention into those questions. At the same time, reading Musil alongside canonical postmoderns like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Lyotard helps us to recognize features of his divergence from the practices of philosophical modernism and to recognize the nonmodern alternative he makes available. It is my hope that situating Musil in the debates about the modern and the postmodern will introduce Musil scholars and those working in the problematics of postmodernism to one another’s interests. Chapter 1 offers a derivation of Bruno Latour’s notion of the nonmodern by exploring the relation of Latour’s nonmodernism to other critical accounts of Modernity: Habermas’ and, more extensively, that of Jean-François Lyotard. One way to test whether the nonmodern is simply another species of the postmodern is by comparing Latour and Lyotard in terms of their analyses of the pragmatics of legitimation according to which scientific statements are determined to be true or at least scientific. Both Latour and Lyotard begin, in a sense, from a suspicion regarding the relation of science to other discourses, specifically politics. Latour, however, develops a response to the problematic linkage of discourses

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about the natural world to those of the human world that is categorically different from Lyotard’s insistence on keeping them separate. It involves reconceptualizing what is meant by science in the first place. The pattern and features of this reconceptualization offer a trope – namely, the nonmodern — for characterizing and developing Musil’s engagement with problems in the philosophical discourse of Modernity. Chapters 2 and 3 examine Musil in relation to two important sites of the postmodern in order to characterize his engagement with the problems of Modernity from a position at the margin of philosophy. Chapter 2 characterizes Musil’s complex relation to the discursive practices of Modernity through a comparative reading with Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Jürgen Habermas positions Nietzsche as the entry into postmodernity on the view that Nietzsche abandons the attempt to rehabilitate reason and “bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment” (PDM 86) in “an unmasking critique of reason that sets itself outside the horizon of reason” (PDM 96). Habermas’ reading of Nietzsche is contested by those who see Nietzsche as not simply appealing to reason’s absolute other in the figure of Dionysos but holding a much more complex and nuanced position relative to the discourses of truth. Alexander Nehamas belongs to this tendency and argues that Nietzsche holds an essentially equivocal relation to Modernity. Nietzsche is the philosopher Musil cites far more than any other, and there are many thematic correspondences between Nietzsche’s thought and Musil’s. Like Nietzsche on Nehamas’s reading, Musil is invested in the effort to intersect literature and philosophy. Musil’s Essayismus corresponds closely to Nietzsche’s perspectivism, while the liberating sense of possibility Musil terms Möglichkeitssinn gives rise to an attitude toward existing social structures that is very much like that of Nietzsche’s “free spirits.” Comparison with Nietzsche thus brings into focus Musil’s complex relation to the discursive practices of Modernity. Musil holds on to features of scientific and mathematical thought while remaining wary of the dangers associated with these forms of instrumental reason. Chapter 3 investigates Musil’s relation to a second influential attempt to move outside the horizon of the Western philosophical tradition: that of Martin Heidegger. Musil and Heidegger were contemporaries, although there has been very little analysis of the correspondences between their critical responses to Modernity. Working through these correspondences reveals that Musil and Heidegger were involved in closely parallel if not, in fact, the same project: the effort to disclose an authentic mode of Being that had become concealed within the everyday practices of modern experience. In the form of narrative fiction, Musil offers something like an existential analysis of human being which discloses a fundamental potentiality-for-being that has become concealed in the publicness of everyday life.

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Introduction: Robert Musil en marge 13 With important details to Musil’s relation to the discursive practices of the modern and the postmodern worked out through these comparisons with Nietzsche and Heidegger, Chapter 4 turns to consider Musil’s relation to the cultural project of Modernity generally. Breaking with the past, Habermas writes, “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself” (PDM 7). According to Habermas, Modernity’s effort to create normativity out of itself took shape as the institutionalization of a specifically subject-centered reason whose principle feature — reflexivity — embodies the structural principle of Modernity itself. Subject-centered reason, as the name implies, involves regarding all non-self objects as means to the gratification of the self’s will and is therefore associated with domination. This problem is what sets Habermas looking for an alternative in the possibility of intersubjective forms of reason. Musil, too, seeks an alternative to subject-centered reason in the form of a textual subjectivity that derives from and is driven by the discursive practice of Essayismus. Essayismus thus represents a challenge to the structural principle of Modernity itself. After mapping in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 Musil’s intervention into these problems of Modernity, it becomes possible to think about extending the example of Essayismus he represents beyond his own achievements. Against the background of Peter Bürger’s account of the historical avantgarde, Chapter 5 examines Musil’s treatment of the modern aesthetic strategies of autonomy and sublation, which are associated, respectively, with aestheticism and the avant-garde. Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities can be read as setting up and running experiments that test the viability of strategies of autonomy and sublation for orienting ethically satisfactory life in Modernity. In light of these experiments, Musil’s Essayismus emerges as a discursive alternative to the historical avantgarde’s attempt to draw on art in order to redirect the life praxis of lifeworld. Moreover, Musil’s Essayismus represents not only an alternative to the modern avant-garde, overcoming its tendency to modernist purification: it also avoids the same aporias in Lyotard’s postmodern version of the avant-garde. Finally, in Chapter 6, “Judgment Without Criteria,” I consider Musil’s Essayismus in connection with another important topic closely associated with the cultural project of Modernity, namely systematic thinking about the just society. Lyotard argues in Just Gaming that Western political philosophy has tended to begin with an ideal (true) conception of the just society from which prescriptive statements are derived according to which an existing society may be brought into conformity with the ideal. The movement from true statements to prescriptive statements, however, involves transgressing the borders of discrete language games whose rules are incommensurable. The invalidity of a procedure of political reflection

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that moves from generalized, ideal descriptions to particular prescriptions of what should be done thus precludes the possibility of a science of politics. As an alternative to the practice of applying universal, a priori, concepts (of the good, the true, the beautiful) to particular cases, Lyotard turns to the distinction in Kantian philosophy between determining and reflective judgment. Reflective judgment secures the minimal conditions for cognition in cases where no universal concept is available under which to subsume a particular case. Musil’s Essayismus, I argue in this chapter, operates very much like Kantian reflective judgment and thus makes possible a mode of judgment that avoids the problem of incommensurability Lyotard observes in the operation of a science of politics. It thus answers to the postmodern possibility for judgment without criteria. The attempt of these chapters is to explore and develop Musil’s mobilization of Essayismus as a strategic intervention into the problems and questions associated with the philosophical discourse of Modernity, generally with special emphasis given to the question of what modes of reflection are appropriate to the effort to create normativity out of one’s own moment. The chapters pursue this goal by reading Musil alongside pivotal figures of the postmodern effort to access and explore territory at the traditional horizon of the Western episte¯ me¯. The various readings of Musil’s Essayismus that these chapters offer are not precisely convergent. That is, they do not add up to a synthetic whole, and they do not attempt to show that Musil holds a fully worked out theory of the essay. Instead they represent, in the spirit of Essayismus, attempts to view an object — in this case, Musil’s engagement with the problematics of Modernity — from many sides without wholly encompassing it. Such an effort involves traversing Musil’s œuvre from different angles and returning to important nodes in his texts from a variety of paths in order to draw his thinking into sometimes convergent, sometimes parallel, and sometimes divergent connections. The map that emerges is not to be inscribed with a grid but constitutes, to borrow from Calvino, a network of lines that enlace.

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The thought figure of the nonmodern

In order to begin recovering (or inventing) a version of Robert Musil en marge it will be necessary to remap the intellectual territory within which his engagement with the problems of Modernity takes place. As announced in my Introduction, the thought figure of the nonmodern provides a trope with which to appropriate Robert Musil’s Essayismus as a strategic intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity; that is, as an alternative to both the modern and the postmodern. It has become a commonplace to bemoan the inadequacy of the designations “modern” and “postmodern” for traversing the landscape of questions and possibilities signaled by these terms, and with good reason. Clearly, the intellectual and cultural phenomena they are meant to reference are far too heterogeneous to be captured by what are inevitably inadequate labels. There is a benefit, however, to working at a relatively high level of generality in order to characterize large patterns in the history of ideas into which newly recognized possibilities might be situated. Moreover, the problems, questions, efforts and understandings at issue here have been cast in the language of the “modern” and the “postmodern,” and it is only by working through these problems, questions, and efforts in the ways they have been formulated that we may be able to move beyond such inadequate terms or find more satisfactory ways to recast them. So, for the time being, “modern” and “postmodern” will have to suffice provided we continually use them in a provisional way. I have attempted to keep this provisionality in mind by using, whenever possible, the intentionally vague formulations “the modern,” “the postmodern,” and “the nonmodern,” which gesture toward the complexes of issues these terms signal. It will be helpful, however, to fill in this territory with examples of specific theorists and their arguments without, nevertheless, thereby implying that what is being discussed pertains to everything that travels under the banner of these titles. We can start to fill them in by turning first to established accounts of the modern and the postmodern, reading them against one another in order to look for lines of fracture. In what has come to be one standard account of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity begins by articulating Modernity’s consciousness of time: its sense of rupture with the past

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occasioned by the discovery of the New World, the Renaissance, and the Reformation as “three monumental events around the year 1500 [which] constituted the epochal threshold between modern times and the middle ages” (PDM 5). The enduring cultural problematic that is Modernity was launched by this sense of rupture: breaking from the past “Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself” (PDM 7). Put another way, the problem Modernity faces is how to generate criteria of the true, the good, and the beautiful without reference to either transcendental authority or precedents from past historical configurations. Kant responded methodologically to Modernity’s problem of creating normativity with the invention of critical philosophy. In “immanent critique” reason bends back on itself to interrogate the very conditions under which it comes to know the highest forms of truth, goodness, and beauty. Kantian philosophy thus “installed reason in the supreme seat of judgment before which anything that made a claim to validity had to be justified” (PDM 18). For Habermas and the Frankfurt School, one persistent defect of the philosophical trajectory that Modernity inherited from Kant has turned out to be the reification of science, morality, and art as separate cultural spheres, and the supervention of theoretic reason over moral and aesthetic reasons. This supervention is the result of the project of Modernity, which sought to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to the internal logics of each and to use the results of research in each cultural sphere for increased rationalized everyday life (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 9). Habermas’ account of this project suggests that Enlightenment thinkers . . . had the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces, but would also further understanding of the world and the self, would promote moral progress, the justice of institutions, and even the happiness of human beings. The 20th century has shattered this optimism. The differentiation of science, morality, and art has come to mean the autonomy of the segments treated by the specialist and at the same time letting them split off from the hermeneutics of everyday communication. (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 9) On this reading, the project is incomplete in the sense that the results of research in each of the spheres have not been brought together and re-synthesized. Conversely, Habermas insists that “a reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements”

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(“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 11). Rather than abandoning the project of Modernity, Habermas argues in favor of completing it by setting the separate spheres back into communication with one another, addressing the problem of normativity through re-connecting science with morality and art. Jean-François Lyotard’s intervention in the philosophical discourse of Modernity directly addresses a problem which arises from attempts, such as Habermas’, to create normativity by linking discourses of the “true” to those of the “just,” or vice versa. He is suspicious about the kind of unity of experience Habermas intends as the result of putting the spheres of culture back together (“What is Postmodernism?” 72–3). Lyotard’s suspicion is grounded in a technical question about “the passage that has to be charted between heterogeneous language games — those of cognition, of ethics, of politics” (“What is Postmodernism?” 72): namely, whether it is appropriate or even possible to link or combine them as Habermas suggests. Answers to the question of the relation of discourses have come to mark one site of divergence between modern and postmodern interventions in the philosophical discourse of Modernity, and thereby have established, to some extent, the conditions under which alternatives might be sought. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard designates as modern “any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative,” the two most historically important of which are Idealism (the inherent value of knowledge for its own sake) and Socialism (the progressive emancipation of the human subject) (PMC xxiii). Conversely, the simplified definition of the postmodern that Lyotard offers is, as everyone knows, “an incredulity toward metanarratives” (PMC xxx). Regarded as a discourse of legitimation, the metanarrative of Idealism amounts to scientism, justifying the production of virtually all scientific knowledge as part of the infinite self-unfolding of Reason that Hegel describes in the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, according to Lyotard, Idealism’s ability to function as a metanarrative of legitimation suffered from an internal instability of the legitimacy principle of knowledge itself (PMC 39). Speculative philosophy, he points out, holds an ambiguous relation toward science: while serving to legitimate science as knowledge, it is simultaneously skeptical of the basis of science’s claim to knowledge, namely, empiricism. In other words, Idealism folds mere empiricism within itself as just one, partial, instantiation of Reason, thus relegating the rules of science to a particular form of knowledge. From the perspective of science, on the other hand, Idealism does not precisely conform to the rules of science’s own language game (denotation), and is therefore regarded by science as a pre-scientific form of knowledge (i.e., narrative). In short, once it makes this recognition, science no longer needs philosophy’s

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mystifications to legitimate it. Ernst Mach’s positivism — his attempt to purge the so-called exact sciences of all metaphysics — is an exemplary case of this internal erosion by which science separates itself from speculative philosophy, a development Lyotard terms “delegitimation” (PMC 37–41). The second metanarrative, Socialism, tells the heroic story of “the emancipation of the rational or working subject” (PMC 31). It is a metanarrative grounded on a notion of the inherent value of the human or its inalienable rights. Lyotard explains, for example, that emancipation’s legitimation of knowledge insists that “all peoples have a right to science” (PMC 31). For Lyotard, socialism lost its credibility when its critical principle (a dualistic conception of society based upon the idea of class struggle) was partially dissolved by the internal regulatory mechanisms of liberal democracy: in other words, as capitalist societies found ways to absorb and redirect class conflict through the development of social programs in the modern liberal state (PMC 12–13). From that point on, Lyotard argues, the goals of socialism were reduced to “utopia” or “hope” (PMC 13). Incredulity toward metanarratives is not, however, all there is to Lyotard’s account of the postmodern, although many readers neglect to read beyond this point. The more valuable portion of The Postmodern Condition offers an analysis of the pragmatics according to which scientific knowledge is legitimated in the absence of metanarratives. His analysis illuminates significant problems in those efforts to create normativity that involve linking discourses of the true to those of the good/just. Lyotard argues that in the absence of credulity toward metanarratives, the de facto legitimation of scientific knowledge takes place within a general context of what he terms “performativity”: good, or legitimate, or valid science is what improves the efficiency of a system by optimizing its input/output ratio. (For example, the introduction of robotic technology to industrial manufacturing increases profit by reducing labor costs.) The advent of postmodern science, Lyotard explains, exhibits two important changes from modernist science: “a multiplication in methods of argumentation and a rising complexity level in the process of establishing proof” (PMC 41). Concerning the latter, Lyotard points out that “the need for proof becomes increasingly strong as the pragmatics of scientific knowledge replaces traditional knowledge or knowledge based on revelation” (PMC 44). A scientist must adduce proof in the form of observed facts in order for his or her statements to be accepted as true. Technology optimizes observation and thus increases a scientist’s chances of being right. But “devices that optimize the performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof — and that means no verification of statements and no truth” (PMC 44–5). The advent of this financial requirement has forced science to play a language game other than its own:

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The production of proof, which is in principle only part of an argumentation process designed to win agreement from the addressees of scientific messages, thus falls under the control of another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity — that is, the best possible input/output equation. The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today’s financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power. (PMC 46) Science thus comes under the spell of politics, what Lyotard refers to as “the discourse of power” (PMC 46), through performativity, whose principle is efficiency: maximization of output relative to given input. In this way the postmodern pragmatics of science entails a linkage of science (discourse of truth) with politics (discourse of justice). Lyotard’s analysis of the status of knowledge in the postmodern condition thus points toward a conclusion diametrically opposed to Habermas’ insistence on reconnecting the spheres of culture: in order to preserve the pursuit of truth, scientific knowledge production has to be kept separate from discussions of what ought to be done in the realm of politics. In the combined domain science/politics that appears in Postmodernity, efficiency amounts to allocating funding only to that research that promises to increase profit or augment power. Lyotard characterizes this principle of allocating funding as “terroristic”: “efficiency gained by eliminating or threatening to eliminate a player from the language game one shares with him” (PMC 63). Science becomes terroristic when it augments power by maximizing performativity — by funding some research and not others. For without funding a scientist is effectively eliminated from the conversation about what is “true.” More broadly, however, Lyotard’s term “terror” points to a kind of violence done to either the integrity of a discourse when its statements are evaluated according to criteria external to that discourse, or a kind of violence done to a domain when it is governed by a discourse not appropriate to the nature of the objects which populate it. In either case, the prospect of “terror” serves as a warning against obliterating the differences between domains and the discourses according to which those domains are regulated and understood. In Postmodernism and its Critics John McGowan argues that Lyotard believes “the way to disconnect scientific discoveries from lamentable purposes is not to tighten the restrictions on what scientists can study according to some generalized moral formula but to sever completely the connection between research and the other language games of nationalist politics, morality, and the economic exploitation of technological

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innovations” (183). It is to prevent the situation Lyotard names “terror” that he insists on keeping science separate from politics. This concern is the occasion for Lyotard’s famous formulation in The Postmodern Condition about the incommensurability of science on the one hand and nonscience (i.e., narrative) on the other: Both are composed of statements; the statements are “moves” made by the players within the framework of generally applicable rules; these are specific to each particular kind of knowledge, and the “moves” judged to be “good” in one cannot be of the same type as those judged to be “good” in another, unless it happens that way by chance. It is therefore impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. (PMC 26) Lyotard’s thesis about incommensurability illuminates the fact that discourses in the domain of Culture (ethics and politics) are not capable of adjudicating questions pertaining to the domain of Nature (science) because the discourses are regulated by fundamentally different and incompatible sets of rules. Science is typically understood to be denotative discourse — description of the way the world is. Politics, however, necessarily involves statements about the way the world should be. That is, the latter is made up of prescriptive statements. It is on this basis Lyotard insists that legitimating science according to the rules of politics interferes with what should be the autonomous determination of what is “true.” Lyotard’s incommensurability thesis has implications beyond the question of how scientific statements are legitimated: separating discourses of science and politics creates significant difficulties for Modernity’s general effort to create normativity out of itself. When he turns his attention from the problem of the political legitimation of the scientific to consider the scientific legitimation of the political Lyotard acknowledges this very difficulty. In Just Gaming Lyotard argues that a science of politics — that is, a discourse of justice that begins with a universally valid description of the ideal polis — is not possible because no conception of the ideal polis could be universally valid. Recalling the argument in The Postmodern Condition about incommensurability, he points out “that there is in justice, insofar as it refers to prescriptions, and it necessarily does, a use of language that is fundamentally different from the theoretical use” (JG 24). Disconnecting questions of justice (political normativity) from questions of truth (science or epistemological normativity) means that “the question of justice cannot be resolved in terms of models,” because without an objective description of the ideal polis there is no clear set of criteria according to

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which prescriptives could be evaluated and chosen. The result is that “one is without criteria, yet one must decide” (JG 17). In Chapter 6 I examine in more detail Lyotard’s strategies for enacting a politics decoupled from science: i.e., a mode of judgment without criteria. Here it is enough to recognize that when the political is decoupled from the scientific or the scientific from the political, one is left with only the possibility of judgment without criteria, which is sufficiently different from the project of Modernity to suggest that we are no longer in the modern. The opposition between modern (Habermas) and postmodern (Lyotard) responses to the problem of normativity can now be seen, in an admittedly schematic fashion, as a question regarding the relation between discourses of theoretic reason and practical reason or, alternatively, as a question about the appropriateness of discourses applied to specific domains. Combining them prevents the discourses from operating according to their own internal logics and, consequently, from accomplishing what they were specifically designed to accomplish. Separating them, however, impedes the determination of normativity. Paralleling both Habermas and Lyotard, Bruno Latour’s reading of Modernity also concerns the relations between discourses of science and those of politics. More specifically, Latour’s inaugural work in the field of science studies (roughly, the sociology of science) seeks to reconfigure the relations between these discourses in order to take fuller account of the interactions between the domains they seek to legislate. His book We Have Never Been Modern argues that contemporary understanding of science’s place in the social world continues to be haunted by the excesses of modernism — in particular, by the insistence on sharp ontological distinctions such as that between Nature on the one hand and Culture on the other. Critical of modernism and postmodernism alike, Latour seeks to articulate a third position: “nonmodernism.” Latour’s work in science studies characterizes the natural sciences as a set of intellectual and social practices, the general configuration of which has not substantially changed since the advent of “modern” science sometime in the seventeenth century. Latour uses the term “modernism” in quite a general and somewhat vague sense to refer to two sets of intellectual practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective: The first set of practices, by “translation,” creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by “purification,” creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. Without the first set, the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless. Without the second, the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out. (Never Been Modern 10–11)

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Whereas purification separates what was once regarded as an undifferentiated entity into distinguishable parts, “translation” or “mediation” integrates nonhuman entities with human interests. Mediation would, for example, “link in one continuous chain the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, scientific and industrial strategies, the preoccupations of heads of state, the anxieties of ecologists” in trying to understand the phenomenon of ozone depletion (Never Been Modern 11). As a further example, the domestication and later synthesis of certain bread molds for their antibiotic properties is perhaps one of the most successful instances in human medical science of a nonhuman entity being integrated into the human world. Conversely, purification would “establish a partition between a natural world that had always been there, a society with predictable and stable interests and stakes, and a discourse that is independent of both reference and society” (Never Been Modern 11). In what could well be the inaugural gesture of modernist purification itself, the Cartesian cogito renders a “mind-in-a-vat” disconnected from a “world-out-there,” such that “mind” and “world” mark reified domains of human subjects of Culture sharply divided from nonhuman objects in Nature. Modern philosophy, in the form of disembodied Reason, floats somewhere in between. Latour observes that both purification and mediation are necessary parts of the “modern constitution” (Never Been Modern 13–15). Without new purifications, mediation has to slow down or stop, because there is only a finite number of combinations possible among a finite set of elements. Conversely, without an interest in generating new combinations of elements, there is no point in continuing to purify existing entities into new parts. Latour’s critique of modernist purification and mediation points toward something like a deconstruction of the standoff between scientific realists and social constructivists, in the sense that it tries to work past a binary opposition that is itself arbitrary and unstable. Thus, on Latour’s modeling, Nature is not some antecedent reality waiting to be discovered by scientists ratcheting their way toward Truth one experiment at a time. Nor is it the purely discursive product of a set of signifying practices which some cultural theorists insist carve up reality in a wholly arbitrary way. To the latter Latour would say that you cannot make an electron do just anything you want simply by placing it in an alternative set of differential signs. To the former he would say that the only way you have any evidence of an electron as such or know anything of its properties is when you isolate it from more complex phenomena — that is, when you “socialize” it into the human world by letting/making it perform inside the human-made theater of a particle accelerator (Pandora’s Hope 194). Latour explains that the goal of his view is to avoid using the Nature-Culture/Object-Subject distinction at all. Thinking past these binary oppositions, an electron no longer appears as a discovered bit of

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Nature or as a constructed artifact of Culture but, rather, as what can be understood as having a hybrid ontology. This leads Latour to refer to such entities as “quasi-objects” — “quasi” in the sense that they are neither wholly objective nor subjective (Never Been Modern 51–5). This schema is the backbone of a narrative Latour develops about the invention of a modern worldview according to which humans are understood to be independent of and autonomous with respect to a nonhuman (super)natural world. According to Latour, prior to this distinction between the Cultural and the Natural, premoderns regarded the world as a continuous fabric woven from threads of humans and nonhumans in such a way that human interests were in unmediated contact with essential properties of nonhumans (Never Been Modern 38). One way to think of this premodern worldview is to see the human world as contiguous with the supernatural such that a range of interactions transpire between them, such as prayer attended by divine intervention or transgression resulting in retribution. Against this integrated view of the cosmos, modernism names the simultaneous generation of separated domains of human Culture on the one hand and nonhuman Nature on the other. The distinction implies that Nature transcends human control and that Culture is immanent to it. But the paradoxical opposites of both are equally true. Latour points out that because humans demonstrate the independence of natural phenomena from human control within the humanly constructed environment of the laboratory, Nature’s transcendence is actually a product of human mediation. Similarly, even though human Culture (human social institutions) is an entirely human construction, it nevertheless transcends human control, behaving more like transcendent Nature in the sense that no individual human or even small groups of humans can alter it at will. This paradox (simultaneously transcendent and immanent Nature together with simultaneously transcendent and immanent Culture) remains hidden as long as the work of mediation is occluded by the work of purification; that is, as long as people forget that a reified Nature beyond human control is actually a product of human interaction with nonhumans. Latour argues that modernism kept this paradox out of sight by officially identifying itself with purification while occluding the work of mediation. As Latour conceives it, modernist purification creates both human and nonhuman autonomy by separating the two into distinct ontological zones and increasing the distance between them. Latour argues that this autonomy gave humans increased daring to interact with the nonhuman world on an unprecedented scale, resulting in the proliferation of human/ nonhuman hybrids (Never Been Modern 41). The very advantage of scientific modernism is, in fact, the great number of human/nonhuman hybrids it produces, many of which provide significant benefits for human society. Not just the development of antibiotics but also selective cross-breeding to

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develop disease resistance in crop plants, the generation and harnessing of electrical power, and, more recently, the advent of hydrogen fuel cells and other alternative fuels for automobiles to replace petroleum combustion engines represent hybrid products of scientific purification/ mediation. In order for this proliferation to continue, however, moderns must continue to believe that the unregulated proliferation of human/ nonhuman hybrids will have no negative cosmological consequences for the human world. It is the increasing incredibility of this belief (its demonstrated falseness) that occasions Latour’s sense of the urgency to rethink the intellectual practices of modernism. For in addition to products whose benefit is beyond doubt, modernist purification has also resulted in the human world becoming populated with human/nonhuman hybrids which modernist science cannot control because it continues to occlude the work of mediation. Atomic weapons provided perhaps the most dramatic occasion, according to Michel Serres, to rethink the unequivocal benefits of science (“Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time” 15). Genetic engineering, stem-cell research, trans-species organ transplantation and “designer” psychopharmacology are recent additions to a rapidly increasing list of hybrid “monsters” science has produced through its mediations with nature. Anthropogenic global climate change is simply the latest, though perhaps the scariest, such monster. Latour’s alternative to and remedy for the uncontrolled proliferation of hybrid monsters is to think the practices of purification together with those of mediation in order to recognize that human interaction with nonhumans can have irreversibly negative consequences for the human world. This amounts to reversing the modernist purification that generated the Nature/Culture distinction in the first place. Latour’s nonmodernism, then, is an attempt to de-reify that distinction, reconnecting mediation with purification in order to foreground the cosmological consequences of the hybrid monsters which modernism has allowed to proliferate. The thought figure of the nonmodern therefore signals the possibility of avoiding the aporia of connecting/disconnecting discourses of science from those of morality/justice. It represents a strategy of dereifying the discursive distinctions which are the basis of important confrontations between the modern and the postmodern responses to the problem of normativity. Ultimately, what Latour is advocating is circumspection regarding scientific knowledge: “we are going to have to slow down, reorient, and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially” (Never Been Modern 12). Regulation of hybrids might begin by reversing the separation of purification and mediation, but it entails more than that. It means, in effect, evaluating the products of science and assigning validity (citizenship in human society) to some and not

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others. This raises an important question Latour does not directly address: according to what procedure could the products of science be evaluated? Viewed from this angle, Latour’s critique of purification and his nonmodern alternative are involved in the philosophical discourse of Modernity understood as the problem of normativity as it applies to criteria of scientific products. Moreover, like Habermas and Lyotard, Latour’s intervention in the problem of normativity concerns the relations between the discourses of science and politics. Latour’s response, however, is neither Habermas’ advocacy of combining the discourses nor Lyotard’s insistence on separating them. Instead, he works toward de-reifying the very distinction between science and politics on the grounds that this distinction is itself an effect of modernist purification which gives rise to — and perpetuates — the problem. Like Lyotard, Latour dismisses knowledge for its own sake (Idealism) as an appropriate basis on which to legitimate scientific production: the very problem he wants to rectify is, after all, the tendency of modern science to conduct itself without regard for non-scientific concerns. Latour’s distance from the other metanarrative Lyotard discusses, emancipation (Socialism), is less clear. On the one hand, he opens Never Been Modern celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event he says signals the failure of Socialism which, “While seeking to abolish man’s exploitation of man . . . had magnified that exploitation immeasurably” (8). This is good evidence that Latour no longer himself believes in (Socialist) emancipation as a narrative capable of directing human societies. On the other hand, emancipation is, in some sense, exactly what Latour is seeking: not, however, emancipation from the human tyranny that Socialism meant to address, but emancipation from domination by human/nonhuman hybrid monsters and emancipation from the structurally flawed intellectual constitution of modernism. However, as Lyotard notes, the narrative of emancipation typically invokes an idea of the autonomy and inherent value of the human, though for Latour to do so would return him to one of the signal practices of modernism, namely some version of humanism as the purification and privileging of one human, cultural domain over others. Insofar as Latour holds at the very least an ambivalent attitude toward legitimation via reference to metanarratives, his critique of modernism parallels Lyotard’s, and there appears little difference between the nonmodern and the postmodern understood as interventions in Modernity’s problem of normativity. Despite these parallels, however, Latour criticizes postmodern attempts to separate science and politics as a perpetuation of modernist purification. He writes, somewhat hyperbolically, that he “has not found words ugly enough to designate this [postmodern] intellectual movement — or rather, this intellectual immobility through which humans and nonhumans are left to drift” (Never Been Modern 61). His antipathy toward the postmodern

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is occasioned by the strategy which calls for keeping the discourses of the natural world separate from those of the human world. Latour says of postmodernism that it “lives under the modern Constitution, but it no longer believes in the guarantees the Constitution offers” (Never Been Modern 46): The postmoderns think they are still modern because they accept the total division between the material and technological world on the one hand and the linguistic play of speaking subjects on the other — thus forgetting [mediation]; or because they relish only in the hybrid character of free floating networks and collages — thus forgetting [purification]. But they are mistaken, because true moderns have always surreptitiously multiplied intermediaries in order to try to conceptualize the massive expansion of hybrids as well as their purification. (Never Been Modern 61–2) Latour’s argument against the postmodern is marked by three separate claims. First, Latour insists that postmodernism perpetuates modernist purification by accepting a division between the material world and the human world (Never Been Modern 64–5). In general, many figures associated with the term “postmodernism” do tend to be skeptical of attempts to bridge the gap between subject and object, especially by way of so-called representational knowledge in which the subject’s representation of the world is thought to accurately reflect an external state of affairs. One genealogy of this skepticism might trace it to Saussure’s observation in his Course in General Linguistics that there is only ever an arbitrary relation between signifier and referent and that different languages carve up the world using different categories, an observation which tends to relativize any (linguistic) representation of the world. Language, in this sense, cuts off humans irredeemably from the nonhuman world rather than connecting them reliably to it. A second, related, criticism Latour levels against postmodernism is that it perpetuates modernism’s purification by relishing only “the hybrid character of free floating networks” (Never Been Modern 61). The centrally important concept of “discourse” which, in much postmodernism, replaces representational knowledge, points to an understanding of language that matches what Latour seems to mean by a network. What the concept of discourse tries to capture is the constitutive function of language with respect to both subjects and objects. For example, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France titled “The Discourse on Language,” Michel Foucault points to the specific ways in which discourse is regulated in any particular historical epoch.1 The general point is that any understanding produced by a discourse (and all understanding is so produced) is relative

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to the ways in which that discourse has been regulated with respect to what can be talked about in the discourse and what counts for a true statement, who is allowed speak within it, and where and when it takes places. This relativity pertains to objects in the natural world as well as to subjects in the cultural world. A primary focus of Foucault’s analysis of the regulation of discourse is on the human sciences, which invent or construct “the human” by interpreting what it means to be human. Part of viewing language as discourse means recognizing that signification is not one-sidedly determined by either subjects or objects — subjects being themselves objects of discourse, as in the case of the humanities and the human sciences. There is, additionally, a recursive effect or feed-back loop at work here by which a subject’s self-understanding, itself a product of discourse, shapes how he or she understands all the other things in the world. Along these lines, Latour contends that the effect of the so-called linguistic turn (the moment in intellectual history when language becomes the primary analytic category according to which problems are treated) “is to make discourse not a transparent intermediary that would put human subjects in contact with the natural world, but a mediator independent of nature and society alike” (Never Been Modern 62). There is, then, (some) justification for saying that (some) postmoderns “relish only in the hybrid character of free floating networks” in the sense of understanding linguistic representations of the world to be determined neither wholly by referents nor wholly by speaking subjects, both being at least partially configured by the operations of discourse. Against this feature of the postmodern, Latour is dismissive of the tendency to relish in free-floating networks because a network connected firmly to neither the natural nor the cultural domain prevents the very linkage between the natural and the human entailed by the goal of regulating scientific production: it prevents the very mediation Latour seeks to re-establish between the human and the nonhuman. Latour’s third criticism of postmodernism is that, although it lives under the modern Constitution, it no longer believes in what that Constitution guarantees. Living under the modern Constitution means accepting the separation of the natural world from the cultural world. We have already seen the senses in which postmodernism separates the human and nonhuman in, for example, a skepticism toward representational knowledge and a consequent appeal to discourse. Believing in what the Constitution guarantees means believing in the project it makes possible. Although the moderns accept the separation of the human and the nonhuman, they surreptitiously allow hybrids to proliferate. Human manipulation of nature was, after all, the specific possibility unleashed by sharply dividing humans from the nonhuman (i.e., supernatural) world. This freedom to experiment with nature, then, is central to what the

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modern Constitution allows. Lyotard’s thesis about incommensurability as well as skepticism regarding representational knowledge suggests a decoupling of the human from the nonhuman that inhibits or at least complicates passage between the two that is the basis of Modernity’s experimentation with Nature. More broadly, one central feature of the project of Modernity — conspicuously continued in the postmodern — is emancipation. This is famously signaled in Kant’s essay, “What is Called ‘Enlightenment’?”, for which question he furnished “independence” as the answer.2 This emancipation is not limited to achieving freedom from the nonhuman (super)natural world, which effort Horkheimer and Adorno refer to as “the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy” (Dialectic of Enlightenment 3). Modernity’s goal of freedom is also directed against human forms of enslavement, of which Marxism’s effort to unmask false consciousness on the basis of a scientific analysis of culture is a prime example.3 Similarly, many versions of postmodernism are similarly engaged in unmasking the arbitrariness of the operations by which various cultural formations (categories of gender, race, versions of “knowledge”) come into being. Unmasking arbitrary forms of domination describes pretty well the goal of Foucault’s archeology and genealogy. Similarly, unmasking characterizes many of the uses to which Derrida’s deconstruction of Western philosophy has been put; for example, in the service of postcolonial theory and queer theory. On Latour’s reckoning, demystification, unmasking, or critique is made possible precisely by a separation of the human from the nonhuman: Solidly grounded in the transcendental certainty of nature’s laws, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, denounce and express indignation at irrational beliefs and unjustified dominations. Solidly grounded in the certainty that humans make their own destiny, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, express indignation at and denounce irrational beliefs, the biases of ideologies, and the unjustified domination of the experts who claim to have staked out the limits of action and freedom. (Never Been Modern 36) Drawing on knowledge of the way the world “really is” — which is in turn grounded on the assumption that the world has an objective shape independent of humans — allows science a vantage point in “reality” from which to adjudicate claims to truth. Similarly, drawing on the fact that human society is an entirely human construction, much cultural critique seeks to unveil as entirely human the operations which configure — and enslave — humans in categories of race, gender, and nationality for example. Conversely, allowing human society to be even partially

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governed by natural forces beyond human control would significantly restrict the scope of liberation made possible by activities of unveiling. Modern efforts to denounce or critique frequently presume the possibility of access to objective criteria beyond human manipulation and therefore ultimately rest on a separation of the human from the nonhuman. Critical efforts associated with the postmodern, however, tend to reject not only unmediated access to the nonhuman but the very claim to absolute foundations of any kind, regarding all such forms of human understanding as products of more or less arbitrary ways of using language. For example, Derrida’s account of logocentrism makes a case that, from its inception in Descartes all the way to Husserl, Western philosophy’s repeated quests for absolute grounding is doomed to failure because the logos is never entirely located in one place — never centric — but always subject to a deferral and displacement, always inscribed by différance. Nothing is outside the network of differences Derrida terms “texte.”4 Latour observes, however, that denying movement cross the gap separating humans and nonhumans precludes the possibility of unmasking or critique because it prevents claiming a position outside human discourse from which to denounce some representations as false. Although the impossibility of a transcendent view tends to be a common feature of versions of the postmodern, those who deny the possibility tend to accept the epistemological and axiological fall-out. So, for example, Lyotard insists that the incommensurability of language games which precludes judging statements in one language game according to the rules of another saddles us with the limitation that “All we can do is stare in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species” (PMC 26). Latour is much less comfortable than Lyotard with this limitation because it precludes the very thing he is attempting to accomplish: the regulation of scientific production that fails to consider non-scientific concerns. 5 Of broader significance for deploying the example of the nonmodern within the philosophical discourse of Modernity, Latour’s thesis about the persistence of purification in the postmodern points to the way it structurally impedes attempts to engage in critique and therefore to establish normativity. The general force of Latour ’s reading of postmodernism can be summarized in the following way. He views versions of postmodernism as perpetuating modernist purification in insisting on the separation of discourses of the natural world from those of the human world. For Latour these versions of the postmodern establish something like an autonomous sphere of discourse without fixed grounding in either Nature or Culture. In either case, the consequence is that postmodernism’s modernism precludes the linkages between discourses that seem to be necessary to the effort to create normativity without reference to transcendental authority or models supplied by the past. Simply linking the discourse of natural

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world with those of the cultural world, however, precipitates the problem Lyotard terms “terror.” One measure of a successful intervention in the problematics of normativity would be to avoid this paradox. The thought figure of the nonmodern suggests what such an intervention might attempt: namely a reversal of the practices of purification by which Modernity grounded itself and which have been perpetuated in many postmodern attempts to overcome that grounding. Additionally, Latour’s example shows us that a reversal of purification might be carried out by de-reifying the oppositions which Modernity institutes and postmodernism reifies in keeping them apart. This operation of nonmodern dereification is on display in Latour’s attention to the question of the horizon within which Western scientific rationality is allowed to operate and therefore, by extension, the question of the very limits of Western scientific rationality and the Western episte¯me¯. One early site at which the scope of scientific rationality was fought is the battle in The Gorgias between Socrates and Callicles.6 The debate between Socrates and Callicles is commonly understood to be between Right and Might (reason and force) as the best means for disciplining the unruly, unreasonable multitude of the polis. While Callicles holds that force is justified and Socrates insists that reason is more appropriate, Latour contends that there is in fact little that distinguishes their positions when they are viewed against the democratic claims of the people of Athens: “Socrates’[s] invocation of reason against the unreasonable people is actually patterned on Callicles’ request for ‘an unequal share of power’” (Pandora’s Hope 219). Latour points out that Callicles’ invocation of Might amounts to an elitist and specialized expertise: “Yes, that’s what I mean. In my opinion, that’s what natural right is — for an individual who is better (that is more clever) to rule over second-rate people and to have more than them” (Plato quoted in Latour, Pandora’s Hope 223). According to Latour, Socrates’ own solution is not technically different, which becomes apparent when he challenges another of his interlocutors in the Gorgias, Polus: The trouble, Polus, is that you are trying to use on me the kind of rhetorical refutation which people in the lawcourts think is successful. There too, you see, people think they’re proving the other side wrong if they produce a large number of eminent witnesses in support of the points they’re making, but their opponent comes up with only a single witness or none at all. This kind of refutation, however, is completely worthless in the context of truth, . . . since it’s perfectly possible for someone to be defeated in court by a horde of witnesses with no more than apparent respectability who all testify falsely against him. (Plato, quoted in Latour, Pandora’s Hope 224–5)

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Socrates’ tactic is technically no different from Callicles’ in the sense that both advocate the potential superiority of a single individual over the multitude on the basis of some form of specialized or expert knowledge that the lone individual possesses. Callicles insists that an individual’s superior understanding (being “more clever”) entitles him or her to a greater share of power; Socrates contends that a superior knowledge of what pertains in “the context of truth” ought to elevate the individual above the multitude. Latour proposes that the West has tended to rule Socrates’ reason as victorious in this debate because, against Callicles’ mere rhetoric (“conviction without understanding”), “the fabulous secret of mathematical demonstration that [Socrates] has in his hands is that it is a step-by-step persuasion that forces one to assent no matter what” (Pandora’s Hope 230). In other words, Socrates wins because he appeals to episte¯ me¯ or apodeictic knowledge that presents its conclusions as infallible and irrefutable, as transcending any merely “human” concerns. Latour is cautious of the problems that arise when science understood as episte¯ me¯ is adduced to politics: the two are combined, in the case of Socrates, in order to force assent, to end discussion about what ought to be done. It therefore enacts a kind of violence that is no different from Callicles’ force and like that which Lyotard calls “terror.” Secondly, and this is the main source of the problematic linking of science and politics, science as episte¯me¯ does not fit the pragmatic conditions of democratic political reason. According to Latour, political reason must be practiced in public in order to have public effects; it cannot be the object of expert knowledge, because that would defeat democracy by eliminating some members of the polis from participating; and, lastly, political reason cannot be based on knowledge of past causes and consequences because the conditions of political decision making are never precisely the same, in which case the apodeictic character of episte¯me¯ does not apply (Pandora’s Hope 238–42). As demonstrated by Socrates’ example, science as episte¯ me¯ does not fulfill the pragmatic conditions of political discourse, which include criteria other than a statement’s truth value. For one thing, Socrates’ apodeictic reasoning is, by his own admission, designed only to win assent of a single interlocutor, not the multitude: “‘I am content . . . if you testify to the validity of my argument, and I canvass only for your vote, without caring about what everyone else thinks’” (Plato, quoted in Pandora’s Hope 229). But, as Latour points out, democratic “politics is precisely about ‘caring for what everyone thinks’” (Pandora’s Hope 229). Socrates’ strategy of winning the assent of a single interlocutor via an irrefutable demonstration ought, then, to carry little or no force in public political debate. Secondly, as the previous example intimates, Socrates deploys episte¯me¯ against the multitudes of Athens, and thus understands it as an

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expert knowledge not available to everyone. However, democracy, as Latour points out, cannot be about professionals telling the people what to do (Pandora’s Hope 239). Finally, Latour explains that Socrates attempts to distinguish philosophy from rhetoric on the basis that the latter “confers conviction without understanding . . . while the other confers knowledge [episte¯ me¯]” (Plato, quoted in Pandora’s Hope 230). “If anything,” Latour responds, “it is apodeictic reasoning of causes and consequences, the episte¯me¯, that is ‘without understanding,’ in the sense that it fails to take into account the pragmatic conditions of deciding what to do next in the thick of the agora with ten thousand people talking at once” (Pandora’s Hope 230–1). In sum, science as episte¯me¯ violates the pragmatic condition of political reason in deploying a supra- or nonhuman “truth” against the all-too-human demos. For Latour, as for Lyotard, then, science (as episte¯ me¯) and political reason constitute different language games and, therefore, adducing the former in the context of the latter amounts to terrorism in Lyotard’s sense, or, alternatively, what Latour refers to as invoking “inhumanity against inhumanity,” which amounts to the same thing (Pandora’s Hope 217). Latour’s solution, however, is not Lyotard’s insistence on keeping different language games separate, for, as noted, that precludes legitimation across language games and, therefore, impedes efforts to create normativity. Instead, Latour advocates conceiving of science not as a discourse of immutable truths validated by the way the world really is but as a discourse that interlaces the human and nonhuman domains through the production of human/nonhuman hybrids that science makes available via its practices of mediation. Thus, in opposition to science as episte¯me¯, Latour invokes an alternative meaning of “scientific”: the gaining of access, through experiments and calculations, to entities that at first do not have the same characteristics as humans do . . . [This] Science No. 2 deals with nonhumans, which in the beginning are foreign to social life, and which are slowly socialized in our midst through the channels of laboratories, expeditions, and institutions, and so on . . . (Pandora’s Hope 259) There are two operations here with important implications for recovering the thought figure of the nonmodern. The first is that Latour’s Science No. 2 effects a reversal of modernist purification. Science, on Latour’s account, has never been only about the Natural world but has always moved between, and in fact linked, what was on either side of the false dichotomy between humans and nonhumans. Or, more broadly, modernism has always engaged in mediation despite its officially privileging purification. Secondly, reversing purification de-reifies the distinction

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between the natural and the social worlds. No longer are they seen as discrete ontological domains governed by distinct sets of laws, the provinces of discrete discourses. Yet a third important feature of the example of the nonmodern is the replacement of science as t by a version of reason capable of bringing some degree of systematization to domains of human experience composed of features which call for their own proper consideration. That systematization relates to the possibility of coming to some kind of judgment, as for example in the effort to create normativity. Finally, then, guided by the thought figure of the nonmodern we are prepared to chart a passage from Latour’s critique of modernism and postmodernism to Musil’s Essayismus as intervention in the philosophical discourse of Modernity. The example of the nonmodern represents a reversal of purification and a dereification of the ontological zones that purification institutes. De-reification characterizes quite well the strategy of Musil’s earliest invocation of the essay as between science on the one hand and art and life on the other. (PS 48; GW II: 1334). He wants to open a space that avoids the way these domains have historically been carved up and kept separated. Latour’s Science No. 2 is a discursive strategy which links the human and the nonhuman. Similarly, as a discursive strategy Musil’s Essayismus seeks to operate between domains susceptible to systematic ordering and those which do not submit to such an order. And both Latour’s Science No. 2 and Musil’s Essayismus arise from a sense of inapplicability of episte¯ me¯ to human experience. Under the heading of Precision and Soul (Genauigkeit und Seele) Musil is attracted to science’s precision and its courage to remake the architectonic of its ideas in light of new discoveries. At the same time, however, he remains wary of the violence associated with science as episte¯ me¯, especially when is applied to human experience. The nonmodernism of the discursive strategy that characterizes Musil’s intervention in the philosophical discourse of Modernity thus bears a complicated relation to the rational instincts of modernism. The task of the next chapter will be to explore Musil’s complex commitment to systematic rationality, for which Nietzsche will be the guide.

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In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Jürgen Habermas positions Friedrich Nietzsche as “the entry into postmodernity” on the grounds that Nietzsche “renounces a renewed revision of the concept of reason and bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment” (PDM 86). For Habermas, the dialectic of enlightenment is an aftereffect of Modernity’s “time consciousness”: the understanding of the present as not simply a continuation of the past but as the advent of something new. That sense of newness is the expression of a radical break with the past following which Modernity will no longer seek its orientation from models supplied by the earlier epoch (PDM 7). Once again, “Modernity will have to create its normativity out of itself” (PDM 7). Kant’s critical philosophy supplied a method for self-generating normativity according to which reason is regarded as capable of interrogating its own operations in the cases of theoretic knowledge, morality/justice, and aesthetic experience. This gives to Modernity its structural principle: namely, subjectivity, in the sense that Modernity supplies its own criteria for the true, the good, and the beautiful. The fact that Kant discovered separate conditions of possibility for each of the cognitive modes appropriate to the true, good, and beautiful (articulated separately in each of the three Critiques) signals the tearing apart of the unified worldviews of revealed religions that enlightenment reason displaced in turning its back on the past. In what Habermas terms the Project of Enlightenment, each of these modes of reason corresponds to a sphere of culture, in which experts are trained to conduct research for the increased rationalization of everyday life (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 9). According to Habermas, “Kant does not perceive as diremptions the differentiations within reason, the formal divisions within culture, and in general the fissures among all those spheres. Hence he ignores the need for unification that emerges with the separations evoked by the principle of subjectivity” (PDM 19). Perception of that need only appears “as soon as Modernity conceives of itself historically, in other words, as soon as it becomes conscious of the dissolution of the exemplary past, and of the necessity of creating all that is normative out of itself, as a historical problem” (PDM 19–20). To conceive the dissolution of the exemplary past as a historical problem means to ask whether the reason which displaced religion is capable of

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“stabilizing a historical formation that has been set loose from all historical obligations” (PDM 20). In other words, can self-reflective reason (Kantian critique) effectively replace what it displaced? According to Habermas, Hegel did not think Kant’s critical philosophy “powerful enough to regenerate the unifying power of religion in the medium of reason” (PDM 20). Instead, he found that Kant’s religion of reason exhibited the same positivities that debilitated religion in the first place and triggered the need for enlightenment. In this way, overcoming the cultural fragmentation that follows Modernity’s break with the past sets off the dialectic of enlightenment: the attempt by reason to overcome the diremptions it occasioned in displacing religion. Hegel is thus the first philosopher to take up and become ensnared in the struggle to rehabilitate Modernity’s appeal to reason, though we do not need to work through the details of the Hegelian solution in order to recognize what is distinctive about even more radical — in essence, postmodern — departures from the Kantian solution. It is enough to recognize that Hegel still thought (absolute) Reason capable of re-synthesizing the cultural diremptions that Kant’s critical philosophy brought about. Nietzsche no longer does, and his place in the philosophical discourse of Modernity is thus decisive for Habermas in that Nietzsche abandons the effort to rehabilitate Western reason and “turns the thought figure of the dialectic of enlightenment upon the historicist enlightenment as well, but this time with the goal of exploding modernity’s husk of reason” (PDM 86). Four themes emerge in Habermas’ installation of Nietzsche as the entry point into the postmodern: 1) Nietzsche is in search of an ethical totality that became lost and thus he seeks to repair the diremptions which the Enlightenment occasioned; 2) overcoming those diremptions involves abandoning subject-centered reason in order to counteract the subjectivity that is the structural principle of Modernity in general and the dialectic of enlightenment in particular; 3) Nietzsche thus turns to Dionysos as a figure of reason’s absolute other in an effort to overcome Modernity’s subjectivity (in the form of Apolline individuality); and 4) Nietzsche appeals to art as the mechanism by which Modernity will be put in contact with the archaic totality of existence in which individuality is dissolved and ethical community arises. According to Habermas then, Nietzsche’s postmodernism consists in an appeal to “reason’s absolute other” as the foundation of “an unmasking critique of reason that sets itself outside the horizon of reason” (PDM 96). That by virtue of which Nietzsche passes over the horizon of Modernity, according to Habermas, is the aesthetic: thus, “Nietzsche enthrones taste, ‘the Yes and No of the palate,’ as the organ of a knowledge beyond true and false, beyond good and evil” (PDM 96). Habermas is critical of this aesthetic gesture on the grounds that Nietzsche

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cannot legitimate the criteria of aesthetic judgment that he holds on to because he transposes aesthetic experience into the archaic, because he does not recognize as a moment of reason the critical capacity for assessing value that was sharpened through dealing with modern art — a moment that is still at least procedurally connected with objectifying knowledge and moral insight in the processes of providing argumentative grounds. (PDM 96) In other words, Habermas detects in Nietzsche’s aesthetic response the following contradiction: Nietzsche appeals to an aesthetic experience evacuated of theoretic and practical reason, thereby rejecting the rational procedures on which Modernity attempted to ground itself. However, Nietzsche’s justification for an appeal to the aesthetic remains grounded in a rational argument about what the aesthetic is capable of providing. Therefore, Nietzsche does not successfully detach himself from those very same rational procedures, and he ends up applying them in the form of criteria for aesthetic judgments. According to Habermas, this contradiction renders Nietzsche’s supposed postmodernism self-contradictory and his supposed farewell to Modernity ultimately unsuccessful. Habermas’ reading of Nietzsche as appealing to reason’s absolute other in an (unsuccessful) attempt to escape the horizon of Modernity has been highly contested. Alexander Nehamas, for one, questions the degree to which Nietzsche attempts to situate himself outside Enlightenment reason, arguing instead that Nietzsche exhibits an “essentially equivocal relation to ‘Modernity’” (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 230). Nehamas’ reading of Nietzsche thus marks a good place to begin recovering a nonmodern Musil en marge de la philosophie. Nietzsche is by far the philosopher Musil cites most often, and there have been several valuable studies which articulate correspondences between key ideas and themes in Nietzsche and in Musil.1 However, guided by Nehamas’ reading, I want to attend to the overall structure and quality of Musil’s response to the problem of Modernity and its symmetries with Nietzsche’s. Above all I want to attend to the question of how well it fits with strategies of the modern or the postmodern. On Nehamas’ reading, Nietzsche’s equivocal relation to Modernity consists of a more intricate attitude toward both reason and reason’s other than that on the basis of which Habermas characterizes his abandonment of the dialectic of enlightenment. I want to suggest that correspondences between Nietzsche’s and Musil’s engagements with the problems of Modernity point to another, nonmodern, alternative to the postmodern. Habermas tends to understand Modernity/Postmodernity as an either/or game in which the question is whether one adheres to enlightenment reason or not. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a sustained

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examination (denial) of the very possibility of treating philosophical questions from beyond the horizon of Enlightenment reason. Conversely, Nehamas’ sense of Nietzsche’s equivocal relation to Modernity begins from an understanding of Modernity as more internally paradoxical: “In Modernism we find both the love of innovation and the rejection of the authority of tradition, but also, and at the same time, a questioning of the value of progress, a critique of rationality, a sense that premodern civilization involved a wholeness and unity that have been irreparably fragmented” (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 224). Guided by this understanding of “modern,” Nehamas’ reading of Nietzsche points us in the direction of two principal themes: 1) (meta)narratives of nostalgia (i.e., progress or decline), and 2) the critique of rationality and the question of truth. According to Nehamas, Nietzsche believes neither in grand narratives of nostalgia nor in those of progress or decline. Whereas Habermas finds the recurrence to the Dionysiac principle in Nietzsche’s work an appeal to reason’s absolute other, Nehamas asserts that “Despite its call for a return to the ‘tragic’ values of Greece, [The Birth of Tragedy] does not thereby privilege whatever is earlier or ‘more primordial’” (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 229). Nehamas’ point is that the Greek tragic culture to which Nietzsche appeals is not simply identical with the Dionysiac but is, rather, a later integration of the Dionysiac and Apolline, “the taming of more primitive, purely Dionysian (“Bacchic”) elements through their intermingling with the Apollonian strains of Greek culture” (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 229). This reconciliation forms, as Nietzsche puts it in The Birth of Tragedy, “the most important moment in the history of Greek religion” (BT 20). Similarly, Nietzsche’s famous thesis about European Nihilism, the transvaluation of all values, precludes the possibility of finding a grounding for values either in the present or in the future, and, therefore, also precludes an investment in narratives of progress or decline. In the preface to The Will to Power Nietzsche announces “the advent of nihilism” as “the history of the next two centuries” (WP 3) and goes on to explain the exhaustion of all values in terms of three realizations: “that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity . . . [and that] the world is fabricated solely for psychological needs” (WP 13). Eliminating categories of goal, unity, and any true being of the world precludes one from measuring one’s distance from either an origin (the movement of a decline) or remaining distance toward goal (the movement of a progress). Abandoning these categories prevents understanding human existence in terms of teleological narratives of any kind. In general, Nietzsche is dismissive of conventional historical understanding because it tends to devalue the present, that is, actual existence (“Uses and Disadvantages” 112). And Nietzsche rejects the possibility that there

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are laws in history that might be thought to guide human societies (“Uses and Disadvantages” 113). More concretely, Nietzsche explicitly rejects attempts to explain the present as a moment within a world-process of becoming: “The time will come when one will prudently refrain from all constructions of the world-process or even of the history of man” in favor of attention to individuals (“Uses and Disadvantages” 111). In the end, despite the hypothesis that the transvaluation of all values unfolds in time, Nietzsche’s nihilism does not involve a narrative of decline because he does not regard the systems of values that have exhausted themselves as worthy of respect or emulation in the first place. Musil exhibits a suspicion toward metanarrative explanations of history that is similar to Nietzsche’s. In the essay “Helpless Europe,” he insists, for example, that events like WWI can be explained not by any hypothesis about the trajectory of humanity — its decline or progress — but only in terms of specific socio-historical circumstances: “we must search for contingencies, or more correctly, for ‘unlawful necessity,’ where one thing leads to another not by accident, but in a sequential concatenation not governed by any particular law” (PS 122; GW 2:1081).2 In The Man Without Qualities Musil treats this notion under The Principle of Insufficient Cause: the idea “everything that happens happens for no good or sufficient reason” (MWQ 140; GW 1:134). Nehamas’ characterization of the modern as combining a break from tradition with a suspicion toward progress aptly described the “Mysterious Malady of the Times” with which Musil begins to diagnose the cultural situation into which The Man Without Qualities seeks to intervene: “Suddenly, out of the becalmed mentality of the nineteenth century’s last two decades, an invigorating fever rose all over Europe . . . everywhere people were suddenly standing up to struggle against the old order” (MWQ 53; GW 1:55). Despite an initial urge for the new, however, “a general lull has set in, a gradual running down, in spite of occasional eddies of energy” (MWQ 55; GW 1:57). In “Helpless Europe” Musil attributes this cultural enervation to a lack of ordering concepts (PS 126; GW 2:1086). The narrator in The Man Without Qualities explains that [t]here is just something missing in everything, though you can’t put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period’s seeds of genius, but everything sparks with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has definitively arrived. (MWQ 56; GW 1:58) The final sentence exhibits what for Habermas is Modernity’s time consciousness: a sense of the present as not only chronologically different

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from the past but as embodying “the oppositional significance of an emphatically ‘new’ age” (PDM 5). Bound up with Modernity’s time consciousness is both an abandonment of the past and a lack of confidence in the future: are things worse or is one merely older? The lack of ordering concepts Musil alludes to signals, among other things, a lack of confidence in the ability of reason to guide the present into the future. Thus, if Modernity pinned its hopes for progress on the application of reason for improvement of everyday life, the specifically modern time consciousness observable in both Nietzsche and Musil which is suspicious of that project put us in contact with the second theme in Nehamas’ reading of Nietzsche, namely his critique of reason. Within the context of a consciousness of the present as categorically different from the past, Nietzsche’s equivocal relation to Modernity thus involves a deeply ambivalent attitude toward Enlightenment reason, one significantly more complex than Habermas’ sense of an appeal to reason’s absolute other. In its 1886 preface, Nietzsche characterizes The Birth of Tragedy as addressed to “the problem of science (Wissenschaft) itself, science grasped for the first time as something problematic and questionable,” where “science” for Nietzsche means the version of Western reason that begins with Socrates (BT 4–5). It is in this sense that “Socratism” is the real subject of The Birth of Tragedy, and it is to a large extent in recoil from Socratism that Nietzsche turns to the figure of Dionysos as a counterbalance to the version of theoretic reason Socrates represents. What is at stake in the choice between Socratism and the Dionysiac is both metaphysical and ethical. According to Nietzsche’s famous thesis, Attic tragedy arises from the interaction of two simultaneously metaphysical/aesthetic strategies for coping with the knowledge that human experience inevitably entails suffering. Following Apollo, god of the dream and therefore of image-making in general, Apolline art creates a beautiful dream world of images meant to shield humans from the horrors of existence. As the figure of delight in the beautiful, Apollo “must also contain that delicate line which the dream-image may not overstep if its effect is not to become pathological” (BT 16). This delicate line is the border between reason and reason’s other, madness. Apollo, therefore, is precisely the figure of the limitation of the individual, of the integrity of individuality itself. Dionysos, conversely, as the god of intoxication, represents a metaphysical/artistic drive which cuts through the world of images and appearances — across the delicate line bounding the individual — to access the fundamental reality from which suffering arises. For the early Nietzsche at least, Schopenhauer’s account of individuality and the individual’s cognitive mastery of the world provides the explanation of a passage from the Apolline to the Dionysiac:

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Schopenhauer has described for us the enormous horror which seizes people when they suddenly become confused and lose faith in the cognitive forms of the phenomenal world because the principle of sufficient reason, in one or another of its modes, appears to sustain an exception. If we add to this horror the blissful ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself, whenever this breakdown of the principium individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy of intoxication. (BT 17) Puncturing the veil of mere images or appearances and accessing the fundamental reality behind it, the Dionysiac provides “metaphysical solace” in the form of a recognition that one is actually a part of the fundamental being which makes up existence and dominates human life. The individual becomes re-absorbed into the primordial unity of being.3 With the dissolution of the limits of the self, the opposition between the individual and the forces that create suffering disappears. In addition to providing metaphysical solace for suffering, dissolution of Apolline individuality (a reversal of modernist purification) also occasions ethical effects that address the cultural diremptions Habermas sees as the defining problem of Modernity. In the experience of primordial unity “state and society, indeed all divisions between one human being and another, give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity which leads men back to the heart of nature” (BT 39). Reunited in this way with primordial being, all opposition between the human will and the forces which frustrate it disappear, and one finds solace for one’s suffering. It is primarily the dissolution of Apolline metaphysical and social individuality via the Dionysiac principle that recommends the latter as the counterbalance to a Modernity dominated by theoretic rationality. Nietzsche maintains that “Our whole modern world is caught in the net of Alexandrian culture, and the highest ideal it knows is theoretical man, equipped with the highest powers of understanding and working in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates” (BT 86). This is the sense of Nietzsche’s claim in the preface that The Birth of Tragedy is a book about science. Nietzsche sees Socrates as the inaugurator of “a profound delusion . . ., the imperturbable belief that thought, as it follows the thread of causality, reaches down into the deepest abysses of being, and that it is capable, not simply of understanding existence, but even of correcting it” (BT 73). The defining characteristic of Socratism for Nietzsche is thus its subordination of all questions to the single, supposedly universal, criterion of reason. So, for example, the supreme law of aesthetic Socratism runs: “‘In order to be beautiful, everything must be reasonable’ — a sentence formed

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in parallel to Socrates’ dictum that ‘Only he who knows is virtuous’” (BT 62). Nietzsche sees Socrates as not only living by science, but, more importantly, dying by it, a feat which represents a liberation from the horrors of (the end of) existence by reason and knowledge, and therefore as representative of the effort to make the world comprehensible and justified (BT 73). Socrates is thus the teacher of a new “Greek serenity and bliss in existence” (BT 75). According to Nietzsche this Socratic delusion is the very problem of science, of modernism, of Modernity. Thus, despite his (modern) unhooking of the present from the past, an important facet of Nietzsche’s equivocal relation to Modernity is grounded in a recognition of the limits of Socratic optimism. He points to Kant’s immanent critique as the awakening recognition of Socratism’s limit, referring to Kant as one of those “great natures [who] . . . have applied the tools of science itself, with incredible deliberation, to prove that all understanding, by its very nature, is limited and conditional, thereby rejecting decisively the claim of science to universal validity and universal goals” (BT 87). Whereas [scientific] optimism once believed in our ability to grasp and solve, with the help of the seemingly reliable aeternae veritates, all the puzzles of the universe, and treated space, time, and causality as entirely unconditional laws of the most general validity, Kant showed that these things actually only served to raise mere appearance, the work of maya, to the status of the sole and supreme reality and to put this in the place of the innermost and true essence of things, thereby making it impossible to really understand this essence . . . (BT 87) Kantian skepticism represents the limits of science (conceptual/theoretic reason) in the sense that it reduces the experienced world to the status of mere phenomena and pushes das Ding-an-sich beyond the horizon of knowability. In a pretty clear instance of Latourean purification, primordial being becomes inaccessible to human thought. As the inaugurator of immanent critique, Kant’s role in the dialectic of enlightenment is decisive at both ends, so to speak. A partisan of Socratism, Kant also signals its impending end. Immanent critique supplies the solution to Modernity’s methodological problem of self-grounding by proposing a self-validating mode of reason. However, that very self-validation is predicated on the Kantian modesty that thought is incapable of penetrating to the truth of the world: the knowledge that can be self-validated is only of phenomena (appearances) and not of reality. There is a sense, then, that for Nietzsche theoretic reason, especially as it is exampled in Kant, is a self-consuming artifact. The contradiction Nietzsche points to in Kantian critique is nicely

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summed up by Gilles Deleuze as “making reason both the tribunal and the accused; constituting it as judge and plaintiff, judging and judged” (Nietzsche and Philosophy 91). More technically, Nietzsche disputes the very capability of conceptual thought to penetrate to fundamental existence. In the essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” Nietzsche points out that words are never more than metaphors, “the copy of a nervous stimulation in sound” (144). Thus “We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities” (“On Truth and Lying” 144). Similarly, conceptual thought, Nietzsche contends, is reductive with respect to the particularity of experience: “a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real” such that there is always a kind of falsification (dissimulation) in the cognitive representation of the world (“On Truth and Lying” 145). “Truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions” (“On Truth and Lying” 146). Only through forgetting the dissimulation inherent in linguistic and conceptual representation, Nietzsche insists, “could human beings ever entertain the illusion that they possess truth” (“On Truth and Lying” 143). Nietzsche is famous for his suspicion toward the will to truth, which he sees as simply masking a will to power. This suspicion notwithstanding, Nehamas contends that “the faith in truth simply cannot be eliminated” from Nietzsche’s response to Modernity (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 239). Nehamas reasons in the following way. What Nietzsche refers to as “faith in science” amounts to a belief in the unconditional value of truth: that we should always accept what is true. Nietzsche asks in The Gay Science, “what if [the unconditional value of truth] became more and more difficult to believe . . . ?” (GS 201). Nehamas regards the question as intentionally unanswered by Nietzsche. Instead of precipitating an answer, the question is meant to lead us through the conundrum it demonstrates: namely, that any rejection of the general policy that we should always accept what is true presupposes a belief in what is true and is, therefore, self-contradictory. The reason for this is that without the presupposition that we should be guided by the truth there would be no force to the claim that we should not be guided by truth — there would be no reason to be guided by it. For this reason, Nehamas contends, “faith in truth simply cannot be eliminated” from Nietzsche’s response to Modernity (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 239), a reading which significantly complicates Habermas’ description of Nietzsche’s entry into the postmodern as an appeal to reason’s absolute other. Nehamas’ sense that there is no general theory of truth in Nietzsche does not, however, imply that truth has no legitimate place in his philosophy. Nehamas observes that the absence of a general theory of truth

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is only problematic from a specifically “Socratic” point of view that demands a general theory of truth in order to talk about the truth of particular claims. Conversely, “We do not need to be able to explain what features make all theories true in order to be able to claim that the theory of relativity is true partly because it explains the observations concerning the perihelion of Mercury better than its competitors” (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 240). The point has to do with the difference between the claim that a view is true and the explanation of why that view is true. Because these are not equivalent, lacking the latter does not preclude one from engaging in the former (“Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism” 241). Setting aside the technical justification for this distinction, Nehamas’ general point is that Nietzsche neither abandons the discursive operations and priorities dearest to the Enlightenment nor embraces them. This is the nucleus of his claim that Nietzsche holds an equivocal relation to Modernity. And on the basis of this reading it is possible to see Nietzsche as neither modern nor conventionally postmodern but something else — something arguably nonmodern in the sense that it avoids subscribing to the distinctions on which these designations conventionally rest. It is crucial to understanding Nietzsche’s equivocal relation to Modernity to note that, despite his deep suspicion toward Socratism, the appeal to Dionysos is not simply an appeal to reason’s absolute other as Habermas claims. While the Dionysiac cuts through the Apolline veil of appearances that shields humans from the horrors of existence, that same Dionysiac principle produces a revulsion toward actual existence which must be contained if life is to be tolerable. This combination of disclosure/containment is, according to Nietzsche, precisely the achievement of Attic tragedy: “What mattered above all was to transform those repulsive thoughts about the terrible and absurd aspects of existence into representations with which it was possible to live; these representations are the sublime, whereby the terrible is tamed by artistic means, and the comical, whereby disgust at absurdity is discharged by artistic means” (“The Dionysiac World View” 130). Nietzsche explains that in the sublime and the comic there exists a “middle world” between beauty and truth which reveals itself in “a playing with intoxication, not in a complete entrapment by it” (“The Dionysiac World View” 130). This middle world represents neither a modern embrace of reason nor a supposedly postmodern appeal to unreason but an effort to access something like a nonmodern moment conceptually antecedent to the modern purification of truth and its others. In a number of ways the “middle world” synthesized in ApollineDionysiac tragedy anticipates and prefigures Musil’s appeal to the essay as a discursive space between the systematically rational and its others. This tension between the rational and its others is a prominent feature of both Musil’s and Nietzsche’s historical consciousnesses, such that Musil’s

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diagnosis of his own cultural moment exhibits a number of parallels to Nietzsche’s account of European Nihilism. In fact, though conducted in different terms, the trajectories of European intellectual history offered by Nietzsche and Musil are more than roughly congruent. Referring to the displacement of Scholasticism by science, Musil characterizes the modern age as dominated by “the philosophy of facts” — that is, by positivism, the evolved form of the scientific revolution which began in the seventeenth century (PS 177; GW 2:1383). Part of what the philosophy of facts displaced is Scholasticism’s ambition: the building of speculative philosophy into a “philosophy of life”: “from Descartes to Fichte, indeed even down to our own day, an aftereffect of [Scholasticism] continued to be preserved as a goal, even if only informally, in the existence and construction of great systems of thought, while the natural sciences had to feel that their real picture of life was not covered by philosophy” (PS 177; GW 2:1383). Musil seems to mean that “modern” philosophy, starting with Descartes, retained something of Scholasticism’s goal of supplying a universal account of human experience, even if in an attenuated form. Positivism, on the other hand, an evolved form of modern philosophy, sacrificed precisely this scope in its quest for certainty, abandoning the attempt to account for the whole range of human experience. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard accounts for this development under the heading of “delegitimation”: the movement of science (positivism) away from legitimating itself with reference to the grand narratives of Idealism or Socialism.4 In other words, for Musil, as for Nietzsche, the quest for a more reliable and precise truth leads to the exhaustion of values in the form of philosophy’s abandoning the attempt at generating an encompassing view of life. In the essay “The German as Symptom” Musil, however, is eager to correct the mistaken notion that the modern epoch — “The Age of Facts” — is therefore un-philosophical, insisting that the epoch is in fact dominated by a philosophy, albeit one that has surrendered the ambition of interpreting life. Thus, against those “Opponents of Facts” who “deny facts and call that thinking” and against those “who blame our rationality and desire to be less rational” Musil maintains that if any philosophy is to build itself into a philosophy of life — that is, to give orientation in Modernity — it has to begin with a factual engagement with experience: “if one wants to attain such a system, a genuine worldview, the first requirement is really to have viewed the world, to know the facts” (PS 177–8; GW 2:1384).5 In the space between positivism’s laudable attention to the facts and its failure to rise to a philosophy of life we find Musil’s equivocal relation to the scientific attitude characteristic of Modernity — one that points in the direction of Nietzsche’s aesthetically accessed middle world. In “Mind and Experience” Musil writes that “the pointless battle in contemporary civilization between scientific thinking and the claims of the soul can

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be solved only by adding something, a plan, a direction, to work in, a different valuing of science as well as literature!” (PS 149; GW 2:1059). This remapping of the intellectual landscape begins with an examination of the opposition between reason and its others, which Musil refers to respectively as the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd. In an early (1918) essay titled “Sketch of What the Writer Knows” Musil explains that the “ratioïd territory embraces everything that science can systematize, everything that can be summarized in laws and rules; primarily, in other words, physical nature . . . but above all the chief characteristic of this area is that in it facts can be unambiguously described and communicated . . . On the other hand, in the nonratioid area one can never have a sufficiently concrete conception of a fact” (PS 62; GW 2:1026–7). Musil explains further: “If the ratioid is the area of the domination of the ‘rule with exceptions,’ the nonratioid is that of the dominance of the exceptions over the rule” adding that “The facts in this area, and therefore their relationships, are infinite and incalculable” (PS 63–4; GW 2:1028). In a move paralleling Nietzsche’s appeal to tragedy as a “middle world” between Apolline reason and its Dionysiac other, Musil invokes the essay as a discursive space between the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd. In the unpublished fragment “On the Essay” Musil writes that there are domains of experience susceptible to systematic ordering and those which do not admit such an order: The essay lies between these two areas. It takes its form and method from science, its matter from art . . . The essay seeks to establish an order. It presents not characters but a connection of thoughts, that is, a logical connection, and it proceeds from facts, like the natural sciences, to which the essay imparts an order. Except that these facts are not generally observable, and also their connections are in many cases only a singularity. There is no total solution, but only a series of particular ones. (PS 49; GW 2:1335) Musil’s invocation of the essay thus signals an equivocal relation to Modernity which embraces Modernity’s empirical instinct but tempers it with a sense of the limitations of Socratism’s univocality, the universality of its answers. In light of this limitation, rather than downgrading the results of essayistic reflection to “something left over in an area where one can work precisely,” those results are “the strictest form attainable in an area where one cannot work precisely” (PS 48; GW 2:1334). By abandoning the principle of a single truth that is the hallmark of Socratism in favor of multiple particular solutions, the essay adapts the critical instincts of the philosophy of facts to domains not otherwise susceptible to systematic ordering. The result is a discursive modality that

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embraces a simultaneous multiplicity of possibilities. In this way, Musil’s appropriation of the essay exhibits an important homology with respect to Nietzschean perspectivism.6 The broad context for Nietzsche’s perspectivism is his antipathy toward Socratism. More specifically, in the essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” Nietzsche offers a critique of the arbitrariness of conceptual and linguistic representations of the world. It requires an effort on the part of humans, Nietzsche explains, to admit to [themselves] that insects or birds perceive a quite different world from that of human beings, and that the question as to which of these two perceptions of the world is the more correct is quite meaningless, since this would require them to be measured by the criterion of the correct perception, i.e. by a non-existent criterion. But generally it seems to me that the correct perception — which would mean the full and adequate expression of an object in a subject — is something contradictory and impossible; for between two absolutely different spheres, such as subject and object are, there is no causality, no correctness, no expression, but at most an aesthetic way of relating, by which I mean an allusive transference, a stammering translation into a quite different language. For which purpose a middle sphere and mediating force is certainly required which can freely invent and freely create poetry. (“On Truth and Lying” 148) An important ground of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is thus the irreducible subjectivity of perceptions and concepts together with the implication that there can be no single, universal criterion for judging between multiple representations. In The Gay Science Nietzsche argues that human existence is fundamentally an interpreting existence below which humans cannot penetrate because “the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under its perspectival forms, and solely in these” (GS V: 239). There is, therefore, no non-interpretive existence for humans and no universal criteria for judging between interpretations. All one is left with, then, is a multiplicity of possible ways of looking at the world. The perspectivism at the heart of Musil’s appropriation of the essay enables it to function not only as a genre, in fact primarily not as such, but as a Denkmethode. Musil’s invocation of the essay as genre thus expands into Essayismus: an experimental, discursive strategy for engaging the phenomena of human experience that do not lend themselves to systematic ordering. Ulrich, the protagonist of The Man Without Qualities also attempts, unsuccessfully, to make Essayismus into a life praxis. Essayismus as both Denkmethode and (failed) life praxis is dramatized in The Man Without Qualities via Ulrich’s intellectual biography,

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which embodies a balancing of scientific rationality and the skepticism it paradoxically motivates. Under the heading of “the Utopia of Exact Living,” the narrator points to the definitively modern idea that “we carry on our human business in a most irrational manner when we do not use those methods by which the exact sciences have forged ahead in such exemplary fashion” (MWQ 264; GW 1:245). Within the flow of an unfolding Modernity there thus arises the goal of living precisely, which is, quite specifically, exactly what the project of enlightenment aimed for: the increased rationalization of everyday life. Musil differentiates between two species of precision, however, which distinction cuts to the heart of the limitations of scientific rationality and reveals important features of his equivocal relation to Modernity: “In reality, as we all know, there is not only an imaginary precision (not yet present in reality at all) but also a pedantic kind, the difference being that the imaginary kind sticks to the facts and the pedantic kind to imaginary constructs” (MWQ 267; GW 1:247). The distinction Musil has in mind between an imaginary and a pedantic precision is at least partially clarified by the corresponding tension he observes between positivism and Scholasticism. Thus, imaginary precision, while grounded in “facts,” is imaginary in the sense that the systematic interlocking of its observations does not correspond with the ways humans actually experience the world, and thus it is “not yet present in reality at all” (MWQ 267; GW 1:247). One could point to the opening paragraph of The Man Without Qualities in which a meteorological description of the weather is juxtaposed with the simple declaration that it was a fine day in August. Despite its (imaginary) precision, the technical description fails to capture what the day is really like. The inability of imaginary precision to capture human experience is the basis of the narrator’s ironic assertion that human business is conducted in the most irrational way when it is does not follow the procedures of the natural sciences — i.e., positivism. Human life may be irrational when it deviates from the natural sciences, but it is not made intelligible by them. Ulrich’s early Essayismus and his effort to realize a utopia of exact living is driven by imaginary precision: the withholding of assent while working through the possibilities with a careful, scientific skepticism. It is the habit of mind of one who holds himself apart from conventional wisdom — and conventional morality — in order to think through the conceptual architecture of conventional existence. In this way, it is analogous to the critical distance that informs Nietzschean genealogy as demonstrated, for example, in The Genealogy of Morals. Pedantic precision, on the other hand, is exemplified in The Man Without Qualities in the legal logic according to which the episodically homicidal Moosbrugger is condemned to death. Musil writes in “The German as Symptom” that the “need for the unequivocal, repeatable, and

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fixed is satisfied in the realm of the soul by violence” (PS 182; GW 2:1388). The Moosbrugger subplot serves primarily to dramatize the violence associated with specifically “pedantic” precision: “The precision, for instance, with which Moosbrugger’s peculiar mentality was fitted into a two-thousand-year-old system of legal concepts resembled a madman’s pedantic insistence on trying to spear a free-flying bird with a pin; this precision was concerned not at all with the facts, but only with the imaginary concept of cumulative law” (MWQ 267; GW 1:247–8). The point is that pedantic precision preserves an existing system of concepts at the expense of being able to account for the particular facts that make up complex human experience. This failure is lamented in the narrator’s summary of the illogic behind Moosbrugger’s death sentence: “there was not a single person in that vast crowded courtroom, the doctors included, who was not convinced that Moosbrugger was insane, one way or another; but it was not a way that corresponded to the conditions of insanity laid down by the law, so this insanity could not be acknowledged by conscientious minds” (MWQ 262; GW 1:243). In other words, it was not an insanity that could be the basis of Moosbrugger’s escape from legal responsibility and therefore from death. Musil’s effort to differentiate kinds of precision dramatizes a complex relation toward the rational instincts of Modernity that goes beyond choosing between reason and reason’s other. This tension between reason and its possible others is dramatized in The Man Without Qualities as the conflict that arises from Ulrich’s attempt to live precisely in a cultural moment increasingly dominated by the suspicion “that pure knowledge tore apart every sublime achievement of mankind without ever being able to put it back together” (MWQ 268; GW 1:249). Ulrich’s utopia of exact living, that is “living hypothetically,” entails not adherence to established moral codes but a cautious attitude toward the givens of social experience: The drive of [Ulrich’s] own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist’s guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? (MWQ 269; GW 1:250)

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In contrast to a scientific rationality motivated by pedantic precision, a conscious human Essayismus escapes the illusory univocal truth Nietzsche associates with Socratism. Thus, Ulrich eventually exchanges the notion of “living hypothetically” for the term “essay” in order to capture the way an essay, “in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it — for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept” (MWQ 270; GW 1:250). The melting down into a concept represents a return to Socratic univocality Musil specifically tries to avoid. This avoidance of something like Socratism is a feature shared by Musil’s Essayismus and Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Musil’s earliest remarks about Nietzsche indicate a recognition of the generally hypothetical aim of Nietzsche’s philosophy: “Characteristic is the way [Nietzsche] says: this could be the case and that, too. And on that basis one might build this and on the other that’” (Diaries 15; Tagebücher 1:19). The hypothetical nature of the proposals is both a point to recommend Nietzsche’s approach and, for Ulrich, a problem on which his attempt to live essayistically ultimately runs aground.7 Despite these difficulties, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is, plausibly, a source of one of the most important features of Musil’s engagement with the problems of Modernity: namely Möglichkeitssinn. (Working in the opposite direction, in light of Musil, Nietzschean perspectivism can be understood as a re-oriented emphasis on imaginative versus pedantic precision.) The narrator in The Man Without Qualities explains that if there is a sense of reality, then there must be a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. (MWQ 11; GW 1:16) Nietzschean perspectivism and Musil’s Möglichkeitssinn both exhibit a distinct sense of the provisionality of the given and a consequent recognition of the simultaneous multiplicity of possible alternatives. This interest in counterfactual possibilities is carried thematically and structurally throughout The Man Without Qualities in terms of the notion of utopia (Utopie).8 In his somewhat idiosyncratic usage of the term, Musil understands utopias as much the same as possibilities and points out that the fact that a possibility is not a reality means nothing more than that the circumstances in which it is for the moment entangled prevent

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it from being realized — otherwise it would be only an impossibility (MWQ 265; GW 1:246). As informing the narrative structure of the novel, Musil understands Utopie in part as a kind of thought experiment in which the effect of an alteration in some element of life is investigated (GW 1:1878). For example, Ulrich first attempts to live hypothetically/ essayistically, then enveloped in a utopic sibling love with Agathe, and finally in what Musil only cryptically alludes to in the Nachlaß as the utopia of inductive sensibility (GW 1:1881–2). Structurally, and as a whole, the novel itself experiments with Utopien as various possible orientations in Modernity.9 Another important feature shared by Nietzschean perspectivism and Musil’s Möglichkeitssinn is the experimentation leveraged by the distanciation from the given that both authors exhibit.10 Experimentation is important to the project of Modernity because generating normativity out of one’s moment necessarily involves coming up with new content. The experimental dimension of Nietzsche’s perspectivism comes out most clearly in his discussion of the intellectual disposition of the future he names the “free spirit.” In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche characterizes free spirits as “those who attempt” (“Versucher”) (BGE 39; §42), which recalls to mind the etymological basis of Essayismus. Nietzsche adds that “the art of experiment” belongs to the list of virtues which “enhance the species ‘humanity’” (BGE 41; §44). According to Nehamas, Nietzschean free spirits pursue truth in the knowledge that they are not free from illusion: “they are constructing or describing a world in which their own values — particularly their desire to be aware that this is the sort of world they are constructing or describing — are manifested . . . The will to truth turns out to be an effort to establish a world in which one’s best impulses and strongest needs can find expression, and in which perhaps, at least for a time, they can be satisfied” (Nietzsche: Life as Literature 68–9). In other words, the will to truth turns out to be the will to power. The linkage between will to truth as will to power finds a direct corollary in Ulrich’s “ruthless passion to influence reality” (MWQ 646: GW 1:592), which effort is leveraged on the fulcrum of scientific rationality that Musil directly associates with a projection of force: if “one looks at the qualities that lead to the making of [scientific] discoveries, one finds . . . just those ancient vices of soldiers, hunters, and traders, here merely translated into intellectual terms and interpreted as virtues” (MWQ 327; GW 1:303). Similarly, in the Nachlaß Musil notes that science is a sublimation of evil, fighting, hunting (GW 1:1877).11 Thus, another component of Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity is the tension between embracing counterfactual possibilities and the difficulties and dangers encountered in attempting to give them a reality in social space. In the Nachlaß Musil characterizes the principal theme of

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The Man Without Qualities as the confrontation of the man of possibilities with reality (GW 1:1881).12 In other words, the novel centrally concerns how one with Möglichkeitssinn negotiates imagined counterfactual possibilities with a world of reality. I want to propose here that Ulrich as Möglichkeitsmensch corresponds to Nietzsche’s free spirit in the pattern of his coming to terms with social reality. Amy Mullin has characterized the stages through which the Nietzschean free spirit develops, and these anticipate to a surprising degree the trajectory of Ulrich’s development as Möglichkeitsmensch in The Man Without Qualities. In the second and third stages of its development the Nietzschean free spirit begins to converge with the trajectory of Ulrich’s intellectual and moral development in the novel, and although Nietzsche’s free spirit and Ulrich as Möglichkeitsmensch do not correspond exactly, these two possible modes of orientation in Modernity come within one another’s orbit so that they illuminate each other. According to Mullin, the free spirit begins as a fettered spirit bound to what it reveres, which bondage is replaced by a drive or impulse that rules or masters its whole soul (“Nietzsche’s Free Spirit” 397). In this condition, the free spirit is “driven by a will to self-determination, a desire to tear things apart, to reverse all values” (“Nietzsche’s Free Spirit” 398). Mullin points out that Nietzsche identifies this drive as the drive for knowledge (truth). We never see Ulrich in a state of bondage to tradition; we are, however, informed that from the time he was young he desired to be a great man. This desire is enacted in three attempts before the period at which he is introduced and the novel begins. The three attempts are: becoming a military general on the model of Napoleon, becoming a civil engineer, and, finally, becoming a mathematician. What all three have in common is the desire to re-shape the world, which begins with a dismissal of existing forms of social organization. Nietzsche characterizes this dismissiveness as the effect of a “great liberation,” “an outbreak of strength and will to self determination,” and a “temptation to reverse or invert all values” (Human, All Too Human 6–7; §3). Thus, Ulrich first turns to the profession of a soldier on the model of Napoleon as a figure who imposed his will on Europe, and although he abandons this route for civil engineering when he recognizes the difference and distance between a mere army soldier and those in positions to influence world events, Ulrich’s subsequent career in civil engineering is introduced as “merely swapping horses” (MWQ 33; GW 1:36); that is, as merely a different means for projecting his will. The narrator explains that Ulrich’s interest in engineering was deeply connected with the spirit of Modernity, which is dismissive of the “thousand years of chatter about the meaning of good and evil” since it turns out “they are not constants at all but functional values, so that the goodness of works depends on historical circumstances, while human goodness depends on the psychotechnical skills with which people’s

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qualities are exploited” (MWQ 33; GW 1:37). The mathematical language superimposed onto the question of good and evil represents the distinctively modern supervention of scientific rationality in the area of human experience. In fact, Ulrich’s sense of engineering dramatizes the over-extension of scientific rationality to all matters of life. He is drawn to science and technology’s capacity to manipulate the world, and other people. Ulrich continues to be motivated throughout the novel by some version of the spirit of scientific rationality. It is what informs his effort to live hypothetically, which is an effort to construct a life along the lines of one’s own choosing — emphasizing those features that make life beautiful and exciting while leaving everything else out, as we do in dreams and fantasies (MWQ 625; GW 1:573). Even once he recognizes the limitations of scientific rationality, he continues to be driven by a scientific spirit, as is Musil, who was unable to turn his back on modern rationalism despite being keenly aware of its limitations. Ulrich eventually abandons engineering for mathematics because he finds other engineers unable or unwilling to apply their technical rationality to domains beyond engineering, which application precisely articulates Ulrich’s attraction to the technological manipulation dramatized in engineering — not for itself, but to re-make the world. Mullin characterizes the second developmental stage of Nietzsche’s free spirits as a drive for knowledge — and this constitutes a central feature of both Ulrich and Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity. Mathematics, Ulrich’s third attempt to become a great man, continues to exhibit the features of the second stage of free spirit development: he is driven by a will to knowledge which manifests a will to power. Mathematics is characterized in The Man Without Qualities as the mother of science and grandmother of technology (MWQ 37; GW 1:40), and, due to its massive influence on re-organizing the world, it appeals to Ulrich as a mechanism for imposing his will on it. Eventually the Nietzschean free spirit recoils from negation and nihilism, from the unmaking of all values, to a stage in which he opens his eyes to what is closest at hand and asks why he needs to renounce what he once reverenced. We observe an analog of this stage in Ulrich’s recoil from living hypothetically, which strategy he rejects because it results in a life too much at odds with real social existence — too removed from the space and time of social life: “Whatever had he meant by telling Diotima that it was necessary to take control of the imaginary, or that other time, when he had said that reality should be abolished? . . . How could one fail to see that the human world is no hovering, insubstantial thing but craves the most concentrated solidity, for fear that anything out of the way might make it go utterly to pieces?” (MWQ 644–5; GW 1:590–1). Nevertheless, despite Ulrich’s return to the realm of social existence, he does not

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abandon experimentation. It is clear that his next attempt at orientation in Modernity, a spiritual union with his twin sister Agathe achieved via incest, is even more experimental (its scientific boldness indicated by its degree of transgression) than trying to live like a character in a book. Recognizing the dangers of living hypothetically, which Musil articulates in the Nachlaß as that of disconnection,13 Ulrich comes to see his life as having been composed of two tendencies: These two basic strategies, the figurative and unequivocal, have been distinguishable ever since the beginnings of humanity. Singlemindedness is the law of all waking thought and action . . . Metaphor, by contrast, is like the image that fuses several meanings in a dream; it is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way things relate to each other in the intuitions of art and religion. (MWQ 647; GW 1:593) These two tendencies correspond respectively to the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd. When Ulrich recognized this dual structure of his life, “he felt that his life, if it had any meaning at all, demonstrated the presence of the two fundamental spheres of human existence in their separateness and in their way of working against each other” (MWQ 648; GW 1:594). The passage registers Ulrich’s/Musil’s recognition of the limitations of the ratioïd and the need to acknowledge the nicht-ratioïd, as well as the difficulty of integrating them. As informing a mode of human existence, the nicht-ratioïd is treated in the novel and elsewhere under the notion of the Other Condition. In Chapters 4 and 6 of this book I explore in detail the Other Condition in terms of its viability as a strategic response to the problems of Modernity. Here it is enough to recognize that the Other Condition represents a situation in which “the border between the self and nonself is less sharp than usual,” and that “Whereas ordinarily the self masters the world, in the other condition the world flows into the self, or mingles with it or bears it” (PS 186; GW 2:1393). Additionally, “in all objective relationships the self is, in a certain sense, bracketed (that is also the point), and this is explained by characterizing this ordinary condition as an ‘alienation’”; conversely, the Other Condition involves “a dereification of the self as of the world” (PS 186–7; GW 2:1393-4). And finally, the Other Condition is “a human condition that is fundamentally opposed to rationalizing, calculating, goal-oriented activity, estimating, pressure, craving, and base anxiety” (PS 185; GW 2:1392). Overall, Musil’s notion of the Other Condition strives to capture an exerience of the dissolution of the boundaries of the self. Ulrich’s first experience of the Other Condition appears in the chapter titled “The Forgotten, Highly Relevant Story of the Major’s Wife,” which recounts Ulrich’s first experience of “a grand passion.” Retreating from

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the nominal object of his love to a remote island in order to come to terms with the emotional intensity of love on a grand scale, lying down on the beach or on top of a hill Ulrich effectively melts into the landscape: “He had no sense of presuming, because the difference in size did not seem to matter, nor did the difference between mind and nature, animate and inanimate; this communion diminished all kinds of differences . . . He had penetrated the heart of the world; from it to his far-off love was no farther than the nearest tree. In-feeling linked living beings without space” (MWQ 130; GW 1:125). The dissolution of the self Ulrich experiences directly recalls the “breakdown of the principium individuationis” that Nietzsche associates with Dionysiac intoxication; its effect is a similar unification with primordial existence which holds the prospect of a basis for a more adequate ethical orientation in Modernity. As such, it informs the other (nicht-ratioïd) half of Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity. Ulrich re-experiences a “dereification of the self” in Part III of the novel, titled “Into the Millennium: The Criminals” in which he explores the Other Condition through an incestuous relationship with Agathe. Dressing for a dinner engagement, Ulrich is captured by the sight of Agathe bending over her knee, putting on her stocking, and he embraces her. Their abandonment of the ordinary condition of human existence is signaled by their separation from the determinations of space, time, and motion: Agathe “felt herself not so much flying through the air as rather resting in it, suddenly liberated into weightlessness and directed instead by the gentle force of the gradually decelerating motion . . . what they were doing seemed to them remarkably remote from energy and force” (MWQ 1177; GW 1:1082). Afterward, Ulrich and Agathe are aware that “the course of the boundaries between them, as well as those between them and the world, had changed slightly” (MWQ 1183; GW 1:1088). Characteristic of Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity, the narrator carefully balances Ulrich’s ratioïd sobriety with a sense of nicht-ratioïd alternatives. This is present in the way the narrative perspective oscillates back and forth between skepticism toward the Other Condition and an effort to entertain its possibility. The narrator explains that if one regarded the Other Condition “as merely an opportunity for some ecstatic foolishness that by day were better suppressed,” then in order to account for what was actually happening to Ulrich and Agathe one would have to “summon up the totally incredible idea that there’s a piece of earth where all feelings do really change like magic as soon as the empty busyness of day plunges into the all-experiencing corporality of night!” (MWQ 1179; GW 1:1084). When Ulrich and Agathe’s glances meet while in the Other Condition, “nothing was so certain as that the decision had been made and all prohibitions were now a matter of indifference to them,” a reference to the incest prohibition they are about to disregard (MWQ 1178; GW 1:1083). Ulrich’s

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willingness to break so completely from social convention corresponds with the final stage of Nietzsche’s free spirit and represents that important dimension of Möglichkeitssinn which frees the Möglichkeitsmensch for experimentation counter to the given cultural norms. Eventually, the free spirit reaches “that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought,” a “superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure” (Human, All Too Human 8; §4). This courage to experiment is an important feature of Musil’s — and Ulrich’s — sense of the scientific spirit. It is diametrically opposed to the stasis of not-quite-yet modern Viennese culture. In “The Mathematical Man” Musil praises mathematics for its ability to look all the way to the bottom of its conceptual architecture as well as its willingness to admit that that architecture lacks any absolute foundation, despite the fact that modern material existence has built itself, via technology and engineering, on such a floating non-foundation. “Today,” Musil insists, “there is no other possibility of having such fantastic, visionary feelings as mathematicians do” (PS 42; GW 2:1006). Within Musil’s conceptual universe mathematics thus stands as a sign for the general importance of the ratioïd and his commitment to it . I have characterized Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity as exhibiting a tension between the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd. That tension is on display in the incompatibility between the ordinary conceptual experience and the Other Condition. The non-conceptual status of the Other Condition is signaled in Musil’s claim that being in this condition is the only access to understanding what is unfolding in it (MWQ 1179; GW 1:1084). In the chapter immediately following their embrace, titled “Moonbeams by Sunlight,” Ulrich and Agathe struggle to make conceptual sense of their previous night’s experience, which struggle dramatizes the unresolved tension between reason and its other that constitutes the nucleus of Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity. Ulrich is struck by the possibility of a convergence or at least a parallelism between a rational, conceptual, scientific comprehension of the world and the mysticism he calls a “turning to God.” In a sequence of reflections, Ulrich oscillates between his inclination toward conceptual ordering and the possibility that there are domains of experience that escape it, to which possibility he has been introduced by the de-reification of the self he experienced as the Other Condition with Agathe. Lying in the garden, Ulrich searches his memory for the names of the various flowers growing around him, relying on the gardener for help when he needed it. If by chance he could name it, it was a redemption from the sea of infinity. Then the little golden stars on a bare cane signified

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“forsythia,” and those early leaves and umbels “lilacs.” But if he did not know the name he would call the gardener over, for then this old man would name an unknown name and everything was all right again, and the primordial magic by which possession of the correct name bestows protection from the untamed wildness of things demonstrated its calming power as it had ten thousand years ago. (MWQ 1183; GW 1:1088) Without the name or the help of the gardener to supply it, however, Ulrich found it “quite impossible to understand the bright green of a young leaf, and the mysteriously outlined fullness of the form of a tiny flower cup became a circle of infinite diversion that nothing could interrupt” (MWQ 1183; GW 1:1088). In an act of modernist purification (naming, classification) Ulrich’s ratioïd instinct deeply inscribes a horizon of conceptual understanding. However, induced by his experience of the Other Condition, Ulrich “began to concern himself with the problem of whether there might not be more things that could be believed in than he had admitted to himself” (MWQ 1187; GW 1:1091). And yet Ulrich is unable to turn himself over to any kind of “cut-rate” mysticism which legitimates whatever is beyond understanding as an intimation of the divine. His rational disposition forces him to discount any such “turning to God” because it is “not capable of furthering knowledge but can only seduce it into the impracticable” (MWQ 1187–8; GW 1:1092). Amid these vacillations, Ulrich “did not in the least doubt that the way of science was the only correct way” (MWQ 1188; GW 1:1092). Crucially, Ulrich prefers to abide on the border between the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd: “to continue abandoning himself to the dizziness of finding the words to characterize a color distinct enough to reach out and take hold of, or to describe one of the shapes that had taken to speaking for themselves with such mindless compellingness” (MWQ 1184; GW 1:1088). The effort to name, to conceptualize, induces dizziness because of the inherent difficulty of fitting concepts to the world, which arises from a particularity resistant to being reduced to concepts (shapes speaking for themselves with mindless compellingness). Ulrich explains to Agathe that “if I maintain that this grass in front of us is green, it sounds quite definite, but I haven’t actually said much . . . there is no end of greens! It would be a lot better if I contented myself with recognizing that this grass is grass-green, or even green like a lawn on which is has rained a little” (MWQ 1185; GW 1:1089). Ultimately, Ulrich concludes, all one can say is that “green grass is just grass green” (MWQ 1185; GW 1:1089). In short, he abandons himself to the tautology because conceptual thought is not able to make any advance on the particularities of the experience itself. Abandoned to the dizziness of fitting concept to world, Ulrich insists that “the word does not cut and the fruit remains on the branch” (MWQ

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1184; GW 1:1088–9). In other words, perched on the very border between the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd—en marge de la philosophie—concepts are no longer allowed to carve up the world. This is a signal moment of Musil’s nonmodernism in the Latourean sense of avoiding purification — and of an equivocal relation to Modernity that is not simply an appeal to reason or reason’s absolute other, but a suspension of that very distinction. It is true that Ulrich remains within the horizon of the ratioïd in a way which preserves the possibility of an outside. On the one hand, any non-rational grasping after whatever might lie beyond conceptual ordering is for Ulrich a “diminished form of knowing” and therefore an affront “against one’s better knowledge.” On the other: it had been given to him to recognize in the “intimation ‘to the best of’ one’s knowledge” a special condition and an area in which exploring minds could roam. (MWQ 1188–9; GW 1:1092) That special condition and area is a re-imagined space within the horizon of the ratioïd in which the tension between the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd, between reason and reason’s absolute other, is not resolved but suspended. The discursive space of this suspension is that of the essay, which in turn opens onto a discursive strategy of Essayismus which effects the exploration. Finally, it is very much worth noting that the narrative passage in which Ulrich works through the possibilities and objections to them itself operates essayistically — that is, it performs the nonmodern discursive strategy thematized by the passage’s content. By articulating correspondences between Nietzsche’s and Musil’s engagements with the problems of Modernity it has become possible to recognize their responses as neither an appeal to Enlightenment reason nor an appeal to reason’s absolute other: that is, as neither modern nor postmodern. Even, in a sense, the alleged postmodern appeal to reason’s other constitutes an instance of modernist purification, in the sense that it continues to reify a border between the two. Nietzsche’s appeal to tragedy as a middle world between the Apolline and the Dionysiac avoids that purification. Similarly for Musil, the opposition between reason and its other is shown to be suspended within the larger questions of how much precision is possible in domains which do not admit systematic ordering. The essay becomes the discursive space and Essayismus the discursive strategy in and by which questions of this kind can be treated. The understanding of discursive practices that informs the question and the turning to the essay both embrace a suspicion toward Enlightenment reason paradoxically coupled with unwillingness to give oneself up to the irrational. On Musil’s operation, the essay becomes something approaching Derrida’s “nonphilosophical place from which one can still

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treat of philosophy.” It is Nonphilosophical in the sense that it abandons the traditions of Western philosophy understood as containment within the dialectic of enlightenment. And yet, crucially, it remains within the horizon of the Western episte¯ me¯, within the horizon of the ratioïd, which is what allows it to “still treat of philosophy.” Recovering the space of the essay en marge de la philosophie, neither modern nor postmodern, allows us to explore in the following chapters the potentialities of Essayismus as a nonmodern engagement with the problems of Modernity.

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3

Disclosing concealed being

When it was published in 1927, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time was very quickly recognized as an epochal contribution to philosophy, and it continues to hold a place as one of — it not the — most important works of philosophy in the twentieth century. This importance can be attributed to its break with what had become traditional ways of approaching philosophical questions stretching back to the beginnings of “modern” philosophy with Descartes and, even further, to the invention of Western (Socratic) philosophy itself. Claims for the significance of Heidegger’s contributions to philosophy broadly concern two themes: his so-called “destruction of metaphysics” which radically re-works traditional ontology (what it means to be) that begins with Plato, and his re-conceptualization of human being without recursion to the Cartesian cogito that has become a starting point for “modern” philosophy. Both divergences are ways of accounting for Heidegger’s innovation, importance, and his postmodernism. On this postmodern reading, Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, an attempt to re-think the meaning of Being on a different basis than that of the entire history of metaphysics since the advent of Socratic philosophy, has been understood as a step toward the very limit of the Western episte¯ me¯, seized upon most famously by Derrida but by others as well. Heidegger’s re-thinking the meaning of Being leads to an understanding of specifically human Being that is significantly opposed to Descartes’ indubitable certainty in the Second Meditation that he is nothing but a thinking thing: that is, apart from entities in the world1 For Heidegger, human Being is fundamentally a being-in-the-world as opposed to a worldless occurring subject. This divergence from the Cartesian cogito as the starting point and nucleus of modern philosophy is a second sense in which Heidegger’s philosophy is something other than “modern.” Heidegger ’s metaphysical and existential concerns converge in the effort to retrieve an authentic mode of human existence that has become concealed and thereby lost in the experience of everyday modern life. As such, Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein2 offers itself as an antidote to modes of human being that have become degraded both by modern philosophy and by the experience of Modernity itself. Considered as responses to Modernity, Heidegger ’s and Musil’s projects are much more convergent than might initially be assumed. Musil

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and Heidegger were contemporaries, publishing their major works in roughly the same historical moment: Being and Time in 1927, Parts I and II of The Man Without Qualities in 1930 with Part III following in 1933. Whereas Heidegger seeks to recover a lost mode of authentic Being, Musil’s novel explores its protagonist’s efforts to find an answer to the only question worth thinking about: “the question of the right way to live” (MWQ 275; GW 1:255). Musil’s exploration of this question involves a startling number of conceptual correspondences to the existential analytic of Dasein Heidegger offers in Being and Time. These correspondences testify to their simultaneous overlapping responses to Modernity. However, despite their contemporaneity, status, and the parallelism of their projects, there has been virtually no detailed comparative treatment of their engagements with the problems of Modernity. Reading The Man Without Qualities alongside Being and Time not only shows how Musil’s novel intervenes in the same questions Heidegger addresses, but using Heideggerian concepts to explore the novel opens it up as something more than a work of metahistorical fiction or a monument of literary modernism. Illuminated by Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, The Man Without Qualities becomes clearly recognizable as an intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity. This chapter begins with an overview of central features of Heidegger’s effort to recover an authentic mode of human being, which overview will serve as a propaedeutic for a comparison with Musil. The overview is followed by a comparative analysis of the correspondences between Heidegger and Musil which allow us to consider Being and Time and The Man Without Qualities as parallel responses to Modernity. The goal is not simply to offer a Heideggerian reading of Musil, although the analysis does begin in that direction, but to use the correspondences between their projects as a basis on which to explore Essayismus as an alternative (nonmodern) discursive strategy for disclosing a concealed authentic Being in Modernity. Pursuant to that goal, the chapter ends with a methodological examination of Musil’s Essayismus against Heidegger’s phenomenology. As announced in its Introduction, Heidegger’s theme in Being and Time is the question of the meaning of Being3 (das Sinn von Sein) (B&T 19). In order to approach the question of the meaning of Being, one has first to determine how Being is to be looked at: specifically, the being of what entity or entities will serve as the basis for the analysis of the meaning of Being in general (das Sinn von Sein überhaupt): “In which entities is the meaning of Being to be discerned?” (B&T 26). In answering this question, Heidegger explicitly positions himself against the interpretation of Being within the Western philosophical tradition starting with Plato — i.e., the history of metaphysics, which has consistently sought the clue to Being in beings (that is, in individual entities) rather than in Being as such.

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Heidegger insists that, taking beings as a starting point, traditional metaphysics does not start at a sufficiently fundamental level. Thus he points out that “In the question which we are to work out, what is asked about is Being — that which determines entities as entities . . . The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (B&T 25–6). On this basis he offers Being and Time as a fundamental ontology — that is, as an inquiry into nature of Being as such. In order to ask the question of the meaning of Being in a transparent way, Heidegger insists, we must understand the entity that asks this question: “Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity — the inquirer — transparent in his own Being” (B&T 27). Heidegger explains that the asking of this question is part of a way or mode of Being itself and thus the being that asks this question gets its essential character from what is inquired about, namely Being. “This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term ‘Dasein’” (B&T 27). For this reason, an answer to the question of the meaning of Being requires what Heidegger terms an existential analytic of Dasein (B&T 34): that is, an analysis of the structure of the way Dasein exists (B&T 33). The central question addressed in Being and Time is, after all, the meaning of Being, and Dasein is the only mode of Being for which Being has a meaning: Dasein is the only Being for which Being is an issue. The fundamental structure of Dasein’s Being that emerges from an existential analysis of Dasein is its “Being-in-the-world” (B&T 78). Although Heidegger insists on understanding “Being-in-the-world” as a whole phenomenon, three constituent parts can be separated for emphasis: 1) the “worldhood” of the world; 2) that entity which has Being-in-the-world as an essential part of its Being (i.e., Dasein); and 3) the mode of being that is a “Being-in” (in other words, “inhood”). Of these three, “inhood” names for Heidegger the existential context of Dasein’s Being. “Being-in” in the ordinary sense of “sharing the same spatial location with” pertains to entities with the kind of Being Heidegger calls presence-to-hand (Vorhandensein). This is explicitly not Dasein’s kind of Being (B&T 79). Conversely, Heidegger works out etymologically the ontological mode specific to Dasein’s kind of “Being-in”: “In” is derived from “innan” — “to reside”, “habitare”, “to dwell”. “An” signifies “I am accustomed”, “I am familiar with”, “I look after something” . . . The entity to which Being-in in this signification belongs is one which we have characterized as that entity which in each case I myself am [bin]. The expression “bin” is connected with “bei”, and so “ich bin” [“I am”] means in its turn “I reside” or “dwell alongside” the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such a way. (B&T 80)

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The emphasis here is on Dasein’s familiarity with the world in which it exists and with which it is practically involved. Heidegger explicates this familiarity as “having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something . . . All these ways of Being-in have concern as their kind of Being” (B&T 83). The force of Heidegger’s account of the Being-in that is specific to Dasein is that Dasein is oriented toward the world in terms of its concernful involvement with the entities it encounters. Heidegger explicates this concern as one which “manipulates things and puts them to use” (B&T 95). A second element of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is its “worldhood.” Heidegger uses the term “world” to denote “that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to live” (B&T 93). He insists that in order to disclose the world to ourselves — to grasp the worldhood of Dasein’s Being — we must attend to the things with which Dasein has concernful dealings: not things as such but things invested with value (B&T 96). Heidegger’s term for those things with which we have to do in our concernful dealings with the world is “equipment” (B&T 97). Dasein’s engagement with various pieces of equipment implies a totality of equipment, such that what Dasein encounters as the world is a whole set of equipment for residing in the world: “The kind of Being which equipment possesses — in which it manifests itself in its own right — we call ‘readiness-to-hand’ [Zuhandenheit]. Only because equipment has this ‘Being-in-itself’ [being specifically available to Dasein for some purpose — my note] and does not merely occur, is it manipulable in the broadest sense and at our disposal” (B&T 98). When we use it, the equipment itself withdraws from our attention such that “that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work” (not the tools themselves) that is performed with the tools (B&T 99). This work, then, “bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered” (B&T 99). In other words, the work with which Dasein occupies itself makes reference to a whole world of entities and other Daseins, in addition to equipment. In the work there is also a reference or assignment to “materials”: the work is dependent on leather, thread, needles, and the like. Leather, moreover is produced from hides. These are taken from animals, which someone else has raised . . . In equipment that is used, “Nature” is discovered along with it by that use . . . The work produced refers not only to the “towards which” of its usability and the “whereof” of which it consists: under simple craft conditions it also has an assignment to the person who is to use it or wear it . . . Thus along with the work, we encounter not only entities ready-to-hand but also entities with Dasein’s kind of Being — entities for which, in their concern, the product becomes ready-to-hand; and

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together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users live, which is at the same time ours. (B&T 100) In the combination of “towards which,” “whereof,” and “for whom,” a whole world is disclosed to Dasein through its concernful involvement with that world. It is in the disruption of the equipment which is readyto-hand that the assignment of that equipment to some thing or purpose is made visible, and, as it were, our attention follows the assignment to focus on the world to which the equipment was assigned. In this way, the world is “lit up” or disclosed in its worldhood. Heidegger’s point is that we normally encounter entities in terms of their usability for some specific purpose (in essence, in their “readiness-to-hand”). Beyond this readiness-to-hand is a more fundamental kind of Being — presenceat-hand (Vorhandenheit) — which gets disclosed when entities become conspicuous, obtrusive, or obstinate in their usability. It is then that their Being as present-to-hand is disclosed to us. In addition to encountering entities (equipment) ready-to-hand which disclose a world of entities present-to-hand, the work performed with equipment makes reference to other Daseins: “along with the equipment to be found when one is at work [in Arbeit], those Others for whom the ‘work’ [‘Werk’] is destined are ‘encountered too’” (B&T 153). In other words, other Daseins are indicated by the equipment with which one manipulates the world such that “The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with Others” (B&T 155). Again: “So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with one-another as its kind of Being” (B&T 163). Dasein’s Being is always a Being-with. Because Other Daseins do not have the kind of Being which belongs to equipment (presence-at-hand), Dasein’s engagement with them is not in the mode of concern but what Heidegger terms “solicitude” (Fürsorge) (B&T 157). Crucially, this co-existence with other Daseins has important implications for one’s own Being. Heidegger hypothesizes that on account of Dasein’s Being-with, Dasein experiences a concern about its relation to (especially its difference from) other Daseins, so that despite having a Being that is a Being-with-one-another, there pervades a distantiality (Abständigkeit) among Daseins (B&T 164). The nature of distantiality is such that Dasein is concerned about its sameness or difference with respect to the Other Daseins, and, as a consequence of this, becomes distracted from its own autonomous Being: this distantiality which belongs to Being-with, is such that Dasein, as everyday Being-with-one-another, stands in subjection [Botmässigkeit] to Others. It itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others . . . ‘The Others’ whom one thus designates in order to

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Robert Musil and the nonmodern cover up the fact of one’s belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part ‘are there’ in everyday Being-with-one-another. The “who” is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the “they” [das Man]. (B&T 164)

Heidegger accounts for the convergence of Dasein’s Being with an average everydayness by hypostatizing a common experience he terms “publicness.” In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next . . . We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The “they”, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. (B&T 164) Heidegger’s basic point about Dasein’s Being-with-Others as everyday publicness is that it tends toward a “leveling-down” (Einebung) of the possible ways of Being into a general averageness which deprives the individual Dasein of its own authentic Being. The leveling-down can be understood as reducing the number of possibilities thereby leading to convention and conformity. Heidegger terms the condition of reduced possibilities to which leveling-down leads “fallenness” (Verfallenheit). Fallenness is the basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness, and it results from three interconnected features of publicness: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity (B&T 211-19). As has been noted, one fundamental feature of Dasein’s Being-with is its Being-with-Others, and this consists in part of communication between Daseins. In communication between Daseins is expressed an interpretation and/or understanding of the world in which Daseins exist. Discourse thus “preserves an understanding of the disclosed world and therewith, equiprimordially, an understanding of the Dasein-with of Others and of one’s own Being-in” (B&T 211). Although discourse contains or preserves an understanding of what it means to be in the world, Heidegger points to a crucial separation between what is said-in-the-talk and the entities talked about in everyday discourse: “What is said-in-the-talk gets understood; but what the talk is about is understood only approximately and superficially” (B&T 212). Heidegger names this mode of discourse in which signifier is separated from referent “idle talk” (Gerede). Whereas discourse is

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generally understood to convey an interpretation (representation) of the world in which Dasein exists — it discloses the world to Dasein —, idle talk intervenes between that world and Dasein’s understanding of it, such that “The primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about is not ‘imparted’ by communication” with the consequence that such discourse leads to a complete groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit) on the part of discourse (B&T 212). Discourse, in the form of idle talk, “serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in an articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up the entities within-the-world” (B&T 213). The implications of idle talk go beyond preventing an adequately grounded, primordial understanding of the world. Idle talk intervenes decisively in Dasein’s own mode of Being in the world: “when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is — as Being-in-the-world — cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in” (B&T 214). Because discourse configures understanding by disclosing a world to Dasein, when discourse intervenes between Dasein and the world, Dasein does not have a complete and accurate understanding of its own possibilities for existence: rather it is left with an incomplete understanding of how it might comport itself toward its possibilities of Being-in-the-world. Thus, beyond an epistemological consequence, idle talk effects an existential one pertaining to how Dasein is in the world. This existential consequence contributes to an ungenuine or “inauthentic” Being. As a feature of its Being-in-the-world, Dasein is absorbed in the world (in the sense of being completely focused on it) in its concernful involvement with the world while engaged in the activity of work. Concernful involvement is guided by circumspection, which discovers the means for accomplishing the task at hand. When this work is completed, or when Dasein takes a rest from pursuing it, circumspection becomes free and, as “curiosity” (Neugier), searches for non-practical things beyond the equipment that is ready-to-hand. When curiosity becomes free it seeks things in the world not in order to understand them but simply to see them. In her Guide to Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Magda King has pointed out that Neugier in colloquial use means greed for the new (86). Curiosity constantly moves from one interest to another and thereby tears Dasein away from what is closest to it, which leads to a “never dwelling anywhere” that Heidegger names “Aufenhaltslosigkeit.” In this mode of Being-in-the-world, Dasein is “constantly uprooting itself” (B&T 217) in the sense that it does not seek a lasting and knowing connection to the objects that make up the world in which it exists. The uprootedness that is an effect of curiosity contributes to Dasein’s failing to choose an authentic mode of existence for itself.

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The third component of publicness — ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) — points to the fact that, immersed in idle talk, individual Daseins are unable “to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding, and what is not” (B&T 217). Heidegger’s notion of ambiguity refers to an inability to decide between multiple interpretations, between multiple representations of the way the world is. The uncertainty that accompanies ambiguity extends to Dasein’s Being-toward-itself — that is, to its sense of its own Being and its possibilities-for-Being: “This ambiguity extends not only to the world, but just as much to Being-with-oneanother as such, and even to Dasein’s Being toward itself” (B&T 217). Thus: “Ambiguity not only affects the way we avail ourselves of what is accessible for use and enjoyment, and the way we manage it; ambiguity has already established itself in the understanding as a potentialityfor-Being, and in the way Dasein projects itself and presents itself with possibilities” (B&T 217). In short, ambiguity limits or obscures from Dasein some of its possibilities for existing. Thus, idle talk, curiosity, and especially ambiguity lead to “a fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself — of itself as an authentic potentiality-for-Being-its-Self” (B&T 229). Dasein’s failure or inability to recognize its potentiality-for-Being constitutes an inauthentic Being (uneigentliches Sein). Conversely, Heidegger understands authentic Being (eigentliches Dasein) as a seizing of one’s potentiality-for-Being. Early in Being and Time Heidegger designates the entity whose Being will supply the clue to Being in general as Dasein, and he chooses this entity because it has the special property of having its Being an issue for it: Dasein is that kind of Being for which its Being is an issue. This comes through in Heidegger’s expression that Dasein is in each case “mine to be in one way or another” (B&T 68), meaning that “Dasein has always made some sort of decision as to the way in which it is” (B&T 68). Dasein’s factical Being (the way it chooses to live its life) is always one of its possible ways of Being, “And because Dasein is in each case essentially it own possibility, it can, in its very Being, ‘choose’ itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself; or only ‘seem’ to do so” (B&T 68). Choosing itself corresponds to having an authentic Being (eigentliches Sein); losing itself corresponds to having an inauthentic Being (uneigentliches Sein). Dasein seizes its possibility to choose an authentic Being for itself in the experience of anxiety or dread (Angst) that comes in the anticipation of death. Anxiety, thus, is the state of mind in which Dasein’s authentic Being — its potentiality-forBeing — is disclosed to itself. Unlike fear, anxiety has no definite object in the sense of fearing or dreading something in particular or in dreading a threat that comes from a particular direction. According to Magda King, this indefiniteness — the “no-thing” and the “no-where” of anxiety — discloses the very possibility of place itself (93). Place or sheer “whereness” is the background against

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which individual entities can stand out as individual entities. King explains that “the very indefiniteness of the nowhere brings to light purely the where, or more exactly, the whereness solely by itself” (94). In other words, the nothingness and nowhere experienced in anxiety disclose the world itself as such in the sense of disclosing the very possibility according to which things can exist in the world. As King formulates it: “It is the nothing of [Angst] that opens up the horizon from which and against which beings stand out as a whole” (94). Again: in disclosing the very possibility of Being, anxiety thus discloses the world itself. This is the sense behind Heidegger’s claim that “the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety” (B&T 231). What oppresses us is “the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself” (B&T 231). Or again: “Being-anxious discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world” (B&T 232). That in the face of which anxiety is anxious is the worldhood of the world, but that about which Dasein is anxious is its Being-in-the-world (B&T 232). The indefiniteness that is experienced in anxiety tends to cause definite entities as well as other definite Daseins to fall away from significance. This experience is captured by the notion of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit): the uncanniness of being no longer at home in the world of things and other Daseins. In this way, anxiety counteracts the fallenness into the “they” which distracts Dasein from its own (authentic) Being. Heidegger explains that “In anxiety what is environmentally ready-to-hand sinks away, and so, in general, do entities within-the-world. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of Others. Anxiety thus takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted” (B&T 232). When the world and Others fall away, Dasein is challenged to confront its own Being apart from the understanding of existence that is offered and watched over by the “they.” In this way the falling away of the world and Others “individualizes Dasein for its ownmost Being-in-the-world, which as something that understands, projects itself essentially upon possibilities” (B&T 232). “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being — that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself” (B&T 232). Anxiety individualizes, and this individualization “brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being” (B&T 235). The individualization which tears Dasein away from its inauthentic, fallen Being in the “they” takes place in the anticipation of death. Heidegger insists that the death of another cannot serve as a basis on which Dasein can genuinely understand its own death. Rather, it must anticipate death as its ownmost possibility-for-Being.

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Heidegger’s fundamental point here is that in anticipating its own death, Dasein is brought to recognize death not just as a possibility but as that “possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped” (B&T 294). In recognizing this, Dasein comes face-to-face with the finitude of its own existence. Inevitable (“impassible”) non-existence is thus part of ontological structure of Dasein’s Being, or: Dasein’s Being is fundamentally a Being-toward-death. Because in anticipation of its own death “all of its relations to any other Dasein have been undone” (B&T 294), Dasein’s Being is torn away from its fallen Being in the “they” and it becomes individuated. This is why Heidegger exclaims that “Anticipation [of death] turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being — that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence” (B&T 307). It is in the oscillation between the nothing and nowhere experienced in anxiety and impassable non-existence of death that Dasein comes to seize its authentic Being as a potentiality-for-Being. It does so, according to Heidegger, in hearing and responding to the call of conscience. Magda King insists that Heidegger fails to give an adequate explanation in Being and Time of the passage from the experience of anxiety to Dasein’s authentically seizing its potentiality-for-Being. She turns to two later essays (“What is Metaphysics” and “On the Essence of Ground”) in order to carry the account of conscience beyond where it is left in Being and Time. Drawing on these essays, King explains that “As a summons, conscience calls Da-sein forward into the possibility of his own self” (164). On King’s reading, in the experience of anxiety Dasein comes face-to-face with nothingness and nowhere, from which it recoils: “In confronting us with the nothing, [anxiety] brings us to an impassable limit which forbids us any further penetration into our having been thrown”; that is, the nullity of this nothing and nowhere supplies no content that could contribute to our understanding of being-in-the-world except that it “refers us to beings as those which we can know and among which we can stand on a firm ground” (176). In other words, in recoiling from the nothing and nowhere, Dasein returns to the entities in the world which constitute its familiar existence. This repulsion, however, carries with it a “positive” existential function.

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Dasein is driven back from the nothingness in anxiety first to the world of things but, crucially for its ability to seize a potentiality-for-Being, beyond the given world to project counter-factual possibilities for existing. According to Heidegger, the experience of conscience “calls Dasein forth to the possibility of taking over, in existing, even that thrown entity which it is; it calls Dasein back to its throwness so as to understand this throwness as the null basis which it has to take up into existence” (B&T 333).4 Dasein’s thrown Being is a null basis of its existence in the sense that it owes its existence to something else (Dasein is not the origin of its own Being) and, more importantly, that, as thrown, its Being is not determined for it — that it has the freedom to choose a factical existence for itself.5 One key to this passage is that Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s “existence” includes its projecting possible ways to be. Hubert Dreyfus points to this linkage between existing and projecting in explaining that Heidegger understands Dasein’s particular mode of Being as a self-interpreting existence, that “Dasein’s activity — its way of being — manifests a stand it is taking on what it is to be Dasein” (Being-in-the-World 15). This selfinterpretation amounts to a self-conscious living out of a particular idea of existence Dasein has for itself. (This is also part of what Heidegger means when he insists early in Being and Time that Dasein is the only being for which its Being is an issue.) Taking up its throwness as the null basis of its existence means taking over its having been thrown into the world in the sense of projecting a possible existence for itself and living out this possible existence. King adds: “It is the constant threat of the nothing which duly drives Da-sein into going out beyond what already is by an anticipating projection of what can be” (179). In projecting possible ways to be, however, Dasein eventually comes face-to-face with the untranscendable limit of death as its ownmost possibility of non-Being, from which it also recoils. King: “This impassible not-to-be not only brings all forethrow [projection] to a stand, but turns the forward-movement of Da-sein’s being back upon itself. In the extreme negativity of death there lies once more a ‘positive’ repulsion, which throws Da-sein back upon himself and directs him to existence within the limits of his factical being-in-the-world” (181). Dasein takes over its authentic Being as a potentiality-for-Being when it chooses an existence for itself “within the limits of his factical Being-in-the-world.” This taking over Heidegger calls “resoluteness” (B&T 343). It is the condition of existing authentically. As detailed above, the principle theme of Being and Time is the meaning of the question of Being, which Heidegger proposes to answer by carrying out an existential analysis of Dasein. Because Dasein is the only Being for which its Being is an issue, the question of the meaning of Being is addressed through examination of Dasein’s particular mode of existence. In this way, the question of the meaning of Being is referred to a question about how Dasein lives in the world and how it might or should live in

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the world. This is the question of authentic and inauthentic Being. While Musil does not offer an explicitly existential analysis of the phenomenon of human Being, much less a fundamental ontology of Being in general, he is concerned with the question of how human beings exist in modern society and how they should or might exist in modern society. Illuminated by the foregoing account of Heidegger’s existential analytic, The Man Without Qualities reveals itself as a parallel attempt to disclose and recover an authentic Being which has become concealed in the publicness of the modern existence. A place to begin mapping out this parallelism are the correspondences between Heidegger’s and Musil’s understandings of those entities which serve as the bases of their accounts of human Being in Modernity. As Magda King explicates Heidegger’s term “Dasein,” “The fundamental characters of man’s being are not properties and qualities, but ways in which it is possible for him to be” (47). She explains that, since Heidegger uses “Dasein” to express the being of man, the “sein” of “Da-Sein” “must be understood as the infinitive of am, and not of the is of a thing” (47). Similarly, Hubert Dreyfus suggests that “The best way to understand what Heidegger means by ‘Dasein’ is to think of our term ‘human being,’ which can refer to a way of being which is characteristic of all people or to a specific person — a human being” (14). Put differently, “Dasein” signifies not the what but the how of human existence. It is precisely attention to the question of the way Dasein exists — authentically or inauthentically — that makes Being and Time a work of existentialism. The other component of the term “Dasein” — “Da” [“here” or “there”] — emphasizes Dasein’s being somewhere; that is, that Dasein’s way of Being is always a “being-in-ness.” By including the “Da” in “Dasein,” Heidegger departs radically from the tradition of modern Western philosophy which, following Descartes’ lead, has tended to conceive of human Being as specifically “a thinking thing” (res cogitans). Against this tradition of positing an essential human subject as a worldless occurring, Heidegger’s concern is to understand human Being not as a isolated thinking entity but as a mode of Being in the world with other things and other Daseins. The title of Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities, points directly to a corresponding conceptualizing of human Being as a mode of Being. Ulrich is regarded by his childhood friend Walter as a man without qualities (MWQ 62; GW 1:64), who adds that this is a human type produced by the time (in essence, by Modernity). Walter explains Ulrich’s lack of qualities (his Eigenschaftslosigkeit) thus: He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect — why quibble, suppose we grant him all those

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qualities — yet he has none of them! They’ve made him what he is, they’ve set his course for him, yet they don’t belong to him. (MWQ 63; GW 1:65) What Walter seems to mean by Eigenschaften here are the characteristics we normally associate with one’s personality — the features of that person which make him or her distinctively him or her. The German word Eigenschaften incorporates the adjective eigen, which means “one’s own,” such that the word “Eigenschaften” typically refers to the characteristics or properties which are one’s own, which properly or authentically belong to the individual who supposedly possesses them. Walter’s accusation that Ulrich is a man without Eigenschaften seems to mean that although Ulrich has these characteristics at his disposal and deploys them, they are not essentially connected to some substrate of Ulrich’s existence — they are not his own. This usage suggests Walter’s thinking about human Being is ontical rather than ontological,6 in that it considers human Being as a collection of properties that belong (or don’t) to a substrate (a hypokeimenon) — in essence, a “self.” The difference between an ontic and an ontological understanding of human Being is precisely what differentiates Walter’s understanding of Ulrich from Ulrich’s own self-understanding.7 That Ulrich himself recognizes and accepts Eigenschaftslosigkeit as the mode of his own Being is revealed when the narrator tells us that Ulrich “was able to say of his life that everything in it had fulfilled itself as if it belonged together more than it belonged to him,” that “the personal qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him” (MWQ 157; GW 1:148). The implication here is that the qualities and experiences out of which Ulrich’s life is composed have an existence independent of him. And conversely, his existence is somehow independent of those qualities which constitute his life. This, however, still leaves unanswered a question implicit in the novel’s title: namely, what is the precise ontological status of a man once his inauthentically possessed Eigenschaften have been removed? What is a man without qualities? Musil’s narrator observes that “one is undoubtedly conditioned by one’s qualities and is made up of them, even if one is not identical with them” (MWQ 157; GW 1:148). If one is not identical with one’s Eigenschaften, then, ontically thinking, there would be some remainder after they had been removed. However, in thinking of his Eigenschaften as belonging more to each other than to himself, Ulrich does not seem to think of his Being as a substance (a hypokeimenon) abstracted from specific qualities. It would be an exaggeration to say that Ulrich is thinking explicitly ontologically here. On the other hand, the chapter that begins by discussing qualities as independent of whatever it is that “has” them, ends by speculating that “Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric

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point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the ‘I’ itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is experiencing it, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve” (MWQ 159; GW 1:150). The dissolution of “the ‘I’ itself” does not leave much remainder to which qualities could belong or not belong. Instead the passage moves in the direction of an understanding of the “I” not as a substance but as a potentiality for experiencing the forms of life (experiences and qualities) one’s life could take.8 This brings the man without qualities within range of something like Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein as a potentiality-for-Being. The narrator tells us Ulrich understood that the difference between identifying with one’s experiences and qualities and distancing oneself from them “was a choice of the degree to which one saw one’s life as a general manifestation or an individual one” (MWQ 157-8; GW 1:149). If one distances oneself from one’s experiences, those experiences are no longer unique to oneself but are instead understood as the kinds of thing that happen to humans sometimes. To see life events in this way amounts to seeing them as having no fixed, determinate significance that is traceable back to a unique subject. Rather, acknowledging his Eigenschaftslosigkeit, Ulrich understands that “an experience derives its meaning, even its content, only from its position in a chain of logically consistent events” (MWQ 158; GW 1:149); that is, from a network of relations which obtain outside and beyond the individual. Acknowledging this functional relatedness shifts the center of gravity from the individual toward the constellation of relations that makes up the experience, which may or may not be embraced by anyone in particular. In this way, that which is left over after the removal of Eigenschaften is not a what that could possess them but a how in the sense of a Being confronted with a range of possible ways of Being. The reading I am proposing of a man without qualities as a potentialityfor-Being is thematized explicitly in The Man Without Qualities under the heading of Möglichkeitsmensch. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the term names a sensitivity to a range of possibilities. In order to understand Ulrich as a figure poised to seize his potentiality-for-Being, it is first necessary to describe how the full range of a Dasein’s existential possibilities is occluded by actual forms of everyday social existence in which Daseins live. Walter condemns Ulrich as a man without qualities because he does not possess his Eigenschaften in a supposedly authentic way (although he does “have” them in some sense). Seen from the perspective of one who acknowledged and embraces his Eigenschaftslosigkeit, however, Walter’s Being is the inauthentic one. The Eigenschaften to which Walter clings must be regarded as components of what Heidegger calls an existentiell

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understanding of Dasein’s existence, which Hubert Dreyfus explains as “(Factical) possible ways to be (roles)” (20). Even Walter’s self-consciously embraced expressivist aestheticism, exhibited as the characteristics of “soul” he so passionately invokes against Ulrich’s mathematical disinterestedness, is one possible factical existence thrown up by fin-de-siècle Viennese bourgeois culture.9 In the sense that Eigenschaften are components of formulaic social roles, they can be understood as making up what Heidegger calls Dasein’s factical Being, which one finds available from the thrown possibilities of the “they.” Eigenschaften are thus factical possibilities that are offered by the social totality in which a Dasein finds itself. This thrown being-inthe-world Heidegger terms Geworfenheit, which is one of three structural aspects of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. To be is to be thrown into the world, and to be thrown into the world is to fall into the “they.” Hubert Dreyfus explains that “falling” (Verfall) “is Heidegger’s term for the way Dasein is by its very nature drawn away from its primordial sense of what it is” (225). That into which Dasein falls, das Man, is usually translated as the “they” or the “one.” Dreyfus points to both positive and negative functions of falling. Positively, falling into the “they” is the condition of general intelligibility of the world. The “they” offers (and enforces) an understanding (intelligibility) about what things are and how they are used, how Daseins interact with things and other Daseins. In short, Daseins learn how to negotiate the world from the societies in which they live. This intelligibility also pertains to Dasein’s understanding of itself. Part of Dasein’s Being-in is Being-in a social/cultural totality which manifests an understanding of what human existence is. However, it is what Dreyfus terms the negative function of falling, namely “levelling-down” (Einebnung), that is most illuminating for Musil’s handling of Eigenschaften and what Eigenschaftslosigkeit discloses about human Being. Heidegger explains the negative effect of fallenness as a restriction of possible ways to live: [T]he “they” maintains itself factically in the averageness of that which belongs to it, of that which it regards as valid and that which it does not, and of that to which it grants success and that to which it denies it. In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore . . . . This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call leveling-down [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being. (B&T 165) In specifying and watching over an averageness of Being, that is, in prescribing the range of behaviors and meanings, “leveling-down”

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suppresses alternative possibilities and thereby closes off Dasein to the full range of its possible ways of Being. Moreover, in its fallenness Dasein is pulled toward the limited range of possibilities offered by and regulated by the “they.” Leveling-down thus tears Dasein away from its authentic Being as a potentiality-for-Being. This is the sense of Heidegger’s interpretation that, as fallen, “Dasein has . . . fallen away [abgefallen] from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self” (B&T 220). The title of the second and largest section of Musil’s novel, Seinesgleichen geschieht, has been translated as “pseudoreality prevails” and more literally as “the like of it happens again.” In the Nachlaß of the Frisé edition, Musil explicates this cryptic term, explaining that whoever is conscious of the contemporary situation has the feeling that experiences repeat themselves (GW 1:1844). Pseudoreality corresponds with Heideggerian Verfall in that, as a repetition of experience based on models, Seinesgleichen geschieht names a cultural logic which offers a limited range of existentiell possibilities. Heidegger makes the point that falling “tears the understanding away from the projecting of authentic possibilities” (B&T 223). To the extent that Walter identifies himself with his Eigenschaften, he remains enclosed within the horizon of the possibilities for existing that are “watched over” by the “they,” however counter-cultural he might regard them. Confined within that horizon of limited possibilities, Walter is closed off from a primordial relationship toward Being, including from his own authentic Being as, specifically, a potentiality-for-Being. Seinesgleichen geschieht is thus a “pseudoreality” in the sense that Dasein’s factical existence is different from its “authentic” existential reality as a potentiality-for-Being that remains concealed from it. Conversely, distancing oneself from one’s Eigenschaften as Ulrich does prevents one from being limited to only those possibilities for existence which circulate within the “they.”10 Concern for one’s possibilities beyond those of conventional existence is explicitly and centrally thematized early in The Man Without Qualities as Möglichkeitssinn (sense of possibility). In Chapter 4 the narrator explains that “if there is a sense of reality . . . then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility,” and he defines this sense of possibility as “the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not (MWQ 10–11; GW 1:16). The narrator also draws attention to Möglichkeitssinn as a ground of Ulrich’s Eigenschaftslosigkeit: [S]ince the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities. (MWQ 13; GW 1:18)

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For Musil (or at least his narrator) Möglichkeitssinn is precisely what enables one to move beyond the average everydayness offered by the “they”: “[forms of life] will always be the same possibilities, in sum or average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above an idea” (MWQ 12: GW 1:17). What Musil is pointing out here is that life repeats itself (Seinesgleichen geschieht) unless and until one is able to disregard the (arbitrary) actuality of the forms of life that one’s own life has taken. The precondition of this disregard is the sense that what exists is no more real than what might exist but doesn’t. Part of the explanation for this attitude comes later in the novel under the heading of The Principle of Insufficient Cause, which holds that “everything that happens happens for no good or sufficient reason” (MWQ 140; GW 1:134). Because the precise configuration of any historical moment involves accidents, what has become actual is no more real (in the sense of being necessary) than what might have become actual but didn’t for no sufficient reason. To further problematize the reality of the actual, Musil points out that the fact “that a possibility is not a reality means nothing more than that the circumstances in which it is for the moment entangled prevent it from being realized — otherwise it would be only an impossibility” (MWQ 265; GW 1:246). The narrator suggests that identifying oneself with one’s qualities involves assuming their reality. However, when someone has no sense of reality — including a sense of reality regarding one’s Eigenschaften — he would conclude that qualities he supposedly has are not real: that he has no qualities. Möglichkeitssinn thus converges with Eigenschaftslosigkeit, which detaches the individual from the forms of life proffered by the “they,” and opens that individual to possibilities: in essence, it positions the individual to seize its potentiality-for-Being. Through its connection to Eigenschaftslosigkeit, which is the novel’s titular theme, Möglichkeitssinn is crucial to Musil’s effort to disclose an authentic mode of Being as a potentiality-for-Being that is beyond/below the limited possibilities that circulate according to the cultural logic of Seinesgleichen geschieht. Möglichkeitssinn is precisely what tears the individual away from its fallen existence in the “they.” We now have in place the conceptual infrastructure for recognizing how, in a manner similar to Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, Musil develops Ulrich’s narrative in The Man Without Qualities to disclose an authentic Being as a seizing of a potentiality-for-Being which has become concealed in the publicness of everyday modern existence. The novel’s plot, such as it is, is structured around Ulrich’s decision to take a year’s leave of absence from his life in order to find an appropriate application for his abilities (MWQ 44; GW 1:47). The narrator explains that Ulrich was a gifted person and had sought to become a great man in three successive attempts: first by becoming a military officer, then

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by becoming an engineer, and finally by becoming a mathematician. He became an officer in order to dominate the world, an engineer in order to dominate it through definitively modern technological rationality, and a mathematician as a kind of intensification of that same modern reason. His abilities proved promising, but in a moment of reflection he catches a glimpse of himself as a mathematician and recognizes that he took up mathematics as mental training for some anticipated great event which he had since forgotten. With wonderful clarity he saw in himself all the abilities and qualities favored by his time . . . but he had lost the capacity to apply them . . . [And] he resolved to take a year’s leave of absence from his life in order to seek an appropriate application for his abilities. (MWQ 44; GW 1:47) The vacation from life appears at first glance to be a fairly conventional concern about how to make one’s way in the world in the sense that Ulrich is looking for an appropriate social outlet for his abilities. However, the function of Ulrich’s narrative as the backbone of something parallel to an existential analytic becomes clear in a later passage in which a deeper underlying reservation about his life opens the novel into something significantly more philosophical than a Bildungsroman. Oriented by Möglichkeitssinn, Ulrich understands the world as only provisional and in constant transformation. On this basis he withholds identifying himself with any “fixed mode of being” (eine feste Wesensart) because he is afraid that his entire existence will become identical with it (MWQ 269; GW 1:250). This reservation implies a deliberate distancing on Ulrich’s part from anything which might become Eigenschaften, and in that distancing there is implicit a possible — hypothetical — Being de-coupled from the limited factical social roles into which one normally pours oneself as a member of a society. (This hypothetical mode of Being is also signaled by the very possibility of taking a leave of absence from one’s own life: in essence, a potential Being capable of being separated from its actuality.) Ulrich eventually translates this notion of “hypothetical” living into a conscious “essayism”: “It was more or less the way an essay explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it . . . that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life” (MWQ 270; GW 1:250). For Ulrich, Essayismus is the most appropriate cognitive disposition toward a world/life in which events have no a priori determined meaning but take their meaning from “a field of energy whose constellation charges them with meaning” (MWQ 270; GW 1:251). In such an open-ended system of relationships “independent meanings, such as are ascribed to actions and qualities by way of a rough first approximation in ordinary life, no longer exist at all” (MWQ 270;

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GW 1:251). In such a system “man, as the quintessence of his possibilities,” potential man, “the unwritten poem of his existence, confronts man as recorded fact, as reality, as character” (MWQ 270–1; GW 1:251). Essayismus is for Ulrich the only orientation appropriate toward the world and his life appropriate to the provisionality of the actual. That provisionality of the actual urges him to stand apart from — resist identifying himself with — any particular social position or role. Thus, Ulrich waited “hidden behind his person, insofar as this word characterizes that part of a human being formed by the world and the course of life” (MWQ 276; GW 1:256) — in essence, behind a form (interpretation) of Being afforded by the “they.” However, this reluctance does not diminish his sense of urgency to accomplish something — to become a great man — in other words, to select for himself a determinate (factical) Being in the world. That urgency is given in the following passage: Perhaps one could say on his behalf that at a certain age life begins to run away with incredible speed. But the day when one must begin to live out one’s final will, before leaving the rest behind, lies far ahead and cannot be postponed. This had become menacingly clear to him now that almost six months had gone by [since he took his vacation from his life] and nothing had changed. (MWQ 276: GW 1:256) It is in the face of one’s finitude — one’s ownmost Being as a Beingtoward-death — that, according to Heidegger, one experiences anxiety and confronts one’s potentiality-for-Being: “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being toward its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (B&T 232). Ulrich’s decision to take a leave of absence from his own life represents an effort to seize his ownmost potentiality-for-Being. Distanced from his Eigenschaften as a result of his Möglichkeitssinn, Ulrich recognizes and resists fallenness into the “they.” He experiences the Unheimlichkeit that anxiety produces. On the basis of this awareness and resistance he feels alienated from the social world in which he exists. This alienation is one part of the novel’s signature narrative technique, namely the frequent and extensive discursive meditations on an encyclopedic range of modern social phenomena: in other words, its Essayismus. In these meditations, Ulrich is figured as a detatched observer of Viennese life. Much of what a reader encounters in The Man Without Qualities is Ulrich’s (or the narrator’s) meditation/soliloquy dramatizing Ulrich’s (mental) withdrawal from the social reality of his existence: that is, his distance from the interpretation of existence circulating among the “they.” Thematically, these meditations often represent unconventional thinking in which either Ulrich’s or the narrator’s thinking runs explicitly counter to the conventional wisdom. This tension constitutes much of the novel’s

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signature irony. As such, the meditations represent a resistance or at least an alternative to “idle talk.” Heidegger points to anxiety as the “mood” or state of mind in which one is confronted with one’s alienation, and Ulrich’s alienation from the “they” is signaled in the opening passage of the novel in which, after viewing a scene of social activity, Ulrich “turned away like a man who has learned to resign himself . . . yet in crossing the adjacent dressing room he hit a punching bag that was hanging there a hard, sudden blow that seemed not exactly in keeping with moods of resignation” (MWQ 8; GW 1:13). Ulrich’s decision to take a leave of absence is the recognition and seizing of a potentiality-for-Being. What remains, and remains unfulfilled throughout the unfinished novel, is a specific decision (what Heidegger would call “resolution”) about what specific, factical Being to seize. The incredible difficulty of that decision gives rise to the novel’s experimental structure. That is, the bulk of the novel experiments with possible bases on which one could resolutely seize a factical Being for oneself. The Man Without Qualities, the narrative of Ulrich’s leave of absence from life, is thus structured as three experiments aimed at finding an appropriate orientation in Modernity. These are presented as the three “utopias” which serve as models or strategies Ulrich/Musil investigates for seizing Being in an authentic way. Grounded in an appreciation for the complexities and ambiguity of social experience, Ulrich tries to turn his Essayismus into a life praxis that first gets characterized as the utopia of essayism. His cousin Diotima is torn between leading a spiritually and emotionally rich life with the wealthy industrialist Arnheim versus fulfilling her convention-bound role as the wife of an upper-bourgeois diplomat. When she asks Ulrich on what basis she could decide between these conflicting possibilities, his answer reflects a willingness to entertain modes of Being that are precisely not determined by conventional social roles. Ulrich tells Diotima that she (they) should live their lives like characters in a book — that is, with all the inessential parts left out (MWQ 625; GW 1:573). One strong implication of the suggestion is that social convention is an inessential part of one’s authentic Being. Ulrich maintains that life is already like fiction (unreal) in being simplified, but he means that it is already simplified when it is lived conventionally, according to models; i.e., when it is experienced as Seinesgleichen geschieht. Setting aside sensory data, “all the other concepts on which we base our life are no more than congealed metaphors” (MWQ 626; GW 1:574). He goes on to say that “we must try to recover unreality” because “reality no longer makes sense” (MWQ 627; GW 1:575). Implicit in Ulrich’s talk of inessential social conventions is, therefore, a more authentic, fuller, richer, range of possibilities that lies underneath conventional (fallen) Being. Authentic Being amounts to recognizing and seizing this wider range of possibilities.

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This is what the disposition or mood of Möglichkeitssinn positions him to access. Ulrich, however, eventually abandons his own advice to live life like a character in a book when he discovers that he cannot extract a life praxis from literary models because anything capable of being formalized as a “life praxis” is already too reductive to embrace the complexity and range of possibilities alluded to by the notion of authentic Being (MWQ 645; GW 1:591). Ulrich’s second experiment with strategies for authentic Being is organized around the utopia of life in love (die Utopie des Lebens in Liebe) which strives for access to the Other Condition. On the occasion of their father’s death, Ulrich is reacquainted with his twin sister Agathe, with whom he pursues a spiritual, mystical union that is approached via an incestuous relationship. However, union with Agathe as an instance of the Other Condition leads to a withdrawal from society, which turns out to be Ulrich’s reason for rejecting the strategy: it “amounted to taking leave of most of his living relationships” (MWQ 950; GW 1:875). The Other Condition which is the nucleus of the utopia of life in love is one of the most central thematic elements of The Man Without Qualities. Ulrich’s first experience with the Other Condition, which comes in connection with his love affair with the major’s wife (Chapter 32), alerts him to the possibility of an alternative mode of existence, and this possibility haunts the rest of the novel, eventually setting up his attempt at spiritual union with Agathe. In an important sense, the Other Condition is a telos toward which Musil/Ulrich’s investigations into modes of Being heads without ever finally arriving. It is tempting to interpret it as the factical existence to be chosen from the possibilities made available by Möglichkeitssinn, and therefore as an analogue to Heidegger’s “primordial relationship-to-Being” or authentic Being itself. However, there are several significant differences which preclude this identification. For one thing, Musil thinks of it as a spiritual condition, rather than a fundamental mode of Being that remains undisclosed by Western metaphysics and ontology. According to Musil, the Other Condition has been disclosed not by systematic philosophy to which it is precisely unavailable but by mystical and religious experience (PS 199; GW 2:1144). Additionally, for Heidegger, authentic Being involves an understanding of one’s relationship to Being (minimally an existentiell understanding, if not an existential one), and therefore authentic Being remains conceptual at some level.11 For Musil, however, the Other Condition is precisely non-conceptual — nicht-ratioïd.12 This is perhaps the most important divergence in their projects of disclosure. Although not precisely analogical, reading the Other Condition alongside Heideggerian authenticity does, however, illuminate significant parallels between Musil’s and Heidegger’s efforts to disclose an authentic, concealed mode of Being. Most importantly, Musil’s notion of the Other

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Condition tries to capture an experience of Being that is in an important sense more primordial than that configured by everyday social experience. In the essay titled “Toward a New Aesthetic” Musil refers to the Other Condition as “a secret rising and ebbing of our being with that of things and other people” (PS 199; GW 2:1144). And elsewhere he characterizes the Other Condition as a situation in which the ordinary subject–object relationships tend to disappear, resulting in a “de-reification of the self as of the world” (PS 187; GW 2:1394). In this sense, the Other Condition is an intensified experience of Being-in and Being-with, both of which are fundamental components of the particular mode of existence Heidegger refers to as Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. In reaching toward a mode of existence apart from determinations such as the difference between subject and object, Musil’s Other Condition reaches toward a more fundamental mode of Being than that governed by existential logic of Modernity he terms Seinesgleichen geschieht. In effect, the Other Condition gestures toward something like Being as such (Sein überhaupt) rather than the merely ontic being of entities. Heidegger ’s account of what he terms Dasein’s “heritage” also contributes to understanding why Musil/Ulrich is unable to get the Other Condition to work as an authentic Being in Modernity. Heidegger maintains that even an authentically chosen existence can only be grounded in factical possibilities handed down to an individual in what he terms one’s “heritage”: “the resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over” (B&T 435). In other words, even in authentically choosing an existence for itself different from its fallen existence of the “they,” Dasein can only choose in the context of the factical possibilities of existence offered by its heritage. “The authentic existentiell understanding is so far from extricating itself from the way of interpreting Dasein which has come down to us, that in each case it is in terms of this interpretation, against it, and yet again for it, that any possibility one has chosen is seized upon in one’s resolution” (B&T 435). Correspondingly, Musil contends that it is only by pouring oneself into the forms of life on offer that one gives life a shape or meaning: “Precisely the shapelessness of his disposition requires the individual to accommodate himself to forms, to take on the character, customs, morality, life-style, and the whole apparatus of a [social] organization” (PS 168-9; GW 2:1374). Recalling Ulrich’s discovery that abiding in the utopia of the Other Condition amounts to taking leave of one’s social relationships, this requirement to live one’s life in social space turns out to set the limitation on the Other Condition and leads Musil to regard it as ultimately unexecutable (undurchfürbar) as an orientation for authentic existence in Modernity (GW 1:1840). In the Nachlaß Musil further emphasizes the importance

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of this social requirement, characterizing the thematic structure of the whole novel as a juxtaposition of the man of possibility with “reality” (GW 1:1881).13 Musil’s sense that the principal theme of the novel is the exposition of the man of possibility in (social) reality echoes Heidegger’s intent to disclose an authentic Being that has become concealed in publicness, which authenticity must nevertheless be executed in the context of the possibilities for existence handed down by one’s “heritage.” I want to conclude this comparative reading of Musil and Heidegger with a reflection on the discursive methods by which each works out their parallel disclosures of authentic Being in order to bring to light some features of Musil’s Essayismus as a strategic engagement with problems of Modernity. Heidegger explains early in Being and Time the technical and restricted sense in which phenomenology will be the method for conducting an existential analytic of Dasein. His explanation involves an etymological analysis of the term “phenomenology,” which he treats as φα ινο′ μενον + λο′γος. “The Greek expression φα ινο′ µενον, to which the term ‘phenomenon’ goes back, is derived from the verb φαι′νεσθαι, which signifies ‘to show itself’. Thus φαινο′μενον means that which shows itself, the manifest” (B&T 51). Regarding λο′γος, Heidegger understands the term as “discourse” (B&T 55), which, following Aristotle, he explains as “to make manifest what one is ‘talking about’ in one’s discourse. Aristotle has explicated , this function of discourse more precisely as αποφαι′νεσθαι. The λο′γος lets something be seen (φα ι′νεσθα ι), namely, what the discourse is about . . . , Discourse ‘lets something be seen’απο′ . . .: that is, it lets us see something from the very thing which the discourse is about” (B&T 56). In other words, discourse lets something be seen by pointing it out. In this function, discourse has the structural form of συ′ νθεσις (synthesis): a “letting something be seen in its togetherness [Beisammen] with something — letting it be seen as something” (B&T 56). Heidegger continues that “The Being-true of the λο′ γος . . . means that . . . the entities of which one is talking must be taken out ,of their hiddenness; one must let them be seen as something unhidden (α ληθε′ς)” (B&T 56). Putting the, terms together, Heidegger concludes that “phenomenology” means “α ποφαι′νεσθαι τα` φαινο′μενα — to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (B&T 58). Here I want to emphasize that Heidegger’s phenomenology aims at allowing phenomena to disclose themselves in the way they are; that is, disclose themselves as the true Being of those entities. Heidegger’s phenomenology is therefore fundamentally bound up with a truth of Being, which it is the goal of phenomenology to disclose. This extends as well to the “authentic” Being of individual Daseins. In other words, there is for Heidegger a true Being of entities and Daseins, and this true Being is what is disclosed in and by phenomenology.

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Musil’s discursive method for disclosing authentic Being is Essayismus, although this needs to be understood differently than in the sense for which Essayismus is a possible life praxis which Ulrich seeks to realize. In fact, although Ulrich cannot ultimately make Essayismus work as a life praxis for the reasons discussed above, Musil does not abandon it as his own discursive method. The Man Without Qualities remains in the mode of Essayismus up to the point that the narrative begins to unravel into multiple drafts, which feature itself might be regarded as an instance of Essayismus in an admittedly extended sense. To bring Musil’s own praxis of Essayismus into focus, we will need a slightly different account of it than the one the narrator gives of Ulrich’s. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s revised notion of discursive tradition, Geoffrey Howe understands Musil’s Essayismus as constituting or inhabiting a three-dimensional field of discursive conditions defined by “time,” “problems,” and “strategic possibilities.” Situating Musil’s Essayismus in a context defined in this way, Howe proposes that we understand Essayismus as the attempt to function at the edge or border — outside — established discursive varieties (2).14 In other words, Musil’s Essayismus seeks to function at or beyond the margin(s) of established discursive conventions. (This observation takes us directly back to the idea of Musil en marge de la philosophie.) Howe suggests that Essayismus works precisely in those situations in which the customary methods and forms of the established discourse are no longer adequate to the reality to be represented (2). In working against or between established modes of discourse, Musil’s Essayismus achieves an effect similar to that of Heidegger’s phenomenologically based destruction of metaphysics — namely, a re-working of fundamental questions apart from the discursive heritage in which those questions have traditionally been received in order to disclose phenomena which have become occluded by existing modes of thought. Howe draws on Walter Moser’s account of Musil’s Essayismus as operationalizing an interdiscursive principle to maintain that Essayismus brings various discursive strategies together not in order that they reciprocally support their complementary strengths but to allow the regions of reality to show through, which (because of the collective weakness of the discourses) had not been graspable by the previously institutionalized conceptual and representational systems (2).15 In this sense, like , ` φαινο′ μενα : to phenomenology, Essayismus operates α ποφαι′νεσθαι τα let that which shows itself be seen from itself. That which is allowed to show itself is a mode of Being (specifically, a potentiality-for-Being) which has become concealed by the prevailing discourses (idle talk) that Musil characterizes as part of the background situation he names Seinesgleichen geschieht. It is common for studies on the essay to approach it as form or genre. Marie-Louise Roth deviates from this

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tendency by adding a consideration of Essayismus as mode of thinking (Denkmethode), emphasizing that Musil develops Essayismus precisely in order to step outside of conventional patterns of thought (125). For example, in the essay “Mind and Experience,” against “dead” systematic, logical thinking Musil poses Essayismus as living thought (lebendiges Denken), which, Roth suggests, occasions an alternative understanding of the world and a new orientation toward life (Lebenshaltung). The inner reaction released by this alternative cognition Musil names Essayismus (127). According to Roth, it is a cognitive disposition whose goal is not knowledge but human transmutation (menschliche Umbildung): “a decoupling of the human from its ossified relation to the environment, upon which new relations with other humans can be built”16 (my translation) (127). At one place in the Diaries Musil describes his life’s work as attempts to find a different kind of human (Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden) (TB 1:663). Just as Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is aimed at the destruction of metaphysics and the disclosure of a human reality behind fallen Being, Musil’s Essayismus aims at a deconstruction (Umbildung) of human Being otherwise imprisoned in the cultural condition he names Seinesgleichen geschieht. In an essay titled “Diskursexperimente in Romantext zu Musils Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,” Moser explicates the way in which Musil’s incorporation of various discursive types within the narrative destabilizes those discourses in order to make available new discursive possibilities. Those possibilities then become strategies for disclosing modes of Being not capable of being represented within prevailing modes of discourse. Moser writes that on account of its inter-discursive function, Musil’s novel carries out alterations to the whole discursive system in which it operates: in essence, narrative literature, but also, potentially, as I am arguing in this book, the philosophical discourse of Modernity. These can be seen as the dissolution (Auflösung) of habitual, fixed entities and stable connections between them (“Diskursexperimente” 170). Moreover, through this interdiscursive praxis, Musil explores new possibilities, and tests out new discursive structures, and in this sense practices a utopian writing technique (“Diskursexperimente” 170–1). In discussing the juxtaposition of various discourses within the novel, Moser suggests that “irony is an agent in a critique of discourse which is used to question established discursive behavior, attitudes, positions and beliefs, and to open them up to the possibility of new formations of discourse” (“The Factual in Fiction” 414). Moser supports this hypothesis with a close reading of the opening paragraph in The Man Without Qualities which juxtaposes a scientific account of the weather with the rather old-fashioned, ordinary-language declaration that it was a fine day in August. Moser concludes, regarding the juxtaposition of these two discourse types, that

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Robert Musil and the nonmodern [t]he message of this beginning would then be that by producing both versions, and by ironically suspending their validity, the text performs a discursive logic that says neither/nor: an alternative of two different incipits is proposed by the narrative voice, but neither the scientific nor the everyday use of language is said to be the right one with which to begin a novel. (“The Factual in Fiction” 414)

Irony operates as a trope by which Musil destabilizes conventional modes of representation in order to open up new ones — in which new possibilities for Being are to be disclosed. Thus, in what he terms Musil’s interdiscursive experimentation, Moser sees Musil provoking an interaction between the represented discourses which cancels the relative autonomy of the separated units and opens the possibility of other connections between them (“Diskursexperimente” 180). Moser concludes that the experimentation with various discourses explores new horizons in which new combinations of discourses are proposed and thereby develops a dynamic which transcends the givens of the existing discursive system17 (“Diskursexperimente” 180). It also makes it possible to explore liminal zones (Zwischenraume) between the existing discourses (“Diskursexperimente” 170). It is in the space of such a liminal zone that Musil’s Essayismus is able to disclose an alternative mode of Being. Reading Moser’s articulation of an interdiscursive principle back onto the larger structure of the novel, it can be said that Musil represents Viennese society as a multiplicity of competing discourses figured locally in the lack of consensus that debilitates the Parallel Campaign as well as globally in the discursive multiplicity that contributes to the pseudoreality that prevails. That discursive multiplicity corresponds to the idle talk and ambiguity which, along with curiosity, are the components of the fallen Being of everyday publicness in Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s Being-in. In allowing these discourses to interact in ways that destabilize one another, Musil’s Essayismus opens a Zwischenraum, which, like the Heideggerian “clearing” (Erleuchtung), allows an alternative mode of Being to show itself as itself. Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is that essayistic Zwischenraum in which the conditions of authentic Being are disclosed. Musil’s disclosure of authentic Being in Modernity exhibits a number of features that position it as something other than “modern” and “philosophical.” Like Heidegger, Musil’s Essayismus discloses an authentic Being without recursion to a Cartesian substantial (ontic) self, and therefore does so without signature components of conventionally modern philosophy.18 Despite whatever degree of radicality can be attributed to Heidegger’s reworking of traditional ontology, however, his

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phenomenological disclosure of authentic Being remains clearly within the horizon of philosophical reflection. Musil, on the other hand, is decidedly not participating in philosophical discourse proper, even though he still treats philosophical questions. It is in this sense that Musil’s Essayismus opens a Zwischenraum that is something like a nonphilosophical place from which to still treat of philosophy.

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4

Order without system

The comparative analysis of Musil and Heidegger in the previous chapter captured and revealed the parallels between their attempts to disclose an authentic Being that for both had become concealed in the everyday experience of Modernity. Heidegger’s eigentliches Dasein and Musil’s Möglichkeitsmensch both point toward modes of human Being conceived of as a potentiality-for-Being. Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein mobilizes a conception of human Being radically different from the Cartesian cogito. Against Descartes’ version of a worldless occurring subject, Heidegger insists on a view of human Being as a Being-in-the-world, the hyphenations of which phrase (as well as many others) emphasize Dasein’s existence as fundamentally entangled with the being of other entities and other Daseins. For Heidegger, Dasein’s way of Being is always a mit-Sein. Similarly, for Musil, a genuinely ethical existence involves detaching oneself from an inauthentic, fallen Being in the “they” that Musil characterizes as Seinesgleichen geschieht. Freeing oneself from these limited and conventional versions of human existence amounts to distancing oneself from the qualities which are normally taken to coalesce into something called personality or personal identity. Detached from his Eigenschaften, a man thus without qualities becomes a Möglichkeitsmensch in the sense of a mode of Being poised to seize a wider range of possibilities of existence. Crucially, however, that which obtains after the removal of Eigenschaften is not a substance to which qualities adhere. A man without qualities is not a what, but a how in the sense of a potentiality-for-Being. A man without qualities is thus ontologically conceived rather than merely ontically. Like Heidegger, then, Musil invokes and appeals to a mode of human Being radically different from the Cartesian cogito as a point substance. In a sense, the central problem of Musil’s novel is the question of the ontological status of a man, without qualities. Musil’s alternative to a Cartesian ontology of the subject also plays a crucial role in a larger facet of his intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity, namely the problematic which might be termed the cultural project of Modernity. The task of the present chapter, then, is to read Musil into the cultural project of Modernity which is understood here as the attempt to create normativity out of oneself. Doing so develops new contexts for Musil’s reception within the debates about the modern and the postmodernism.

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Moreover, articulating Musil’s intervention into the cultural project of Modernity charts affinities as well as distance from two important genealogies associated with the dialectic of enlightenment: on the one hand the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason, and on the other poststructuralism’s radical critique of the subject. Because Musil neither tries to lift himself outside the philosophy of the subject with the lever of “antiscience,” nor to destabilize it from within, but re-imagines the moment of Modernity without Modernity’s self-privilegings, the discursive strategy he develops exhibits features significantly different from now-canonical versions of postmodernism on offer. Before that distance from extant postmodernisms can be evaluated, however, it is first necessary to characterize Musil’s participation in the cultural project of Modernity and its entanglements. According to Habermas, Modernity’s break with the past triggered an enduring problem: how to create criteria for the true, good, and beautiful without reference to transcendental authority or models supplied by the past. In other words, the cultural project of Modernity is the effort to create normativity out of itself. (PDM 7). For Habermas, this effort becomes the very problem of philosophy per se: “The anxiety caused by the fact that a Modernity without models had to stabilize itself on the basis of the very diremptions it had wrought is seen by Hegel as ‘the source of the need for philosophy’” (PDM 16). Accordingly, Hegel is the first to treat the problem of Modernity as a specifically philosophical problem. Forced to derive normativity out of itself, Modernity, and more specifically modern philosophy, takes the form of self-consciousness: “Hegel sees the modern age as marked universally by a structure of self-relation that he calls ‘subjectivity’: ‘The principle of the modern world is freedom of subjectivity, the principle that all the essential factors present in the intellectual whole are now coming into their right in the course of their development’” (PDM 16). Modernity seeks criteria for the true, the good, and the beautiful through self-reflection, giving rise to its structural principle, namely subjectivity: that is, the activity by which the subject makes an object of itself for itself. Habermas points out that the self-conscious structure of Modernity is “grasped as such in philosophy, namely, as abstract subjectivity in Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ and in the form of absolute self-consciousness in Kant. It is the structure of a self-relating, knowing subject, which bends back upon itself as object, in order to grasp itself as in a mirror image — literally in a ‘speculative’ way” (PDM 18). On Habermas’ reading, modern philosophy, therefore, instantiates the principle of subjectivity while configuring itself as the philosophy of subjectivity. Put slightly differently, philosophy, in becoming modern, reifies itself as subject-centered reason. Habermas points out that Hegel was troubled that this new “religion” of reflection reproduced the very same kind of alienations that orthodox

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religion created between lived experience and theological dogma. Thus, “Hegel contends against the enlighteners that the pure religion of reason is no less an abstraction than the fetishized beliefs, for it is incapable of interesting the heart and of having an influence upon the feelings and needs. It, too, comes down to a private religion because it is cut off from the institutions of public life and arouses no enthusiasm” (PDM 26). Neither orthodox dogma nor Enlightenment reason, it turns out, is capable of “shaping religion into the ethical totality of an entire nation and of inspiring a life of political freedom” which is necessary for carrying forward the project of Modernity’s self-grounding (PDM 26). For this reason Habermas characterizes the paradox of the Enlightenment by pointing out that “the principle of subjectivity engenders positivity, which, however, calls forth the objective need for its own overcoming” (PDM 27). The result is the so-called dialectic of enlightenment: the attempted self-overcoming of subject-centered reason. Hegel’s own understanding of this paradox took shape as a concern that Modernity’s structure of subjectivity generates subject–object relations that fragment the ethical totality of a society, elevating the finite self above the unified collective. Habermas characterizes this ascendance of the individual by pointing out that for Hegel “emancipation became transformed into unfreedom because the unshackling power of reflection had become autonomous and now achieved unification only through the violence of a subjugating subjectivity” (PDM 33).1 That is, the principle of subjectivity expresses itself as an activity of reflection which gives rise to subject–object relations in which all not-self entities are subsumed under the objectifying power of a finite subject. It is worth recalling this history in order to recognize that the problem of domination that is occasioned by subject-centered reason continues to be at the center of critiques of philosophical modernism. Thus, the critique of Modernity as subject-centered reason has taken its enduring form from Hegel’s concern regarding the dominating tendencies of the philosophy of the subject. According to Habermas, the critique of a reason grounded in a principle of subjectivity holds that such a version of reason denounces and undermines all unconcealed forms of suppression and exploitation, of degradation and alienation, only to set up in their place the unassailable domination of rationality. Because this regime of a subjectivity puffed up into a false absolute transforms the means of consciousness-raising and emancipation into just so many instruments of objectification and control, it fashions for itself an uncanny immunity in the form of a thoroughly concealed domination. (PDM 56)

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Habermas points out that the critique of subject-centered reason has continued along the same lines since its inception with the Young Hegelians. The domination occasioned by a subjugating subjectivity persists as long as one remains committed to carrying out the cultural project of Modernity along the path of subject-centered reason. It is this awareness that has led to attempts, beginning with Nietzsche, to step outside subjectcentered reason (Foucault’s archeology of madness is one example) or to disable it from the inside (such as Derrida’s attempts to deconstruct the transcendental foundations of certainty in Western reason). Habermas’ generally unsympathetic reading, however, regards Foucault as caught in the performative paradox of using a form of Western reason (archeology) to carry out a critique of Western reason (PDM 247) while Derrida’s invocation of arche-écriture and différance makes deconstruction no less an Ursprungsphilosophie (philosophy of origins) than the other monuments of the Western philosophical tradition (PDM 181). While he shares Foucault’s and Derrida’s concern about the dangers of subject-centered reason, Habermas is skeptical about so-called postmodern attempts to escape the horizon of Western reason either by means of an archeology/genealogy of discursive formations or a critique of metaphysics: “Even on methodological grounds I do not believe that we can distantiate Occidental rationalism, under the hard gaze of a fictive ethnology of the present, into an object of neutral contemplation and simply leap out of the discourse of modernity” (PDM 59). In general, Habermas remains suspicious that “postmodern thought merely claims a transcendental status, while it remains in fact dependent on presuppositions of the modern self-understanding that were brought to light by Hegel” (PDM 4). Reluctant to abandon the project of Modernity, Habermas’ own effort is to work back through the philosophical discourse of Modernity in order to identify paths not taken. The paths to which he turns his attention have to do with versions of non-subject-centered rationality — those that necessarily involve intersubjective considerations, insisting that “the paradigm of the knowledge of objects has to be replaced by the paradigm of mutual understanding between subjects” (PDM 295). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to evaluate the cogency of Habermas’ criticisms of Derrida and Foucault or the viability of the counterdiscourse of intersubjective reason he seeks to recover. While there may be reasons to disagree with Habermas’ critique of Foucault and Derrida, his account of the themes and trajectories of modern philosophy remains, on the whole, reliable. The value of Habermas’ reading of postmodernism thus lies in the way his critique opens the questions of the modern and the postmodern to further reflection, with the consequence that a continuation of the project of the Enlightenment along the lines Habermas indicates may not be the only way of avoiding the impasses of postmodernism

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he points to. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida are not, in other words, the only strategic alternatives to the modern that can be found among so-called postmodern interventions into the philosophical discourse of Modernity. Robert Musil’s theory and performance of Essayismus is also to be ranged among these other efforts to engage the problem of normativity without recourse to subject-centered reason. We can begin to articulate this facet of Musil’s belonging to the philosophical discourse of Modernity by identifying the principal features of his participation in Modernity’s effort to create normativity out of one’s own self/moment. Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities is an encyclopedic critique of pre-WWI Vienna that points to an ossified and collapsing Habsburg culture as a contributing circumstance of the conflagration of Europe in 1914. A more explicit diagnosis of that dystopic moment is found in Musil’s 1922 essay “Helpless Europe.” Musil addresses the difficulty of explaining the horrors of the First World War and other similar cultural catastrophes by insisting that “what is at issue is not . . . the collapse of a particular ideology or mentality — for instance, that of the bourgeoisie today, or of Catholicism in 1618 — or the content of this or that ideology, but rather the periodic breakdown of all of them” (PS 130; GW 2:1090). He goes on to explain that “it seems mistaken to assume that we could improve this situation . . . by any increase in what we showed too little of before; for what was lacking was not our vision of the ideal, but its preconditions” observing that “never again will a homogeneous ideology, a ‘culture,’ arise in our Western society on its own” (PS 130; GW 2:1091). “The solution” he suggests, “lies neither in waiting for a new ideology nor in the clash of the ones that are quarreling today, but in the creation of social conditions that safeguard the stability and depth of ideological endeavors in general. What we lack is not substance but function!” (PS 130; GW 2:1091). Musil thus characterizes the cultural situation as an organizational problem that entails the deliberate interaction and linking of ideological elements. He goes on to insist that “This essential organizing function of society, however, rests in our time exclusively with the sciences, in the realm of pure intellect; in the humanistic area not even creative people recognize the need for it” (PS 131; GW 2:1091). Musil thus approaches the problem of Modernity not in terms of inappropriate, outdated, or “un-modern” normative content but as a search for new discursive techniques for engaging the problem of normativity itself. His sense that science alone is capable of performing an organizing function with respect to ideologies signals his alignment with the modernist ethos of “critique” as opposed to a retreat to an un- or pre-scientific humanism like that of the Expressionism circulating in Vienna in the first decades of the twentieth century.2 The priorities of Musil’s quest for new discursive techniques with which to undertake this problem of normativity emerge in a distinction

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he makes between morality and ethics that is in turn grounded in the different modes of rationality associated with each one. For Musil the moralist systematizes existing precepts while the ethicist develops new content. The moralist, Musil writes, “adopts an existing corpus of moral precepts and arranges them in logical order. He doesn’t add value to these values, rather he adds to them a system . . . His primary drive is logical. He makes use of ethical precepts only to the extent that they are amenable to logic” (Diaries 312; TB 1:645). “Typically different,” writes Musil, “are the ethicists. Names: Confucius, Lao-tse, Christ and Christianity, Nietzsche, the mystics, the essayists . . . Their contribution to ethics is concerned not with the form but the material” (Diaries 312; TB 1:645). We encounter here a distinct echo of Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity that arose in the comparison with Nietzsche in Chapter 2. While some kind of systematic ordering of concepts and ideologies is necessary to prevent another catastrophe like the First World War, Musil remains wary of the applicability of ordinary systematic thinking (modeled on the natural sciences) to the complex phenomena that make up human ethical experience. These difficulties begin to emerge in Musil’s reflections on the nature of ethical experience. Thus Musil notes that there are generally two groups of experience: those that can be fixed and transferred, and those that cannot be fixed and transferred. His appeal to the notion of transferability recalls his work in experimental psychology under Carl Stumpf in Berlin which demonstrated, for example, that “A red of x µµ is certainly different subjectively, but it is fixed” by means of measurement (Diaries 313; TB 1:646). Ethical experiences, Musil maintains, cannot be fixed in this sense because the source of ethics is the individual (Diaries 311; TB 644). He points out that the essential part of ethical experience is not its “value-element” (whether something is good or bad) but the qualitative element on which it is founded (Diaries 314; TB 1:649). In other words, the experiential quality is what is important, not how it can be measured against a standard of conventionally determined good or evil. In his sense that ethical experience arises in the individual, Musil re-enacts the modernist gesture of generating normativity out of one’s own self/moment. At the same time, however, he remains suspicious of something very much like the danger of a finite subjectivity raised via false methodological certainty to an overblown objectivity: “Here the issue is how one goes beyond logic without making an error” (Diaries 313; TB 1:645). Again, some non-subjective process of reflection is called for. In insisting simultaneously on the individual and the non-subjective features of ethical experience, Musil is not only engaged in the cultural project of Modernity: he is entangled in its enduring contradictions as well. The discursive strategy Musil develops to negotiate these entanglements — Essayismus — breaks the pattern of subject-centered reason by

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abandoning the model of a finite subject elevated to false objectivity by reconfiguring both the subjective and objective poles of the interaction. Thus, while Musil maintains that the ethical phenomena arise in the individual, the individual he has in mind is crucially not the Cartesian subject of subject-centered reason but a textual subject instituted through the discursive praxis of Essayismus.3 Similarly, Essayismus reshapes the operations of subject-centered reason itself, dispensing with the quest for certainty and universality while preserving a kind of rigor central to the critical instincts of Modernity, thus answering the call for something like systematic thought. Musil’s Essayismus can be understood to operate in two distinct dimensions (although these are difficult to decouple from each other): as a mode of subjectivity (dramatized in Ulrich’s, albeit problematic, attempt to live hypothetically) and as a discursive strategy for engaging the complexities of human experience. For Musil, both dimensions of Essayismus draw upon signal features of the essay, above all its ability to operate in the space between that which can be systematized and that which cannot. This distinction brings into play those sides of human experience not strictly governable by logic but about which careful thinking is still required. Musil labels these domains, respectively, the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd. Conceptualizing the domain of ethics as nicht-ratioïd in light of the individuality of the phenomena that comprise it points to the necessity of an alternative discursive approach to that of the natural sciences, which deal adequately only with repeatedly observable phenomena obeying universal laws. It is on the basis of his insight that “facts” in the domain of the nichtratioïd are not susceptible to systematic ordering that Musil is impelled to develop an alternative discursive engagement with the problem of normativity. In the unpublished fragment titled “On the Essay,” Musil marks out the domain of the essay as between epistemology (the science of knowledge) on the one hand and art and life on the other. The domain of epistemology, Musil writes, is dominated by the criterion of truth. This is an objective criterion; it lies in the nature of the field. There are mathematical and logical truths. There are facts and a combining of facts that are generally valid. That are systematic or in accord with laws. In both cases — and at the same time this is the least of the claims we make for them — they admit a far-reaching spiritual order [eine weitreichende geistige Ordnung] . . . And there are areas that do not admit of such an order. (PS 48; GW 2:1334–5) The essay, Musil says, does not aim at truth but at probability. He then raises the question of “how there can be areas in which it is not truth that

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dominates, and in which probability is something more than an approach to truth” (PS 49; GW 2:1335). It must lie, he writes, in the nature of the objects which make up the domain. The “facts” that make up the domain of the ratioïd are repeatedly observable and therefore susceptible to systematic ordering. The objects or “facts” that make up the domain of the nicht-ratioïd, however, consist of complexes of thoughts, feelings, and experiences which do not behave according to universal laws. As complexes of thoughts, feelings, and experiences, “the facts [in the nicht-ratioïd domain] are not generally observable, and also their connections are in many cases only a singularity” (PS 49; GW 2:1335). So, for example, Musil indicates that whether a rational thought “speaks to us” or not depends on the emotional context and experiential history of the individual. The “sudden coming alive of an idea, this lightninglike reforging of a great complex of feeling (most penetratingly imaged by Saul’s becoming Paul) by means of the idea, so that one suddenly understands the world and oneself differently: this is intuitive knowledge in the mystical sense . . . On a smaller scale it is the constant movement of essayistic thought” (PS 50; GW 2:1336–7). Musil is not, of course, the first to advocate the essay as a discursive strategy especially well suited to approaching the irregular complexities of human experience: Michel de Montaigne is often cited as the inaugurator of the essay as a distinctively modern form. And though Musil cites Montaigne surprisingly little, Montaigne’s example provides access to important features of Musil’s Essayismus. Most importantly, Montaigne’s essays model the linkage between essayism as a mode of writing and the textual subjectivity it occasions. Hassan Melehy has elaborated this linkage in his book Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject. Melehy argues that under the sign of the “I” Montaigne institutes a textual subject instantiated in the figure of the “author” through an essayistic mode of writing and maintains that subject’s fragmentary condition through a process and attitude of textuality with respect to the sources of his own writing — more specifically, through citation and multiple meaning (Writing Cogito 55–60). This textual subject enacts a mode of judgment anterior to the institution of the “modern” philosophy of the subject grounded in the Cartesian cogito. The models made available by Melehy’s reading of Montaigne (essayism and the textual subjectivity it occasions) thus present themselves as antecedent alternatives to the subject-centered reason that lies at the heart of the philosophical discourse of Modernity. They are models which find close analogues in Robert Musil’s essays and fiction. When those essayistic models are refracted through Musil’s engagement with the problems of Modernity they point toward openings into other critiques of the modern than those conventionally on offer. Melehy begins articulating the relationship between essayism and textual subjectivity by observing that Montaigne’s Essays are subjective

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in the sense that they record the author’s subjective reaction to the objects under consideration: “The Essays are, as a book of the subject, a subjective book: they say ‘I speak,’ ‘I believe,’ ‘I produce,’ ‘I like,’ more than ‘speech,’ ‘belief,’ ‘production,’ ‘friendship’” (47). Melehy reads the preponderance of these subjective locutions as a signal of Montaigne’s awareness of his subjective relation to the objects of contemplation. That is, he takes these locutions to imply a self-awareness on Montaigne’s part that the subject has only a partial, incomplete apprehension of the objects toward which it directs itself, with the consequence that [e]very judgment of a thing, every observation and proposition, becomes a partial judgment of certain aspects of the thing, strictly in its relation to the subject. And the subject itself emerges bit by bit in the writing of these relations, no more revealing itself as a whole than do any of the objects. The text of the Essays is made of the interweavings of these varied parts; and “Montaigne,” never a stable entity, becomes readable as the assembly of these fragments. (Writing Cogito 48) The signified “Montaigne” is thus constellated at/as the intersection of relations to various objects, which relations are delineated in the essays, that make up the essays. “Through Montaigne’s assembly, the relation of book and body becomes the very process by which text produces subject” (58). The contours of the “I” or writing subject thus come into definition through the construction of the text it writes, a text that embodies and inscribes the limits of the subject. Thus, Montaigne’s subject, in a way, stands not in opposition to but rather in an intertwining engagement with its objects. But this engagement is strictly partial, not constituting an overarching unity. Since each of the subject fragments emerges in relation to a particular object or object fragment . . . it must be seen as totally bound up with the latter to the point where there no longer can be a binary distinction between the two. (49–50) When Montaigne writes “I am myself the matter [la matiere] of my book,” Melehy explains, matter is that through which the man — the constituted, material subject — is articulated as the book. Both I and the book are matter; in the writing they are the same matter — though not . . . a homogeneous substance — bearing the name “Montaigne.” Each constitutes a series of fragments of the matter of Montaigne, not identical with

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The characteristic of Montaignian essayism that makes for both the textuality of the essays and the textuality of the subject is the practice of uncited borrowings from numerous sources. When one considers the composition of the essays, that they are constellations made up of uncited passages from various sources, the textual nature of the writing (and of the writing subject) begins to become clear: “The body is pieced together from diverse members; the writing subject is assembled from phrases, citations, from ‘foreign matter,’ foreign texts, from the same and from other diverse members” (Writing Cogito 61). The leverage for an alternative to subject-centered reason that Essayismus and textual subjectivity make available concerns, on the one hand, abandoning the subject as the transcendental point of reference for knowledge about the world. Such an abandonment obviates the subjugating subjectivity Habermas identified as the systemic fault of subject-centered reason. As a discursive practice, on the other hand, Montaigne’s essayism constitutes an alternative to the “method” of modern (Cartesian) reason. Melehy develops just this difference as one of the overarching themes of Writing Cogito when he points out that Montaigne’s essays are not assays of objects but assays of judgments (77). Seen in this light “Montaigne’s essays construct a figuration of epistemology: they relate the on-going engagement of the field of cognition with itself and with its object” (77). Melehy continues, “Montaigne’s weighing is not a counting. It does not operate by a measurement that takes recourse to a prescription but yields its productions as singularities” (84). “What the essay offers as a critical instrument,” consequently, “is an attenuation of the forcefulness of reason . . . Between Montaigne and Descartes, essayistic writing is becoming the subversion of the reason that would claim ascendancy,” that is, as modern philosophy (85). The resources that Melehy thus finds functioning within Montaignian essayism is an antecedent critique of subject-centered reason. It is one that corresponds to a number of analogues in Musilian Essayismus. First of all, Musil shares with Montaigne a sense of the fundamental messiness of human experience. Thus, the nicht-ratioïd domain of human experience arises from the complexity of the interactions between the individual and the world: Musil asserts that “there is no better way to characterize this [nicht-ratioïd] region than to point out that it is the area of the individual’s reactivity to the world and other individuals, the realm of values and valuations, of ethical and aesthetic relationships” (PS 63; GW 2:1028). Musil’s focus on “reactivity” embraces the fact that human engagement with the world is not governed by logic alone:

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Man not only thinks, he feels, desires, senses, acts. Just as there are purely automatic actions without the participation of thought, so there are also purely rational ideas without the participation of the feelings or the will. And there are others as well. When a thought seizes us, bowls us over, etc., it does in the area of feelings what a revolutionary insight does in the purely rational area. The depth of its effect is a sign of how great masses of feeling are empathetically involved. (PS 49; GW 2:1336) The interaction of thought and feeling results in a constellation of cognitive functions complexified and particularized beyond universalizability and thereby necessitating a mode of discursive engagement that does not operate by subordinating individual phenomena to universal laws. It involves a mode of discursive engagement, in other words, significantly different from the “method” of modern philosophy. Musil’s understanding of ethical experience in terms of a complex interaction of thought and feeling is dramatized in the character of Ulrich, for whom [t]he value of an action or a quality, and indeed its meaning and nature, seemed to [Ulrich] to depend on its surrounding circumstances, on the aims it served; in short on the whole — constituted now one way, now another — to which it belonged . . . In this way an open-ended system or relationships arises, in which independent meanings, such as are ascribed to actions and qualities by way of a rough first approximation in ordinary life, no longer exist at all. (MWQ 270; GW 1:250–1) One consequence of this open-ended system of relations is that moral determinations cannot be traced back to some universal principle, a moral law, for example. Conceptualizing ethical experience in this way abandons the idea that ethical experience could have a fixed, absolute content or value. The appropriateness of the essay as a discursive model for engaging questions of ethics — and therefore for intervening in Modernity’s quest for self-grounded normativity — is illuminated first by the essay’s ability to embrace complexity without being driven to a singular solution. This is the basis of the connection Ulrich makes between the essay and ethical experience on the basis of their shared structures: The accepted translation of “essay” as “attempt” contains only vaguely the essential allusion to the literary model, for an essay is not a provisional or incidental expression of a conviction capable

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of being elevated to a truth under more favorable circumstances or being exposed as an error . . . an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought. Nothing is more foreign to it than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivism. (MWQ 273; GW 1:253) The passage emphasizes that the provisionality associated with both the essay and ethical experience is not that of a hypothesis that has not yet been confirmed or rejected. Its character is somewhat paradoxically both more necessary (determined) and yet more singular. This formulation points to the idea that an essay is a configuration of personality and external circumstances given a particular inflection by a decisive thought. Similarly, Musil wants to approach the idea that moral decisions are highly particular, complex constellations of personality, circumstances, and rationality, all of which need to be taken account of if one is going to come to a judgment about a decision to be made. One important feature of this structure is that while the shape of either complex constellation is in some sense determined by the convergence of its circumstances, because those circumstances do not repeat themselves exactly, there can be no universal law or principle deduced from them nor adduced onto them. This is the basis of Musil’s insistence that the essay does not aspire to a total solution (eine Totallösung) but only a series of partial ones (eine reihe von partikulären) (PS 49; GW 2:1335). And yet despite the absence of universality, the insights associated with Essayismus are still not “subjective” in the sense of being entirely dependent for their meaning on the individual who experiences them. That is, they are still susceptible to a kind of systematic understanding. This is, again, the hybrid space of the essay that lies between the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd. It is on the basis of shared underlying structure that the essay affords an appropriate discursive approach to ethical experience. In addition to naming a discursive strategy for engaging the irregular complexities of human experience, Essayismus also operates in Musil’s œuvre as a mode of a subjectivity that is suspended amid a network of determining forces. This mode of subjectivity is precisely that of a textual subject. This textuality is signaled in the novel’s title and more clearly by the title of Chapter Thirty-nine: “A Man Without Qualities Consists of Qualities Without a Man.” Thus Ulrich “had to suppose that the personal qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him; that every one of them, in fact, looked at closely, was no more intimately bound up with him than with anyone else who also happened to posses them (MWQ 157; GW 1:148). The notion of textual subjectivity also helps elucidate the spiritual experience Musil refers to as the Other Condition. In the ordinary condition,

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Musil explains, “a thin line connects the individual with his object and attaches itself to both the object and the person at only a single point, while all the rest of the person’s being remains untouched” (PS 185; GW 2:1392). In all such “objective” relationships, Musil argues, the self is “bracketed” (ausgeschaltet) in a way that produces a kind of “alienation” (PS 186; GW 2:1393). No such alienation obtains in the case of the Other Condition. What is common to all instances of this Other Condition is that “the border between self and non-self is less sharp than usual” (PS 186; GW 2:1393). Instead of being alienated, “One participates in things (understands their language). In this condition understanding [Verstehen] is not impersonal (objective), but extremely personal, like an agreement between subject and object” (PS 186: GW 2:1393). Musil goes on to characterize the Other Condition as “a dereification of the self as of the world” (eine Entdinglichung des Ich wie der Welt) (PS 187; GW 2:1394). This textual subjectivity of Musil’s Other Condition thus exhibits close parallels with the intertwining engagement of subject and object Melehy describes as instituted by Montaigne’s essays. The two dimensions of Essayismus (as discursive strategy and as mode of subjectivity) converge in the case of Musil’s own essayistic production where they reveal a close connection between writing and subjectivity much like the one Melehy describes operating in Montaigne. This is most evident in an unpublished introduction Musil wrote to a proposed collection of his essays provisionally titled “Attempts to Find a Different Kind of Human Being” (Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden.)4 There Musil notes that [w]henever in this introduction — or in what follows — the term I is used, it does not mean the private person of the writer; nor is it an invented I as in a novel. What is important for me is not the interrelationships of ideas and feelings that present themselves for discussion as they occur in one person, and therefore not in my person either, but only their interrelationships among themselves. (PS 287; TB 1:663) Given a growing suspicion toward the supposed objectivity of strictly logical connections among ideas that has begun to pervade Modernity, Musil observes that rhetoric has now come to assume a place alongside logic as a discursive mode with which people attempt to make sense of the world. On the other hand, the alternative subjectivism of personalized connections among ideas is equally unsatisfactory. Therefore, [i]f the connections of ideas among themselves are not entirely satisfactory, and if the connection in the person of the author is rejected — that kind of personal trumpeting and indirect sketching

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of an interesting author — what remains is a connection that is neither subjective nor objective, but could well be both: a possible image of the world, a possible person, and it is both of these that I am seeking. (PS 288; TB 1:664) Thinking in this manner, Musil proclaims, “doesn’t need to be either a personal thought that is part of myself, or an entirely impersonal thought to which is ascribed the impersonality of truth” (PS 288; TB 1:665). Musil insists that these neither subjective nor objective thoughts are the thoughts with which essays are written (PS 288; TB 1:665). In this way Musil develops Essayismus — as both discursive strategy and mode of subjectivity — as alternative to subject-centered reason by reconceptualizing both poles of the classical epistemological paradigm of subject–object relations. On the one hand, a textual subjectivity replaces the Cartesian subject. On the other, such a textual subject is understood to exist not in ontological opposition but rather in intertwining engagement with its objects. Musil indicates, in fact, that all his work could go under the title “Attempts to find a Different Kind of Human Being,” indicating the scale and importance of his quest for an alternative mode of subjectivity (PS 291; TB 1:667). In the converging senses of discursive strategy and mode of subjectivity, Musil’s Essayismus simultaneously engages the contingency of knowledge as well as the contingent ontology of the knowing subject. This dual engagement with contingency is what distinguishes Essayismus from the modern practices of subject-centered reason. By instituting a textual subjectivity figured as a dereification of subject–object relations, Essayismus decouples knowledge production from a Cartesian subject and thereby obviates the subjecting subjectivity Habermas identifies as the principal defect of subject-centered reason. In neither the case of knowledge nor that of the ontology of the subject, however, is the contingency too irregular or subjective to be calculable. For Musil, the engineer-turned-novelist, some kind of ordered approximation of these complexities remains the goal: “the whole task is life without systematizing but, nonetheless, with order” (Diaries 318).5 Musil answered the requirement of order, an important feature of the critical project of Modernity, by drawing on his training in philosophy and experimental psychology. Thus, Musil’s sense of ethical experience as a complex constellation of reciprocally interacting forces corresponds closely to the conceptualization of natural phenomena he engaged in his doctoral dissertation on Ernst Mach’s positivism. A good case can be made that Musil’s understanding of ethical phenomena receives its conceptual modeling from the notion of functional relation that emerges in Mach’s critique of causality and physical concepts in the natural sciences.

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The overall theme of Mach’s positivism as it is formulated in his book The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical is the elimination of metaphysics from science (AS 35). Mach understood this first of all to entail abandoning explanations of natural phenomena by reference to universal laws in favor of direct descriptions of phenomena themselves. Chief among Mach’s targets are the so-called physical concepts (heat, mass, force) and the concept of causality. In general, Mach contends that talk of cause and effect results from inexact observation in which one supposed cause is abstracted from a whole complex of circumstances. In his dissertation, On Mach’s Theories (Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs), Musil isolates four main criticisms in Mach’s analysis of causality. First, the concept of causality implies that the same circumstances are followed by the same results, but Mach maintains that the identity of circumstances and events presupposed by the concept of causality exists only as an abstraction, where other aspects of the facts are neglected. Therefore, secondly, talk of cause and effect results from what Mach regards as inexact observation. More exact observation “reveals the so-called cause to be only a complement of the whole complex of facts which determine the so-called effect” (OMT 45; Beitrag 58). Thirdly, the connection between a supposed cause and its effect is not simple but complex, involving not just a single dependency between two phenomena but multiple dependencies between multiple phenomena. What one has, consequently, is not a simple causal relation between two phenomena but a complex of mutual dependencies. Therefore, fourthly, the relations which exact analysis of phenomena bring to light do not possess the irreversibility that is characteristic of causal relations. Without this irreversibility, cause and effect are interchangeable and, therefore, meaningless (OMT 45; Beitrag 61–2). These problems in the concept of causality lead Mach to conclude that the concepts of cause and effect . . . describe a state of affairs in what is at best a rather provisional and imperfect fashion because they are insufficiently precise . . . As soon as we can characterize the elements of events by means of measurable quantities . . . the mutual dependence of elements is much more completely and precisely represented by the concept of function than by those of cause and effect. (AS 92)6 Musil glosses Mach’s concept of functional relations more specifically as “relations expressing the reciprocal quantitative dependence of the measurable components of phenomena” (OMT 47; Beitrag 62). The concept of function allows the figuration of the network of mutually determining

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relations in which a given phenomenon is suspended with the advantage that it makes possible a more complete analysis of the phenomenon under investigation without involving abstractions that correspond to nothing real in nature. Whereas for Mach, the adoption of functional relations is thought to make science more exact by redirecting inquiry away from explanation of phenomena by reference to a hypothetical underlying reality and toward the description of phenomena in terms of one another, for Musil, functional relations allow one to account for ethical phenomena without recourse to an abstract, hypothetical (Cartesian) subject, the extreme subjectivity of which would put ethical phenomena beyond any kind of systematic scrutiny. Thus, one of the most important things Musil took from his study of Mach is that constellations of phenomena have determinate structure even if their highly individualistic configurations are not reducible to particular instances of universal laws. Musil references this kind of chaotic behavior in a variety of complex phenomena: The path of history is in fact not that of a billiard ball, which, once struck, follows a predictable course, but resembles rather the path of a cloud, which also follows the laws of physics but is equally influenced by something that can only be called a coinciding of facts . . . all these elements, when they come together, even if they are calculable, are really facts not laws. (PS 169; GW 2:1374) In terms of Essayismus as a discursive strategy in line with the critical instincts of Modernity, Musil’s approach to ethical experience aims for a precision paralleling the “reciprocal quantitative dependency” Mach advocated in describing natural phenomena. In another parallel to Mach’s attempt to place scientific knowledge on the most rigorous basis possible, and beginning from an awareness that ethical phenomena are not reducible to universal laws, Musil champions the functional understanding generated by Essayismus as the most rigorous form attainable in an area in which one cannot work precisely (“auf einem Gebiet, wo man eben nicht genau arbeiten kann”) (PS 48 GW 2:1334). It is through a functional understanding of phenomena that Musil approaches a precision differently configured than that of the method of modern philosophy yet still capable of critique, and therefore still recognizable as part of the critical effort of Modernity. A functional understanding of ethical phenomena allows Musil to approach the problem of how to go beyond logic and epistemology without making an error. Musil’s concern for avoiding error signals an important feature of both the project of Modernity itself as well as its postmodern developments:

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the effort to lay bare the conditions of possibility that emerge from and constitute immanent or self-critique. It is on the basis of its ability to function as “immanent critique of intellectual constructions” that Theodor Adorno regards the essay as “the critical form par excellence” citing its departure from the “method” of modern philosophy set out by Descartes in his Discourse on Method (“The Essay as Form” 18). In general, Adorno praises the essay’s resistance to the modernist philosophical practice of subordinating particulars to universals, pointing out that “the academic guild accepts as philosophy only what is clothed in the dignity of the universal and enduring” and that “it gets involved with particular cultural artifacts only to the extent to which they can be used to exemplify universal categories” (3). More particularly, Adorno addresses Descartes’ requirements that the object be divided into “‘as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution’”; that one conduct one’s thoughts “‘in such an order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, [one] might ascend by little and little . . . to the knowledge of the more complex’”; and that “‘one should in every case institute such exhaustive enumerations and such general surveys’ that one ‘is sure of leaving nothing out’” (Descartes quoted in Adorno 14–15). Descartes’ rules of method are designed to guarantee thought’s arrival at certainty. Against this background, “[i]t is not so much that the essay neglects indubitable certainty as that it abrogates it as an ideal” (Adorno 13). The essay’s abrogation of the requirement that objects be divided into as many parts as necessary is grounded in a reluctance to reify as elementary the categories with which conceptual schema attempt to comprehend their objects. The essay refuses, in other words, to accept as a priori the categories with which thought carves up the world. Similarly, the essay dismisses the rule of proceeding from simplest to more complex in the awareness that the world is more complex than the conceptual systems which attempt to comprehend it. Finally, according to Adorno, the essay abandons the goal of exhaustive enumerations on the grounds that such a survey “would be possible only it if were established in advance that the object to be dealt with was fully grasped by the concepts used to treat it” (15): in short, that the concepts applied anticipated all features of the object with nothing left out. Adorno’s conception of the essay as immanent critique of intellectual constructions is thus built around the observation that it uncovers the discursive conditions of possibility of those intellectual constructions: namely, the relation between conceptual categories and the objects they engage. In disclosing and holding these categories at arm’s length, the essay keeps in the foreground the contingency of the practices by which intellectual constructions are shaped in the first place. The essay, therefore, has built into its discursive operation a sense of its own contingency as well as the contingency of the objects it engages.

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One way to read the postmodern critique of philosophical modernism is as a recognition of subject-centered reason’s inability to recognize its own contingency. This inability is famously characterized in Foucault’s account of Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas in The Order of Things (3–16). Failure to recognize one’s own contingency is also the theme of Derrida’s insistence, to take one example, that solitary mental life in Husserl’s phenomenology does not exhibit the self-sufficiency of self-presence but is, in fact, inscribed with a structure of difference (Speech and Phenomena 60–9). Read in this light, Adorno’s appropriation of the essay as immanent critique of intellectual constructions belongs to those engagements with the philosophical discourse of Modernity that attempt to think the very horizon of subject-centered reason. In its anticipation of a number of features of Adorno’s invocation of the essay against the universalizing tendencies of subject-centered reason, Musil’s own Essayismus also belongs to critiques of subject-centered reason that make up the most recent chapters of the philosophical discourse of Modernity or its abandonment. It is the textuality of the subject and the functional understanding of cognitive objects instituted by Essayismus which configure that discursive practice as an on-going remembrance of the contingency of both the subject and its objects of knowledge. Whether understood as “intertwining engagement” between subject and object in Montaigne, “reciprocal interaction” in Adorno, or “functional relations” in Musil, Essayismus effects a reconfiguration of subject–object relations that obviates the “subjugating subjectivity” occasioned by the Cartesian subject at the center of subject-centered reason. Essayismus manages this break by continually embracing the contingency of both the subject and its understanding of the world. It is very likely that the term “postmodern” harbors even more ambiguities than does the term “modern,” beginning with the relation to the modern signaled by “post.” At least two senses of “post” can be observed at work in the term “postmodern”: 1) as what follows the modern, therefore its developmental continuation; and 2) as what tries to overcome the modern, therefore its supercession. Habermas contends in a precursor essay to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that Modernity took shape as the separation of the spheres of culture and specialization of the forms of rationality inherent to each: namely, cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic (“Modernity vs. Postmodernity” 9). The project of the Enlightenment became the pursuit of research in each of these spheres according to their internal logics and the application of that research to society for a more rationalized lifeworld (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 9). The trajectory of this project, however, stalled at the specialization of the spheres of culture, failing to connect the results of research with everyday life. Habermas contends, therefore, that “a reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interactions of the

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cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements” (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 11). This is the goal of his effort to complete the project of the Enlightenment in the form of a critique of instrumental reason (identified as the culmination of subject-centered reason) which prevents the interaction of the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic spheres. Habermas’ effort to supplant instrumental reason with a more intersubjective reason recovered from paths not taken within the philosophical discourse of Modernity therefore represents a kind of developmental continuation of Modernity: in essence, another cycle of the dialectic of enlightenment. Paradoxically, and in an admittedly extended sense, Habermas’ effort to rectify the hegemony of instrumental reason by reworking the dialectic of enlightenment fits the description of the postmodern in sense 1: that is, as a developmental continuation of Modernity. It is on this ground, for example, that he is frequently accused of perpetuating the universalizing tendencies Modernity.7 The version of the postmodern oriented toward the supercession of the modern can be understood to have taken one of two general forms, represented on the one hand by Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogical attempts to step outside modern philosophy by working back to a point before the classical episte¯me¯ takes hold. The other is exemplified by Heidegger’s and Derrida’s efforts to destabilize modern philosophy from the inside, through the destruction or deconstruction of metaphysics. Collectively, they typify the postmodern in the second sense: the supercession of Modernity. We can continue articulating Musil’s participation in the philosophical discourse of Modernity by triangulating the location of his Essayismus in relation to the navigational points Habermas, Foucault and Derrida represent. I certainly do not propose that Musil holds anything like a solution to the problems of Modernity and Postmodernity. But reading Musil against the background of some general features of now canonical versions of the postmodern helps us re-imagine the contours of that landscape. Like Habermas, Musil conceives the problems of Modernity in terms of the separation of domains of culture and the ascendancy of a problematically reified instrumental reason. In “The German as Symptom” he characterizes the age as one dominated by facts: “Put positively, our time’s lack of faith means: The age believes only in facts. Its conception of reality recognizes only what is, as it were, really real” (PS 176; GW 2:1382). This conjuncture comes at the end of a sequence of intellectual historical events recognizable as the Enlightenment’s “disenchantment of the world”8 which culminates in the hegemony of instrumental reason understood as positivism: “First, there was a time that believed in God simply and unequivocally. Then came a time that had to demonstrate God’s existence through reason. Then a time that was content as long as reason was unable to disprove God’s existence. And finally our own, which would

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believe in God only if it could encounter him regularly in a laboratory” (PS 176; GW 2:1382). This “philosophy of facts,” which Musil regards as the “unofficial ideology” of the age, corresponds in a number of ways to the instrumental reason attacked by Habermas — most importantly in its inability to facilitate the integration of cognitive, moral, and aesthetic spheres of culture. Thus Musil is similarly critical of positivistic rationality’s inability to embrace anything beyond the world of natural phenomena: Partly out of itself, partly because of the aftereffect of Classical resistance, and partly for reasons to be discussed later, the new way of thinking signified by the catchword “philosophy of facts” has, up to now, proved unfruitful in the sphere of the philosophy of life. Our poets, artists, and philosophical pathetics feel alienated from it, and look past it as they look backwards . . . The exemplary synthesis is missing. But how, in the midst of such confusions, should the perspective of scientific thought and practical life be raised to the sphere of observation of life? (PS 180; GW; 1386) If the philosophy of facts is the unofficial ideology of the age, despite its inability to rise to an “observation of life” in the form of an integration of science, morality, and art, Musil’s solution is not simply to catapult one’s self backward out of the present. First of all, Musil is critical of the “opponents of facts” who “deny facts and call that thinking” as well as those “who blame our rationality and desire to be less rational” (PS 184; GW 2:1391). Moreover, Musil insists that “If I want to have a worldview, then I must view the world. That is, I must establish the facts” (PS 155; GW 2:1359). Conversely, he rejects those diagnoses of the present which “pour out an ocean of complaints about our soullessness, about our mechanization, our calculatedness, our irreligion” explaining that their “remedy is nearly always sought regressively in turning away from the present” (PS 176; GW 2:1382). It is at the end of “The German as Symptom,” in which Musil discusses the inability of “the philosophy of facts” to give rise to a philosophy of life, that he gives the fullest account of the Other Condition as a disposition “fundamentally opposed to rationalizing, calculating, goal-oriented activity, estimating, pressure, craving, base anxiety” (PS 185; GW 1392). And as we have already seen, the Other Condition is Musil’s terms for the experience of a textual subjectivity instituted via Essayismus. Essayismus is, in other words, Musil’s discursive strategy of de-reification (Entdinglichung). But it does not come, as with Habermas, as a developmental continuation of the dialectic of enlightenment (even though it properly belongs to the project of Modernity).

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Instead of working back through the philosophical discourse of Modernity to recover paths of intersubjective reason not taken, and then working those forward as a counterfactual completion of the project of Enlightenment, Musil’s strategy is to situate himself, as it were, in the space between the advent of Modernity and the point at which the Cartesian rules of method become institutionalized into what becomes the philosophical discourse of Modernity. Musil’s Essayismus aligns itself with the project of creating normativity out of one’s own self/moment, while its “antimethod” holds itself at a discursive moment antecedent to the institutionalization of the Cartesian rules, which eventually give rise in the course of the Enlightenment to the hegemony of instrumental reason. Musil’s position relative to the other version of postmodernism (that of supercession) is equally illuminating. The textual subjectivity instituted by Essayismus bears close resemblance to the textuality of poststructuralism, such as that captured by Derridean différance or that described in Roland Barthes’ seminal essay “From Work to Text.” For Musil, the textuality of both subject and object is occasioned by Essayismus by virtue of the functional understanding Essayismus is designed to engender. Musil’s concept of functional understanding exists as an analogue to the concept of textuality that emerges amid the network of phonic or graphic difference in Sassurean semiotics from which poststructural textuality descends.9 In other words, Musilian Essayismus exhibits a distinct though perhaps parallel genealogy to that of poststructuralism. One way to conceptualize that divergence is to see Musil as offering an alternative to the path of following différance all the way down to the bottom of Being. In this sense, Essayismus does not seek to supercede modern philosophy by dialectically working through the aporias of the Western philosophical tradition (its logocentrism, for example) in the manner of deconstruction. Whether or not différance escapes logocentrism by not being a concept (signified), because it is discovered as the condition of possibility of everything including concepts as well as Being itself, it operates with something like transcendental status.10 (It is, for example, on the basis of the transcendental status of archewriting that Habermas, rightly or wrongly, regards deconstruction as an Ursprungsphilosophie (PDM 181).) In its abrogation of the ideal of indubitable certainty — that is, by refusing to participate in the privileging of the universal over the particular by which modern philosophy strives for that ideal — Essayismus harbors nothing like the aspirations of a first philosophy, contenting itself in offering only “partial solutions” (partikuläre Lösungen).11 In its movement to a moment antecedent to the institution of the Cartesian method, Musilian Essayismus does have something of the temporal structure of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s genealogy. However, the nature of its incorporation of elements of scientific reason complicates

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110 Robert Musil and the nonmodern that description. On the one hand, it is the precision afforded by a functional understanding that keeps Musil aligned with the critical spirit of Modernity. The technical means to that precision (in essence, functional relation) are appropriated, moreover, from the evolved form of Enlightenment reason itself, namely positivism, even if they are detached from the goal of certainty to which they were originally oriented. On the other hand, the overall tendency of Musil’s work is toward alternatives to the hegemony of the ratioïd that is closely associated with positivism. Essayismus, therefore, is best understood as neither “science” nor “antiscience” but as a de-reification of the discursive boundaries of these domains. Habermas’ well-known charge that Foucault’s critique of the classical episte¯me¯ entails a performative paradox revolves around the claim that Foucault maintains something of the methods of classical episte¯me¯ while seeking to escape it, noting that “Genealogical historiography can only take over the role of a critique of reason qua antiscience if it escapes from the horizon of just those historically oriented sciences of men whose hollow humanism Foucault wants to unmask in his theory of power” (PDM 249). Given Habermas’ commitment to completing the project of the Enlightenment, he is, of course, eager to specify the precise location of that horizon and guard against its transgression. (The whole of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity can be read, in fact, as a defense against just such border incursions.) Similarly, it is pretty clear that Foucauldean genealogy also needs that boundary in order to imagine its outside. Musil’s engagement with the problems of Modernity does not involved this spirit of containment/escape, shared alike by Frankfurt Critical Theory and versions of French poststructuralism. It involves, rather, a complex, simultaneously historical and methodological dereification of the border between science (subject-centered reason) and its possible alternatives. Essayismus is precisely the discursive effort to imagine and occupy the space that is opened by the dereification of science and its others: therefore, once again, Musil en marge. It constitutes itself as an alternative configuration of discursive modalities to those of modernism and postmodernism by reimagining the moment of Modernity not as the transcendence of reason over its other, nor as the return of that repressed other, but without Modernity’s own self-privilegings — that is, without the reifications on which Modernity grounded itself. The pattern of this reimagining is neither properly “modern,” “antimodern,” nor “postmodern.” As I have tried to show, Musil’s intervention in the cultural project of Modernity aggressively avoids the certainty, method, and universality characteristic of modern philosophy from Descartes at least until the time of Nietzsche. Additionally, if, as on Melehy’s reading, Montaigne’s essays mark an inaugural gesture of Modernity, then Musil is not exactly “modern” in this sense. For unlike

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Montaigne, Musil had to face the proximal end of the philosophical discourse of Modernity that begins only with Descartes’ attempts to close the openings Montaigne made available by essayism. That is, Musil had to overcome the philosophy of the subject in a way Montaigne did not. On the other hand, Musil’s response does not involve turning away from the philosophy of facts that make up an important part of modern philosophy’s genome. Because it seeks a discursive strategy for adopting a degree of precision in a domain not ordinarily susceptible to systematic ordering, Musilian Essayismus is, therefore, not exactly a version of antimodernism either. Nor, yet, does it quite conform to either a strategy of developmental continuation or that of supercession associated with the term “postmodern.” These features are better captured by the notion of the nonmodern — a refusal to perpetuate the aporias of Modernity by replicating the intellectual practices that gave rise to them and set off the dialectic of enlightenment.

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5

Toward a nonmodern avant-garde

Reading Musil alongside Nietzsche illuminated details of his complex relation to the discursive practices of Modernity. As with Nietzsche, Musil’s equivocal relation to Modernity involves a commitment to scientific rationality combined with a clear sense of its limitations and dangers. Reading Musil alongside Heidegger’s phenomenology revealed the way Essayismus destabilizes (dereifies) conventional discourses in order to disclose a mode of existence that has become concealed in the experience of everyday life. These Nietzschean and Heideggerian moments constitute efforts to engage philosophical problems of Modernity from a position at the margin of philosophy itself. As discussed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, Musil’s Essayismus represents an alternative to the intellectual practices that make up the dialectic of enlightenment. One feature common across these efforts is the strategy of dereifying the kinds of distinctions on which Modernity grounded itself, such as those between subject and object, reason and unreason, science and art. A different challenge to the philosophical discourse of Modernity, one with a long pedigree, has been the appeal to the aesthetic as either a realm of more authentic experience or a path to a superior set of meanings and values. Beginning with early German Romanticism, the experience of art has been offered as an alternative to the particular forms of rationality (namely, instrumental reason) that have been increasingly institutionalized in social space in the course of an unfolding Modernity. In this chapter I want to examine the way Musil’s Essayismus bears on these appeals to the aesthetic as a challenge to instrumental reason by working out his relation to both modern and postmodern versions of the avant-garde. Musil’s turn toward fiction as the means for inquiring into and experimenting with possible ethical orientations places him in the company of those who appeal to the aesthetic against the rational tendencies of Modernity. And yet, his entertainment of this possibility bears the complexity and subtlety of something between conventional versions of the modern and the postmodern. As I have been arguing, the fulcrum of Musil’s intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity is his theory and praxis of Essayismus. Broadly speaking, Essayismus is Musil’s discursive alternative to the intellectual practices that make up the philosophical discourse of Modernity. It functions in The Man Without Qualities as an alternative simultaneously to the modern avant-garde insistence on the sublation

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114 Robert Musil and the nonmodern of art as well as to the postmodern avant-garde insistence on the need to maintain the autonomy of challenges to reigning ideologies. In successfully distancing itself from these features of appeals to the aesthetic, however, Essayismus is still capable of carrying out a critical engagement with a problematic life praxis of the modern lifeworld. In this way, Musil’s Essayismus obviates an impasse that debilitates both the modern and postmodern avant-gardes. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) Horkheimer and Adorno broadly characterize the trajectory of enlightenment as “the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy” (3). What originated as an attempt to liberate humans through gaining control of nature, however, turned into the horror of the Holocaust, which serves as the dark occasion of their writing: “What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men” (4). Although Horkheimer and Adorno do not use the term, they argue that both myth and science share the same structure of thought that the Frankfurt School later refers to as “instrumental reason.” That structure is found in forms of reason which regard all non-self entities as means for the realization of the subject’s own ends: “Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them. In this way their potentiality is turned toward his own ends” (9). Thus, while “the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty,” “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (3). According to the Frankfurt School interpretation, enlightenment, which began as science’s attempt to control nature, institutionalizes in social space a means-ends rationality. The effort to supervene, counteract, or neutralize instrumental reason has been a significant part of critical accounts of Modernity stretching back at least as far as Nietzsche’s critique of the will to power. Contextualizing Musil’s engagement with the problems of Modernity in his book Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity (2000), Stefan Jonsson points to Ferdinand Tönnies’s historically influential, late nineteenth-century account of the transition of societies from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.1 Tönnies’s distinction between “community” and “society,” Jonsson points out, rests upon the prior distinction between “natural will” (Wesenwille) and “rational will” (Kürwille) (24). Tönnies differentiates between Kürwille and Wesenwille on the basis that the former, associated with abstract thinking, allows the subject to determine the object of his or her will: “The person’s volition is thereby turned into an instrument, subordinated to the power of reason, and calculated to realize rationally determined ends” (25). In becoming organized by

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Kürwille, Gemeinschaft becomes Gesellschaft; that is, it turns into a condition of society dominated by instrumental reason: “people pursue their own happiness and treat their fellow beings as means to their individualistic ends” (Jonsson 23). The movement from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft signals the supervention of instrumental reason in the process that Georg Lukács terms “reification.”2 As explained by Jonsson, “Reification involves the disconnection of individuals and social functions from the traditions in which they previously were embedded; they are reduced to isolated parts and reorganized in accordance with rational principles” (31). In the Gesellschaft, the rational principles according to which individuals and social functions are reorganized are, therefore, those of instrumental reason — that is, individual and social functions are reorganized according to the logic of performativity, to increase productivity. Jonsson’s larger argument is that Modernity’s institutionalization of instrumental reason elicited aestheticism as an assertion of an authentic self against the realization in social space of a version of the self inauthentically connected to its essential being. Citing the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness, Jonsson points to the tension between a self’s authentic essence and a falsely reified version of itself: The cause of this contradiction is the process of reification and the division of labor. In order to realize himself as free and independent, the individual must objectify his qualities. The bourgeois, for instance, must assume a certain profession, a role that has no internal relation to the rest of his being . . . If social existence is [thus] deprived of meaning, “private” existence must now be warded as a reservoir of emotions and non-instrumental behavior. (32–3) The process of reification that Lukács describes accounts quite nicely for Ulrich’s central conflict in The Man Without Qualities, namely that social existence under the conditions Musil terms Seinesgleichen geschieht involves a split between authentic and inauthentic selves. This difference between authentic and inauthentic Being came to light in the comparison with Heidegger in Chapter 3. One early modernist response to reification of this kind is the assertion and protection of an autonomous sphere of experience not configured by instrumental reason. And one historic strategy for accessing and preserving such an authentic experience against the incursion of instrumental reason is an appeal to the autonomy of aesthetic experience. Peter Bürger contends in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) that it is not until the rise of the bourgeoisie and the advent of philosophical aesthetics that the concept of an autonomous art fully comes into being (42). He points to Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man as an early example

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116 Robert Musil and the nonmodern of the invocation of an autonomous aesthetic experience as a remedy for fragmented existence in the social world. Thus, Schiller assigns to art “no less a task than to put back together the ‘halves’ of man that have been torn asunder — which means that it is within a society already characterized by the division of labor that art is to make possible the development of the totality of human potentialities that the individual cannot develop in his sphere of activity” (45). On this reading, aestheticism — whose central principle is the autonomy of art — therefore begins as a response of distanciation from the supervention of instrumental reason. Bürger explains further that “L’art pour L’art” theory is not simply the reaction to a new means of reproduction . . . but is the answer to the tendency in the fully evolved bourgeois society for works of art to lose their social function . . . The evolution of art as a distinct subsystem that began with l’art pour l’art and was carried to its conclusion in Aestheticism must be seen in connection with the tendency toward the division of labor underway in bourgeois society. (32) Bürger’s point is that despite its intended separation from bourgeois society, art achieves its autonomous status within the historical development of bourgeois society. As an event in that historical process, the autonomy of art provides an ideological cover for reification: “[i]n bourgeois art, the portrayal of bourgeois self-understanding occurs in a sphere that lies outside the praxis of life. The citizen who, in everyday life has been reduced to a partial function (means-ends activity) can be discovered in art as ‘human being’” (48). However, such art is likely to be “affirmative” in Herbert Marcuse’s sense of providing either ideological cover or compensation for the reified subject.3 Grasping the autonomy of art as a historical category reveals, then, that that very autonomy is itself a function of instrumental reason (in essence, the division of labor). The supposed autonomy of aestheticism, therefore, exists neither as a sphere free from instrumental reason nor, for that very reason, as locus from which one could critique instrumental reason. Conversely, because the institution of art is the product of a specific historical process, it does have an essential connection to the social circumstances from which it emerged. Therefore, a critical function for art could potentially be recovered if its autonomy could be overcome. According to Bürger, this is what the historical avant-garde tried to do: Aestheticism had made the distance from the praxis of life the content of works. The praxis of life to which Aestheticism refers and which it negates is the means-ends rationality of the bourgeois

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everyday. Now, it is not the aim of the avant-gardistes to integrate art into this praxis. On the contrary, they assent to the aestheticists’ rejection of the world and its means-ends rationality. What distinguishes them from the latter is the attempt to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art. (49) The distinction Bürger draws between the avant-garde and aestheticism reaches in two directions. First, aestheticism, while insisting on the retreat of art from society, did not concern itself at all with life praxis in any direct way but, rather, sought to locate art in a sphere evacuated of all purposiveness. While the avant-garde shares aestheticism’s suspicion of a life praxis of instrumental reason, instead of abandoning the sphere of purposiveness the avant-gardistes sought to organize an alternative life praxis from a basis in art. According to Bürger, this effort took the form of the sublation of art: “art was not simply to be destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form” (49). The avant-garde effort to sublate art, however, triggers one of aesthetic modernism’s most debilitating aporias: the paradox of autonomy/critical function. Aestheticism started out as a rejection of the instrumental life praxis that dominated bourgeois society. However, as Bürger suggests, aestheticism’s autonomy — its self-distanciation from the lifeworld — renders it ineffectual as an alternative to instrumental reason because that very autonomy looks suspiciously like an instance of the division of labor in bourgeois society — that is, as an instance of instrumental reason. Under the heading of “affirmative culture” Herbert Marcuse sought to describe cultural initiatives and products which affirm a given system of social relations by relieving pressure on it to change, for example in providing compensation for that which is unavailable in everyday social experience.4 Bürger’s point is that strategies of aesthetic autonomy amount to affirmative culture. Recognizing this, the avant-garde sought to obviate the affirmative character of aestheticism by obliterating the difference between art and the lifeworld — that is, reversing or collapsing that distance. However, collapsing the difference between art and life brings its own problems, as Bürger points out. For example, “the (relative) freedom of art vis-à-vis the praxis of life is at the same time the condition that must be fulfilled if there is to be a critical cognition of reality. An art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose its capacity to criticize it, along with its distance” (50). In other words, collapsing the difference between art and life runs the risk of suffusing the art with the life praxis of the lifeworld, thereby eliminating art’s ability to function as a critique of society by way of generating an alternative life praxis. Bürger insists that the avant-garde effort to sublate art was ultimately unsuccessful for precisely this reason, in essence because “the protest

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118 Robert Musil and the nonmodern of the historical avant-garde against art as an institution is accepted as art” (53). He has in mind, for example, Duchamp’s Ready-Mades, originally meant to question the very institution of art, now hanging on the walls of museums and thereby perpetuating that institution by belonging to it. Bürger explains further: “The avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life. This has not occurred, and presumably cannot occur, in bourgeois society unless it be as a false sublation of autonomous art” (54). False sublation refers to the process by which cultural artifacts, instead of challenging dominant life praxes, contribute to their circulation and thereby to their normalization. False sublation is therefore the failed outcome of avant-garde attempts to counteract aesthetic autonomy by destroying the distinction between art and the lifeworld — its cost is the loss of a critical function for art. Bürger himself points to the aporetic character of the autonomy/ sublation paradox as illustrated by the phenomenon of false sublation. For Bürger, false sublation raises the question of “whether the sublation of the autonomy status can be desirable at all, whether the distance between art and the praxis of life is not requisite for that free space within which alternatives to what exists become conceivable” (54). He concludes: “Only an art the contents of whose individual works is wholly distinct from the (bad) praxis of the existing society can be the center that can be the starting point for the organization of a new life praxis” (49–50). Bürger’s now classic account of the historical avant-garde is of course challengeable on a number of points, but it nevertheless brings to light some basic features — and problems — of the appeal to the aesthetic as an alternative to versions of reason institutionalized by an unfolding Modernity. The false sublation and the aporia of autonomy/sublation that come to light in Bürger’s account should be recognized as instances of what Bruno Latour has characterized as the privileging of “purification” in the modern intellectual constitution (Never Been Modern 13). Purification, it will be recalled, creates new entities by isolating them from an otherwise undifferentiated world. The other component of the modern intellectual constitution, “mediation,” creates networks of humans and nonhumans interlacing their interests and interactions. Latour’s analysis of the intellectual practices of modern science illuminates the aporia of autonomy/sublation in the following way: in the context of the avantgarde effort to sublate art, the insistence on autonomy as creating a requisite critical distance corresponds to the practice of purification (in which an autonomous art becomes a new entity) while the effort at sublation is an instance of mediation (in essence, the integration of previously differentiated spheres of art and lifeworld). The larger point of Latour’s account of scientific modernism is that while both purification and mediation are necessary to the programme of modern science, the practices

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must remain separated to remain effective. The historical avant-garde ran aground on precisely this obstacle when it sought a cognition of society purified of instrumental reason yet one still capable of bearing directly on the lived experience of the lifeworld. The false sublation which signals the failure of the avant-garde is thus recognizable as a symptom of the modernist tendency of separating purification and mediation. While Latour’s fear is that disconnecting purification from mediation gives rise to “monsters” science cannot control, falsely sublated art also takes on the character of hybrid monsters. That is, the hoped-for alternative life praxis to arise in an autonomous art combines with the lifeworld in an unpredictable and uncontrollable way, most dangerously in the case of co-optation in which previously counter-hegemonic artifacts serve to reinforce a hegemonic life praxis: in essence, affirmative culture. The result is a hybrid art object in the service of the life praxis of the lifeworld. In Latour’s terms, it is the perpetuation of modernist purification — the perpetuated distinction between art and society — that, on Bürger’s assessment, makes the avant-garde effort to reintegrate art into the life process a “profoundly contradictory endeavor” (50). It might be objected that since, as Bürger suggests, the historical avantgarde has exhausted itself, the aporia of autonomy/sublation belongs to an antiquated moment in the struggle against Modernity. Jean-François Lyotard also references the urgency with which a number of other intellectuals call for the liquidation of the heritage of the avant-gardes (“What is Postmodernism?” 73). And Habermas, too, alludes to the notion that the avant-garde spirit of Modernity has played itself out (“Modernity versus Postmodernity” 5–6). The objection that the aporia of autonomy/sublation has been eliminated with the exhaustion of the avant-garde would be a valid one were it not for the fact that it remains a feature of at least one canonical version of postmodernism as well. Bruno Latour prepares us for this observation when he characterizes postmodernism (not unproblematically) as imagining a “total division between the material and the technological world on the one hand and the linguistic play of speaking subjects on the other” (Never Been Modern 61). Latour’s point is that many versions of postmodernism tend to be skeptical of attempts to bridge the distance between the human and the nonhuman via representational knowledge which purports to provide accurate descriptions of the natural world. This skepticism looks indeed like an instance of purification; that is, an insistence on carving up the world into distinct ontological zones. There is a sense, then, that the practice of purification undergirds the historical avant-garde’s distinction between a corrupt lifeworld and an autonomous aesthetic experience, and, consequently, is what gives rise to the aporia of autonomy/sublation in the first place.

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The perpetuation of modernist purification in the postmodern that Latour alludes to also gives rise to the aporia of autonomy/sublation within at least one influential version of the postmodern avant-garde. Whereas Bürger associates the historical avant-garde with “modern” art, Lyotard extends the spirit and programme of the avant-garde beyond the modern to include instances of the postmodern. For Lyotard, the idea of the avant-garde refers most generally to the repudiation of realism in art. Realism, for Lyotard, operates essentially conservatively in stabilizing both objects and modes of perception in ways that correspond with dominant political structures (The Inhuman 119–20). On this basis, Lyotard locates realism within the aesthetic of the beautiful, whose central concept, taste, testifies to consensus. The avant-garde, conversely, inhabits the aesthetic of the sublime, whose drive is experimental: the search for new means with which to present the unpresentable. For Lyotard, the aesthetic of the sublime is engaged in the project of testifying to the fact that there are ideas which can be conceived but for which no adequate presentation is possible. Within the aesthetic of the sublime Lyotard distinguishes two moments. He uses the term “modern” to refer to “art which devotes its ‘little technical expertise’ . . . to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible” (“What is Postmodernism?” 78). The specifically modern avant-garde is characterized by a nostalgia which “allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents: . . . the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure” (“What is Postmodernism?” 81). Conversely, the postmodern avant-garde is that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (“What is Postmodernism?” 81) The distinction between modern and postmodern avant-garde, then, turns on the question of form versus matter, in which the modern avant-garde preserves recognizable form in order to maintain a community of viewers whereas the postmodern avant-garde is willing to abandon established ways of viewing in order to access and explore possibilities limited by them.5 Viewed in the wake of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard’s pronouncements on the postmodern avant-garde carry a political inflection.

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Although best known for the simplified definition of the postmodern found in the introduction (“incredulity toward metanarratives”), the larger argument of The Postmodern Condition documents Lyotard’s anxiety toward the supervention of instrumental reason in postindustrial societies, namely that in the absence of metanarratives of Socialism and Idealism, the legitimation of scientific knowledge takes place according to a political criterion: “The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today’s financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power” (46). Within this postmodern political context the goal of the avant-garde “to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented” must be understood as including the generation of political, scientific, or normative ideas not conceivable under prevailing ideological or discursive conditions. The aporia of autonomy/sublation persists in Lyotard’s postmodern avant-garde in terms of an insistence on the autonomy of political alternatives as well as their simultaneous bearing on the lifeworld. Lyotard observes that within the cultural tendency characterized as the exhaustion of the avant-garde, “there is a call for order, a desire for unity, for identity, for security, or popularity (in the sense of Öffentlichkeit, of finding a public). Artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community” (“What is Postmodernism?” 73). It is a call to reconcile the split between artistic experimentation and the lifeworld, a kind of sublation whose impetus, however, comes from the side of the lifeworld. It is this kind of unification, of course, which Lyotard finds most threatening in, for example, Habermas’ call for the completion of the project of Modernity by integrating cognitive, moral, and aesthetic reason.6 At the same time, however, Lyotard is clearly invested in maintaining a distance/distinction between hegemonic life praxis of instrumental reason/ performativity and conceivable alternatives. Lyotard’s fear is that the life praxis of performativity, according to whose pragmatics statements about the true, the good, and the beautiful are legitimated in the postmodern condition, threatens to obliterate differences by evaluating statements according to a single criterion (namely, utility or instrumentality). Lyotard uses the term le différend to name the situation in which one is divested of the means of representing one’s own experience (The Differend 13). As such, Lyotard’s insistence on le différend amounts to an insistence on a possible autonomy. Bearing witness to le différend against the hegemony of instrumental reason amounts to an insistence on the autonomy of the alternative; that is, an insistence on the necessity of guarding the alternative against something like false sublation. This autonomy is also implied in his famous thesis in The Postmodern Condition regarding the

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incommensurability of different language games: that moves made in one language game cannot be judged according to the rules of another because their relevant criteria are different.7 Understood in the political context of The Postmodern Condition, the business of the avant-garde (inventing allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented) takes the shape of inventing alternative life praxes not presentable (defensible) under the hegemonic conditions of instrumental reason (performativity). Bearing witness to le différend against the hegemony of instrumental reason amounts to an insistence on the autonomy of the alternative — the necessity of guarding the alternative against sublation within the hegemonic life praxis of instrumental reason.8 And yet despite an insistence on protecting the autonomy of counterhegemonic initiatives, what is at stake in the postmodern avant-garde for Lyotard is the possibility of an alternative cognition of society brought to bear on an existing one. This emphasis is most clearly visible in his linking of painting and political representation (the latter in the sense of the graphic representation of political structures). Lyotard points out that painting originally gained its legitimacy as a fine art in the fourteenth century with the development of perspective, which effected a correspondence between the organization of pictorial images and the organization of political communities, the vanishing-point perspective corresponding to the gaze of the monarch, for example (“Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable” 119–20). Painting lost this political function with the advent of amateur photography, in the wake of which, according to Lyotard, what is at stake in the avant-garde is the question, “What is painting?” The question about the rules of formation of pictorial images remains a question that bears on the rules of formation of political communities. The sublation half of the aporia of autonomy/sublation thus shows up in Lyotard’s postmodern avant-garde in a way which corresponds with Bürger’s modern avant-garde: the attempt to organize a new praxis of life from a basis in art. Despite its “post” prefix, Lyotard’s postmodern avant-garde thus exhibits the same defects observable in the historical avant-garde, namely its entanglement with the aporia of autonomy/sublation. Whereas insistence on le différend amounts to a gesture of autonomy, the political context of Lyotard’s work implies a surreptitious mediation between the autonomous alternative and its hegemonic other. Lyotard’s postmodern avant-garde perpetuates modernist purification. Bruno Latour’s characterization of the modern constitution, and its perpetuation in versions of the postmodern, suggests that a rapprochement of the appeal to autonomy (aesthetic or otherwise) as a move within the philosophical discourse of Modernity will have to avoid the aporia of autonomy/sublation. One way to obviate that problem is to de-privilege — or abandon altogether — the practice of purification. We

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might look, then, for challenges to the intellectual practices of Modernity which avoid replicating modernist purifications that give rise to or are deeply grounded in such distinctions as subject/object, art/society, autonomy/sublation, aesthetic/instrumental reason. The narrative praxis of Essayismus articulated in Musil’s essays and put into experimental operation in The Man Without Qualities suggests what such an alternative discursive strategy might look like. The novel not only addresses the possibility of strategic discursive alternatives to instrumental reason: it experiments with a number of such possibilities. Closely connected to the sense of “assay” or attempt from which it derives, the genre of the essay is frequently embraced as an experimental form of writing, and this is no less the case with Musil’s essays, nor with his essayistic fiction. The experimental character of Essayismus carries over into The Man Without Qualities thematically, structurally, and performatively. In The Void of Ethics, for example, Patrizia McBride argues that Musil’s novel in not merely experimental in the sense of inventing and exploring new techniques of narration but that The Man Without Qualities is operationally experimental in the more significant sense that Musil designs and carries out experiments related to the possibility of connecting an aesthetic world of values with an ordinary realm of daily experience. Following McBride’s lead, I want now to suggest that those experiments involve testing the viability of strategies of autonomy and sublation as strategic alternatives to a life praxis of instrumental reason. The novel’s engagement with strategies of autonomy and sublation as a challenge to instrumental reason is thematized in the novel first of all in terms of a range of appeals to some alternative realm of experience as a challenge or counterbalance to instrumental reason. The conceptual laboratory Musil constructs to conduct these experiments is, of course, a fictionalized Vienna 1913. In “The German as Symptom” Musil describes the intellectual climate of that moment as an “Age of Facts” whose lack of faith means that people only believe in what is “really real” and which has given rise to an unofficial ideology that is “narrowly focused and goaloriented”: in other words, a pervading ideology of instrumental reason (PS 185; GW 2:1392). Within this instrumentally-charged atmospheric chamber the principal characters are arrayed as a spectrum of strategies for challenging that pervading ideology. Ulrich’s childhood friend, Walter, serves as a figure of an expressivist who literally divests himself of the bourgeois world after returning home from meaningless bureaucratic work by changing into more suitable clothes and withdrawing into ecstatic piano playing, which is ironically described as hyperbolically transcendent: “The millions sank . . . awestruck in the dust, hostile boundaries shattered, the gospel of world harmony reconciled and unified the sundered; they had unlearned walking and talking and were about to fly off, dancing, into the air” (MWQ

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45; GW 1:48). Walter’s antipathy toward instrumental reason is explicitly formulated in the novel when he lectures Ulrich: You’re right when you say there’s nothing serious, rational, or even intelligible left; but why can’t you see that it is precisely this growing rationality, infecting everything like a disease, that is to blame? Everyone’s brain is seized with this craving to become more and more rational, to rationalize and compartmentalize life more than ever, but unable to imagine what’s to become of us when we know everything and have it all analyzed, classified, mechanized, standardized. (MWQ 235; GW 1:218–19) Walter insists that the only remedy is “to withdraw completely” (MWQ 234; GW 1:218), and so he functions in the novel as a figure of aesthetic autonomy — a retreat from the social world into a realm of art meant to “safeguard his spiritual integrity” (MWQ 49; GW 1:51). The fragmentation he fears is dramatized in Ulrich: it is Walter who diagnoses Ulrich as “a man without qualities” (MWQ 62; GW 1:64) . Against Walter’s example of aesthetic distanciation (autonomy), two other principle characters in the novel, Diotima and Arnheim, represent cultural strategies of sublation: naïve sublation in the case of Diotima and what Bürger terms false sublation in the case of Arnheim. As the doyenne of the salon hosting the Parallel Campaign, whose goal it is to inject Hapsburg society with some missing principle, meaning, or value around which it can unify and solidify itself, Diotima espouses a vague idealism aimed at remedying the fact that “The soul has gone out of society these days” (MWQ 111; GW 1:107). Her proposed remedy amounts to bringing “ideas for the very first time into the domains of power (MWQ 113; GW 1:109). She insists to Ulrich that the Parallel Campaign must seize “a unique, never-to-recur opportunity to bring into existence what must be regarded as the greatest and most important thing in the world” (MWQ 95; GW 1:93). Although Diotima’s hope to reorient Hapsburg culture does not revolve around an explicit invocation of art as the source of alternative life praxis, it does appeal to a vague realm of alternative values, and part of the point of her appeal is its remoteness from ordinary experience. Thus, when Ulrich asks whether Diotima has something specific in mind when she talks about the “the greatest and most important thing in the world,” the narrator ironically interjects that “No one who speaks of the greatest and most important thing in the world means anything that really exists” (MWQ 95; GW 1:94). This characterization of Diotima’s appeal as to nothing that “really exists” brings into focus the opposition at work in her thinking between a world of social reality and some other realm from which alternative

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values could be drawn. Diotima’s inability to supply any specific content for this alternative value effectively cancels the possibility of collapsing (sublating) the distance between that alternative realm and ordinary experience. On a larger scale, the failure of the Parallel Campaign to agree on a principle around which to unify the Austro-Hungarian empire attests to the difficulty of sublation. Arnheim, who is introduced as the “union of soul and economics,” represents a more sinister (instrumental) conflation of intellectual and social worlds. He is “notorious for quoting poets at board meetings, and for insisting that the economy could not be separated from other human activities and could be dealt with only within the larger context of all vital problems, national, intellectual, and even spiritual” (MWQ 205; GW 1:192). Despite Arnheim’s unconventional talk of integrating business transactions with the mysteries of the soul, his colleagues find his intellectualism useful as ideological cover because “the world being what it is, with its ingrained prejudice against a life dedicated primarily to its own self-interest,” “only criminals dare to harm others without philosophy” (MWQ 206; GW 1:192–3). And when Arnheim’s interests in the Parallel Campaign eventually emerge as the desire to possess Galician oil fields, his intellectual veneer is peeled back to reveal a fundamentally instrumental modus operandi. Graf Leinsdorf is another character positioned within the novel’s primary concern with alternatives to the ruling cultural logic. Although an aristocrat, Leinsdorf recognizes the ascendency of the bourgeoisie, including its pragmatic instrumental reason. He thus “realized the prime importance of establishing a connection between the eternal verities and the world of business” (MWQ 102; GW 1:99) and did not “at all object to the political or economic influence of the middle class” (MWQ 917; GW 1:844). Leinsdorf, however, wavers between capital and culture. On the one hand he could not imagine “any conceivable way to run a modern, large scale landed estate rationally without the stock exchange and industry” (MWQ 101; GW 1:99). On the other, he descries that there is “too much finance in modern life,” and insists that the antidote to such an overabundance of instrumental reason is supposed to be culture, but that “culture has not been pulling its weight alongside capital” (MWQ 919; GW 1:846). By “culture” Leinsdorf means traditional culture, the culture of the aristocracy. A complex figure, Leinsdorf’s position between capital and culture is one of what might be termed “historic” sublation in the sense that he struggles to re-negotiate the very last remnants of feudal culture with an expanding capitalist ethos he regards as a necessary though not yet adequately controlled evil. Leinsdorf’s encounter with the problem of an instrumental life praxis and possible alternatives to be brought to bear on it cuts in a slightly different direction than those of the other characters, but it involves a similar problem of how to negotiate dominant and

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alternative sources of orientation, and therefore remains entangled in the contradictions of sublation. Beyond arraying characters who embody various strategies of autonomy and sublation, The Man Without Qualities performatively engages the difficulties these strategies represent. McBride has characterized the structure of The Man Without Qualities as consisting of two experiments designed to test possibilities for creating a bridge between an ordinary experience devoid of higher meaning and purpose and an ethically charged Other Condition associated with aesthetic experience that is not susceptible to conceptual apprehension (McBride 128–9). In other words, The Man Without Qualities can be read as staging a range of negotiations between an aesthetic sphere of alternative ethical experience and a social sphere in need of reorientation. On McBride’s reading, “the first book recounts the endeavor of raising the Other Condition to the level of ordinary experience, while the second focuses on the attempt to plunge ordinary experience into the Other Condition” (129). Raising the Other Condition to the level of ordinary experience amounts to expanding an aesthetic experience to inform — in fact to subsume — daily life, while plunging ordinary experience into the Other Condition means living daily life in a wholly transformed manner. I want to propose that Ulrich’s attempts to negotiate an ethical Other Condition with ordinary experience are structured as attempts first at sublation, then autonomy. Although both attempts fail, according to McBride they carry a positive valence which points to a third, incompletely articulated possibility. By closely examining the shapes of these two attempts we can situate ourselves to read past their demonstrated limitations. Ulrich’s first attempt to bridge ordinary experience and the Other Condition takes the form of trying to live “hypothetically” — as a character in a book. In the middle of taking a leave of absence from his life in order to search for an answer to the question of the right way to live, Ulrich is confronted by his cousin, Diotima, who faces the dilemma of remaining faithful to her husband or pursuing a more spiritually charged relationship with Arnheim: “Should a woman in Diotima’s difficult position make a gesture of renunciation, or let herself be swept into adultery, or take a third, mixed course, such as belonging physically to one man and spiritually to another, or perhaps physically to neither? (MWQ 623; GW 1:571). When Diotima asks him what a woman is to do “in real life,” Ulrich recommends that she “Let things happen”: that they should live “as if they were characters in a novel who have met in the pages of a book. Let’s in any case leave off all the fatty tissue that plumps up reality” (MWQ 625; GW 1:573). Ulrich’s recommendation constitutes a strategy of sublation, but not simply because it draws on fiction for orienting life. His recommendation to collapse the difference between life and art has a deeper metaphysical

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basis and existential resonance having to do with the complexity of human experience relative to the simplicity of conventional morality. Ulrich points out that humans make sense of reality with the use of concepts, which are fundamentally reductive with respect to the particularity of experience. There is always, therefore, a tension between what similar things have in common and what makes them individual: “Everything partakes of the universal and also has something special all its own. Everything is both true to type and refuses to conform to type and is in a category all its own, simultaneously” (MWQ 624; GW 1:572). This tension means, for Ulrich, that conventional morality never precisely applies to human ethical experience: “Conventional morality is a perfectly valid average and collective value, to be literally adhered to, without deviations, whenever it is acknowledged. But no individual case can be decided on moral grounds alone; morality is irrelevant to it in the precise degree that it shares in the inexhaustible nature of the universe” (MWQ 625; GW 1:572). This is the same limitation Ulrich observed in the case of scientific and legal thought, in fact all systematic thinking, which deals adequately only with that which is repeatedly observable. Ethical experiences, conversely, are too highly particular to reoccur. One option for negotiating the fit between universal principles and particular experience is to complexify morality to correspond with the conditions of a particular case. Paradoxically, however, the applicability of a moral principle is inversely proportional to its universality, so that as one complexifies a principle to fit particular cases, it loses its universality, with the consequence that one would need an infinite number of principles to cover precisely each instance that makes up the “inexhaustible nature of the universe.” Ulrich’s recommendation to live as a character in a book constitutes a strategy of sublation because it collapses the distance between art and life, but in an unexpected way. It is Walter who characterizes the structure of Ulrich’s recommendation as an instance of sublation, insisting that “such a life-as-art, or whatever you’d call it, unimaginable as it is to begin with, would make philosophy and art quite superfluous; it means one thing only, the end of art!” (MWQ 398; GW 1:). It does not, as is typical of the avant-garde on Bürger’s characterization, seek to derive an alternative life praxis from a basis in art in order to replace the life praxis of the lifeworld. Ulrich explicitly denies this possibility: “Think of the great writers, for instance. We can model our lives on them, but we can’t squeeze life out of them, like wine out of grapes” (MWQ 626; GW 1:574). Ulrich’s recommendation that they live like characters in a book involves simplifying ordinary experience down to its most essential elements, which then become calculable. The strategy of sublation involves drawing from fiction not a life praxis but a model of the structure of experience. When one reads fiction, he tells Diotima:

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You leave out whatever doesn’t suit you. As the author himself had done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams or fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reaching their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. (MWQ 625; GW 1:573) Ulrich’s advice that Diotima “let things happen” amounts to detaching the emotional components of her experience from the conceptual ordering of conventional morality, thereby simplifying that experience down to its essential, highly particular elements — elements that are particular to her experience of the dilemma. This is the sense of Ulrich’s recommendation that they “must try to recover unreality” because “Reality no longer makes sense” (MWQ 627; GW 1:575). Reality makes no sense in so far as conceptually ordered “reality” is a kind of fiction. Decoupled from an artificial ordering, the emotional components that make up the experience are allowed to take on their own equilibrium.9 This is the intended outcome when one “lets things happen.” Ulrich’s advice amounts to a strategy of sublation in that it erases the distinction between art and life on the grounds that both fiction and ethical experience are complexes of particularities that do not admit systematic ordering. Ulrich, however, recognizes toward the end of Part II of the novel that the attempt to collapse this distance is deeply problematic. The failure of sublation lies in the fundamental incommensurability of the two domains. However invested he is in an ethical Other Condition opposed to ordinary experience, Ulrich expresses in his “unmistakable, ruthless passion to influence reality” a commitment to living in the world, albeit coupled with a desire to supply it with a counterfactual ordering. Ulrich regards the human world as composed of two strategies: “Single-mindedness [instrumental reason] is the law of all waking thought and action . . . and it arises from the exigencies of life where only the single-minded control of circumstances can avert disaster. Metaphor, by contrast . . . is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way things relate to each other in the intuitions of art and religion” (MWQ 647; GW 1:593). Single-mindedness and metaphor correspond, respectively, to ordinary experience and the Other Condition. Reflecting on his advice to Diotima that she and he try to recover unreality, Ulrich now asks himself how anyone could “fail to see that the human world is no hovering, insubstantial thing but craves the most concentrated solidity, for fear that anything out of the way might make it go utterly to pieces” (MWQ 645; GW 1:591). Although the highly particularized nature of ethical experience is better approached without the

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reductive logic of conventional morality, the human world depends on solidity and regularity. The two domains, therefore, that Ulrich sought to collapse, are fundamentally incommensurable and cannot be sublated. Abandoning the sublative attempt to connect the Other Condition and ordinary experience, the second experiment of The Man Without Qualities addresses the strategy of autonomy as a challenge to the supervention of instrumental reason that constitutes the principal plot of the philosophical discourse of Modernity. This exploration takes fullest shape in the spiritual union Ulrich seeks with Agathe. Their sibling love is presented as an instance of the Other Condition, which Musil explicitly characterizes in “The German as Symptom” as “fundamentally opposed to rationalizing, calculating, goal-oriented activity, estimating, pressure, craving, base anxiety”: We have a great many accounts of this other condition. What seems to be common to all of them is that the border between the self and nonself is less sharp than usual, that there is a certain inversion of relationships. Whereas ordinarily the self masters the world, in the other condition the world flows into the self, or mingles with it or bears it, and the like (passively instead of actively). (PS 185–6; GW 2:1392) Searching for a way of representing the extra-ordinary quality of Ulrich and Agathe’s experience in this extra-ordinary state of being, Musil appeals to the visual peculiarity of objects lit by moonlight, “the quixotically altered reality of moonlit nights” (MWQ 1179; GW 1:1084). In this state Not only do external relationships melt away and re-form in the whispering enclosures of light and shadow, but the inner relationships, too, move closer together in a new way: the spoken word loses its self-will and acquires a fraternal will. All affirmations express only a single surging experience. The night embraces all contradictions in its shimmering maternal arms, and in its bosom no word is false and no word true, but each is that incomparable birth of the spirit out of darkness that a person experiences in a new thought. In this way, every process on moonlight nights partakes of the nature of the unrepeatable. Of the nature of the intensified. Of the nature of selfless generosity and a stripping away of the self. Every imparting is a parting without envy. Every giving a receiving. Every conception multifariously interwoven in the excitement of the night. To be in this way is the only access to the knowledge of what is unfolding. For in these nights the self holds nothing back; there is no condensation of possession on the

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self’s surface, hardly a memory; the intensified self radiates into an unbounded selflessness. (MWQ 1179; GW 1:1084) As an instance of the Other Condition, Ulrich and Agathe’s sibling love figures as a strategy of autonomy — that is, as an effort to withdraw from a sphere of human society populated by independent subjects seeking to realize their wills through the instrumental use of others. Against this instrumental orientation in the world, the Other Condition effects a “dereification of the I as of the world” which, in reconfiguring subjectobject relations, effectively obliterates their finite boundaries, canceling the instrumentality of subject-centered reason. This challenge to instrumental reason is sought through abandoning the ordinary condition of human society. Ulrich and Agathe’s “other” existence apart from the determinations of space, time and, more crucially, apart from society, is dramatized by the phone call Ulrich makes excusing himself and his sister from the social engagement for which they were preparing when they first encountered the Other Condition, a separation made more complete and sustained because “In the time that followed they withdrew from their circle of acquaintances, astonishing them by turning down every invitation and not allowing themselves to be contacted in any way” (MWQ 1192; GW 1:1095). This separation from social existence is what becomes ultimately problematic about the Other Condition. The experiment with the utopia of the Other Condition fails on the grounds that it isn’t ultimately social enough. Ulrich eventually recognizes that “living in the Millennium” was an “unnatural, bloodless state”: What he was thinking amounted to taking leave of most of his living relationships; he had no illusions about that. For today our lives are divided, and parts are entangled with other people; what we dream has to do with dreaming and also with what other people dream; what we do has sense, but more sense in relation with what others do; and what we believe is tied in with beliefs only a fraction of which are our own. It is therefore quite unrealistic to insist upon acting out of the fullness of one’s own personal reality. Especially for a man like himself, who had been imbued all his life with the thought that one’s beliefs had to be shared, that one must have the courage to live in the midst of moral contradictions, because that was the price of great achievement. (MWQ 950; GW 1:875) McBride points out that although Ulrich’s two attempts fail to build a connection between ordinary experience and the Other Condition,

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those failures carry a positive valence in the sense that they gesture past themselves toward a third possibility for orientation in Modernity (166). In the postscript to her book, McBride sketches just a few features of this third possibility pointed to by the failed experiments in the novel. Musil terms this possibility the utopia of inductive sensibility (die Utopie der induktiven Gesinnung). The strategy Musil names “the utopia of inductive sensibility” is raised in the Studienblatt sections of the Nachlaß, in the section designated as II. R. Fr. 29 in the 1978 Adolf Frisé edition. In summarizing the novel in those notes Musil indicates that: A principal theme for the whole [novel] is, therefore: the juxtaposition of the man of possibilities with reality. This juxtaposition yields three utopias: the utopia of inductive sensibility. The utopia of the other (non-rational, motivated, etc.) life in love . . . The utopia of the pure other condition . . . (my translation; GW 1:1881–2)10 The last two named utopias correspond, respectively, to Musil’s experiments with sublation and autonomy. Later in the Nachlaß he indicates that these are to be resolved in the chapters in which Agathe discovers Ulrich’s diaries, and that what then remains is the utopia of inductive sensibility, which can also be thought of as the utopia of real life, with which the book closes (GW 1:1887).11 Musil also notes that the utopia of inductive sensibility is the most severe (ärgste), and corresponds to a point of view which justifies (completes or backs up) the other two (GW 1:1885). McBride explains that while the inductive sensibility is focused on the importance of individual ethical experience, it is also informed by an awareness that this experience cannot unproblematically guide ordinary life (167). In the end, Musil’s third possibility embraces the recognition that the question of ethical orientation in Modernity “cannot be addressed from a purely ethical standpoint, but that it must become mingled with a host of practical, pragmatic considerations” and be guided by “the hybrid reality of conflicting claims and perspectives of different spheres in the modern world” (167). McBride suggests that a principal feature of the inductive sensibility is the operation of an aesthetic imagination capable of tapping into the emotional substrate Musil recognized as the foundation of genuine ethical experience (168). McBride thus emphasizes the literary as the general discursive modality of Musil’s alternative for addressing the practical and pragmatic considerations of ethical orientation once one abandons the idea of a purely ethical orientation as impossible: “Art, and literature in particular, constantly challenge the status quo by presenting imaginative alternatives to the given. The authority of these unique models . . . derives from art’s ability to intermittently tap

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into the emotional modality of ethics” (167–8). Rather than focusing on the category of the literary, I want to re-direct this investigation toward Essayismus as the underlying discursive strategy of Musil’s inductive sensibility in order to understand how it is able to function as a challenge to the dominant intellectual practices of Modernity while avoiding the aporia of autonomy/sublation. It is of course not clear beyond the notes from the Nachlaß how Musil intended to develop this possibility, particularly the juxtaposition of inductive sensibility with the other two utopias, although it is clear that it was the avenue to be adopted and explored next. I do not mean to presume to know how Musil would have carried out this exploration. It is very likely he did not know himself, given his difficulty in bringing the novel to conclusion. We can, however, take up the exploration of these ideas where Musil left off, benefiting from the work he already accomplished. (I don’t think this is an arrogance given that Musil’s work, rather than supplying answers, invites readers to work through the problems for themselves, along paths he has cleared.) Therefore, I want to read his notes regarding an inductive sensibility against the background of the narrative experiments in The Man Without Qualities and within the context of the historical and postmodern avant-gardes. To be clear: I am not proposing here what, precisely, Musil was working toward. Rather I want to explore possibilities opened up by the notion of an inductive sensibility read against the background of the failed experiments. In its experimentation with autonomy and sublation, The Man Without Qualities illuminates the difficulties with which the historical avantgarde failed to come to terms. The novel’s experiments dramatize the inadequacy of both autonomy and sublation. Those failures suggest that a viable ethical orientation will have to dispense with the sharp distinction between an aesthetically grounded or accessed Other Condition and an ordinary condition associated with social experience. Ulrich’s first experiment (sublation) failed because it is not possible to extract a life praxis from the Other Condition. Similarly, the debilitating limitation of retreating into an ethically charged mode of being (autonomy) turned out to be a negation of the claims of social existence. In short, then, common to both sublation and autonomy is a degree of unreality in the sense of abandoning or failing to connect with ordinary daily social existence. This defect helps set the context in which we can recognize the general contours of an inductive sensibility. I want to hypothesize, therefore, that Musil’s third utopia serves to dereify the opposition between the Other Condition and a lifeworld in need of ethical reorientation. The dereification is achieved by integrating domains of experience programmatically separated (purified) in both the historical and the postmodern avantgarde. It is the kind of integration that constitutes the very foundation of Musil’s Essayismus.

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Since Musil in the Nachlaß explicitly diagnoses the utopia of the Other Condition as unrealizable (undurchführbar) (GW 1:1884), he characterizes the next step as an effort to develop a solution to problems presented in the novel, a solution “that was other and more real than that of the other condition. One which could be summarized as the utopia of inductive sensibility” (GW 1:1877).12 In those same notes Musil sets the utopia of inductive sensibility in apposition to the utopia of the given social condition (des gegebenen sozialen Zustands) (GW 1:1885). Musil’s designation of inductive sensibility as corresponding to the given social circumstance, along with his designation of it as more “real” than the utopia of the Other Condition, point to the implication that inductive sensibility must engage and embed itself in the circumstances of social reality. The inductive component of the utopia of inductive sensibility organizes an ethical orientation that is fundamentally different from conventional morality in two important respects. First, as Eberhard Ostermann has pointed out, simple conformity to a moral norm does not engender what Musil would regard as truly ethical action because it is based on the threat of possible sanction. Action that merely conforms to an external principle instantiates a division within the individual between itself and criteria adduced from the outside, a division that creates a deep self-contradiction Musil was not prepared to accept (Ostermann 138). Conversely, for Musil, truly ethical action must be action that arises from the whole — in essence, undivided — self. This feature of Musil’s understanding of ethics is dramatized, for example, in the case of Ulrich’s attempt to access the Other Condition in an incestuous relation with his twin sister, which union represents the completion of the wholeness he lacks as a man without qualities. Secondly, conventional morality is typically structured in terms of the application of general principles to individual cases — that is, as deduction. We have already seen Musil’s deep dissatisfaction with the applicability of general principles to individual cases, as, for example, in the case of Moosbrugger’s contradictory legal and medical diagnoses. The specifically inductive component of inductive sensibility therefore reverses the direction of conventional morality, allowing ethical determinations to arise from the particularities of individual cases. This inductive principle thus answers to both Musil’s conviction that the individual is the source of ethics and to his suspicion toward the application of general principles to specific cases. Ostermann characterizes Musil’s utopia of inductive sensibility as involving the transfer of the kind of precision associated with natural sciences to the domain of daily human experience (142). Precision is indeed a persistent commitment throughout Musil’s work.13 His early interest in the essay is grounded, for example, in the question of the kind of precision applicable to the domain of art and life. And in The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich’s only concrete suggestion for the Parallelaktion

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is the establishment of a Secretariat of Precision and Soul on the basis that his life had been infused with and guided — at least in part — by a commitment to precision. However, precision can easily devolve into pedantry, in essence dogmatic insistence on rules too simplistic for the complexity of individual cases. It has for this reason to be tempered with a sense for openness and a polyperspectivity toward human experience. Glossing Ulrich’s diaries in the withdrawn galley chapters of The Man Without Qualities, Ostermann explains that in practical life people act on the basis of suppositions and half-certainties, because the complex conditions of human action are generally not collectively surveyable; that is, they are too complex to be reduced to comprehensive explanations (147). As Ulrich’s diary indicates, “by far the greatest number of manifestations of our life rest on the mind’s insecurity. Faith, supposition, assumption, intimation, wish, doubt, inclination, demand, prejudice, persuasion, exemplification, personal views, and other conditions of semi-certainty predominate among them” (MWQ 1227; GW 1:1128). Consequently, Ostermann argues, it is opinions (die Meinungen) that make it possible to enact decisions under the conviction that what one observes could always be otherwise than as perceived (147). In other words, generally acknowledged plausibilities and convictions of value are what stabilizes judgment amid an otherwise chaotic and unsystematizable human experience. Die Meinungen Musil refers to are thus somewhere between the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd in the sense that they are involved in a kind of rational calculation, but one that is not apodictic. Ostermann thus characterizes the aim of Musil’s inductive sensibility as an attempt to return to die Meinungen their heuristic value within an unfinalizable induction process by which people negotiate their encounters with the world (147). He points to Musil’s claim that “a life, in which opinions had the right place, would be none other than that of the utopia of inductive sensibility; that is to say it would have a rational and a non-rational part” (GW 1:1916). The paradoxical intersection of the inductive and the hypothetical that lies at the basis of an inductive sensibility becomes somewhat less paradoxical as soon as inductive sensibility is recognized as a species of Essayismus. As a combination of the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd, the discursive structure of inductive sensibility closely parallels the mediation of systematic and non-systematic discursive modalities that characterizes Musil’s basic interest in the essay. Additionally, Musil essentially connects the notion of utopia with experimentation.14 And experimentation is another description of the awareness underlying Musil’s sense that the essay does not provide a total solution but a series of partial ones (PS 49; GW 2:1335). As an attempt to enact an ethical orientation contrary to the cultural logic hegemonic in Modernity, Musil’s inductive sensibility fits the

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description of the avant-garde as an attempt to invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable. However, inductive sensibility operates in a way that avoids the aporia of autonomy/sublation which debilitates both the historical and postmodern avant-gardes. Inductive sensibility recoils from the demonstrated failure of appeals to an autonomous Other Condition in acknowledging the claims of social existence — it does so by incorporating the components of social experience that take the form of Meinungen. Paradoxically, however, it is this same commitment to induction that prevents inductive sensibility from falling into false sublation. The turn to induction allows ethical determinations to arise from the specificity of individual cases, thereby avoiding the reduction of individual cases to instances of universal rules, the tendency dramatized in the novel as Seinesgleichen geschieht. In short, inductive sensibility dereifies the distinction between an ethically superior Other Condition and a lifeworld in need of ethical reorientation. If, on Latour’s reading, modernism is indelibly inscribed with a privileging of purification, and if purification is what undergirds the aporia of autonomy/sublation, then de-privileging purification by de-reifying the distinctions between art and society, aesthetic and instrumental reason, alludes to a version of the avant-garde de-coupled from modernist intellectual practices. Musil’s inductive sensibility might, therefore, best be understood as a nonmodern avant-garde.

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6

Judgment without criteria

On Habermas’s characterization, Modernity’s turn away from the past means that it has to derive its own answers to questions about the true, the good, and the beautiful. In general Habermas relies on Max Weber’s theory of rationalization to account for the way this search unfolded. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas explains that the process of an increasingly rationalized everyday life is guided via a model of knowledge borrowed from the natural sciences by Condorcet in an attempt to account for the trajectory of human history1 (CA 145). On this reading, mathematics and Newtonian physics supplied the form of cognition on which the progress of human society would be sought. According to Habermas, physics “becomes a paradigm of knowledge in general because it follows a method that raises the knowledge of nature above the scholastic debates of philosophers and reduces all previous philosophy to the status of mere opinion” (CA 145). In this way the natural sciences, then, take over the responsibility for enlightenment, which becomes “a political concept for emancipation from prejudice through the diffusion of scientific knowledge” (CA 147). What appealed to Condorcet about the natural sciences is its “sure course” to truth that is based on the supposed ability of the natural sciences to generate an accurate description of reality. This “sure course” of the natural sciences was taken as a reliable method for organizing human society. In this connection Habermas cites Condorcet to the effect that [t]he sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences is this idea, that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are necessary and constant. Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for the other operations of nature? (Condorcet quoted in Habermas, CA 148) Habermas challenges a number of presuppositions underlying Condorcet’s expectation that human society can be guided on the basis of a model of knowledge supplied by the natural sciences. Among these are the belief in the linear progress in science, the assumption that Western scientific reason is co-extensive with human reason, the conflation of theoretical and practical reason, and an unexamined faith in the empirically guaranteed

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efficacy of human cognition (CA 148–51). Habermas is chiefly interested in this last presupposition for charting the process of rationalization. I want to draw attention, however, to the third presupposition in order to focus on the compatibility of theoretical and practical reason as a particular point of departure from the dialectic of enlightenment. This theme turns out to be important for Musil’s intervention in the philosophical discourse of Modernity because it concerns the very question of the applicability of systematic knowledge to the phenomena of human experience. It is a concern that takes shape as the foundation of Musil’s invocation of the essay as a way to approach the question of what kind of precision is possible in the domain of art and life. For this reason, Enlightenment recursion to the natural sciences marks an important site of Musil’s intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity. The conflation of theoretical and practical reason appealed to by Condorcet turns out to be a point of postmodern departure from the dialectic of enlightenment in the work of Jean-François Lyotard; one, moreover, which brings to light important possibilities in Musil’s Essayismus. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard famously and expressly rejects the possibility of connecting theoretical statements and moral-practical statements on the basis that they belong to different language games whose rules are incommensurable.2 As signaled by its subtitle (A Report on Knowledge), The Postmodern Condition is a meditation on the status of scientific knowledge in the post-industrial moment; that is, in the epoch in which information becomes increasingly important as an economic commodity. For Lyotard, however, the status of scientific knowledge in the postmodern has to do not just with epistemological questions but bears as well on questions of justice. In the series of conversations that makes up Just Gaming, Lyotard brings critical insights from his contemplation of the pragmatics of scientific knowledge to bear on questions of politics. Above all this involves the question of the relation of scientific or theoretical knowledge to practical knowledge. Lyotard begins working out this relation from the observation that politics implies doing something else than what is currently the case: that is, politics necessarily involves the uttering of prescriptives (JG 23). The problem, of course, is deciding which prescriptives will be uttered and which will not. According to Lyotard, among Western thinkers “there is a deep conviction that there is a true being of society, and that society will be just if it is brought into conformity with this true being, and therefore one can draw just prescriptions from a description that is true” (JG 23). So, for example, “Plato believes that if one has a ‘just’ (that is, true) view of being, then one can retranscribe this view into social organization” (JG 23). The movement from a supposedly true being of society to prescriptions for ordering a particular society, however, turns out to involve significant theoretical difficulties. Lyotard explains that the structure of this kind of

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political thinking is encumbered by a discursive duality: on the one hand there is a theoretical operation that seeks to define scientifically, in the sense of the Platonic epistémè . . . the object the society is lacking in order to be a good or a just society; on the other hand, plugged into this theoretical ordering, there are some implied discursive orderings that determine the measures to be taken in social reality to bring it into conformity with the representation of justice that was worked out in the theoretical discourse. (JG 21) This dual structure harbors the following debilitating paradox: “what is implied in the ordering in question is that the prescriptive can be derived from the descriptive” (JG 21). This is precisely what is implied in Condorcet’s conflation of theoretical and practical reason, in the appeal to the natural sciences as a model of knowledge on the basis of which human society can be guided. One of the central features of The Postmodern Condition is Lyotard’s decision to theorize the social bond in terms of language games, which exist in a state of multiplicity in society. The basis of this view is the observation that members of a society negotiate their relations to one another in terms of the various positions (addressor, addressee, referent) within the pragmatics of one or more language games. Members of a society are simultaneously caught up in multiple language games and even move between various language games in a single conversation. Each of these language games has its own rules, and the rules of one game do not necessarily apply to another. Lyotard carries this thesis about the incommensurability of language games in the nature of the social bond over into considerations of justice, observing that “There is in justice, insofar as it refers to prescriptions, and it necessarily does, a use of language that is fundamentally different from the theoretical use” (JG 24), such that “the question of justice for a society cannot be resolved in terms of models,” that is, in terms of descriptions or denotative statements about what is true (JG 25). The absence of models on the basis of which one might attempt to derive prescriptive statements about what ought to be done means that a science of politics is no longer possible. To say that there can be no science of politics is to say that practice cannot be directly derived from the operation of theoretical reason in the form of an appeal to what is true; that is, by an appeal to a concept of the true being of the just society, for example. This is because prescriptive statements, which are necessarily the very essence of ethics and politics (in essence, statements about what ought to be done), cannot be deduced from theoretical statements.

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Abandoning the possibility of a science of politics thrusts thinking about justice and ethics to the very boundary of Western philosophy, and marks an exit point from Modernity’s effort to derive rational justifications for the organization of society and its rules of behavior. The impossibility of a science of politics, Lyotard insists, catapults us into a condition of “paganism” in the sense of recognizing a pantheon — that is, a multiplicity — of gods. Paganism thus implies abandoning a single standard of judgment in favor of a multiplicity of particular judgments. It leaves only the possibility of “judgment without criteria” in the sense that one undertakes decision making without appeal to supposedly universal ideas about the way the world is or about the nature of justice.3 Lyotard concludes that acknowledging the impossibility of deducing prescriptives from descriptives means We are in dialectics, and we are never in the epistémè . . . I mean by this that dialectics cannot present itself as producing a model that would be a model that would be valid once and for all for the constitution of the social body. On the contrary, dialectics allows the judge to judge case by case. But if he can, and indeed must (he has no choice), judge case by case, it is precisely because each situation is singular . . . This singularity comes from the fact that we are in matters of opinion and not in matters of truth. (JG 27) Decoupling practical reason from theoretical reason — politics from science — means that we are always left dealing with particular cases. As a consequence, political cognition takes on the form of the cognition of particulars, which, although not reducible to instances of universal concepts (much less laws), nevertheless needs to be determined to have a particular configuration in order to be susceptible to decision making. So for example, Lyotard notes, “In every instance, one must evaluate relations: of force, of values, of quantities, and of qualities; but to evaluate them there are no criteria, nothing but opinions” (JG 27). Since no politics of reason is possible, Lyotard concludes, we must do with a politics of opinion (JG 81). By “opinion” Lyotard means what has “always” been said, a judgment people defend, what one has “always” heard (JG 75). Recourse to opinion, however, triggers its own difficulties. For one thing, Lyotard tends to think of a politics of opinion in terms of traditions or customary practices. A politics of pure opinion, therefore, tends to fall into convention, into the way things are currently being done or have been done in the past: To follow the “philosophies” of opinion in their most banal, and probably most falsified aspect, that is the so-called conventionalist

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philosophies of some Sophists, one would reach the very simple position that what is just in a collectivity of human beings at a given moment, is that which has been convened as just. (JG 74) In short, a politics of opinion never really rises above description (of what currently passes for justice) to the level of politics in the sense of prescriptives. Opinion qua conventionalism turns out to be disastrous as a basis for a theory of justice because “in this frame, one loses all capacity to make the slightest judgment about what ought to be done” (JG 74). The question then becomes how one decides between opinions in the absence of universally valid or rationally grounded criteria. Because no universally valid descriptions of justice are available to serve as criteria on the basis of which to choose between competing alternatives, one is left only with modes of cognition that do not involve appeals to either a priori concepts on the one hand or to the traditions of past or of current practice on the other. Lyotard’s alternative to a politics of pure opinion, one that is “pagan” in the sense of remaining decoupled from theoretic reason, involves the use of so-called “regulating ideas” that he finds in Kant’s description of reflective judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. To illustrate the operation of Kantian regulating ideas, Lyotard references a passage in Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, in which Corax, a strong man, is accused of assaulting a weaker man. Corax’s defense involves claiming that he anticipated he would be judged guilty of the assault on the basis of the common opinion that the strong beat the weak. Anticipating that this common opinion would be the basis of condemning him, Corax refrained from assaulting the weaker man. For Lyotard, Corax’s thinking illustrates the operation of a regulating idea in the Kantian sense: it involves the projection (imagination) of a not-yet-real event (the invocation of the common opinion against Corax) and the use of that projection as a horizon against which one reflects in a way that informs decision making. Reflecting on the possibility that the opinion would be invoked against him leads Corax to refrain from assaulting the weaker man. Lyotard offers Corax’s case as an example of what he terms “the maximization of an opinion.” The scope of the commonly held opinion that the stronger beat the weaker is expanded by projecting it out of the past to include hypothetical future cases in the light of which one considers possible decisions. The important thing to note about the operation of a regulating idea is that it does not involve an appeal to a universally valid concept of just behavior or a just society. The idea against which Corax reflects is not of the form of a true description of reality. The common opinion that Corax invokes is, after all, neither a universally true description of human society nor is it an actual case. The reflective use of a regulating idea is thus

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categorically different from the operation of theoretic reason. Additionally, but just as importantly, the idea against which Corax reflects does not contain or supply an explicit principle or maxim which prescribes behavior: it is not reducible to a prescriptive. The use of a regulating idea does not, for this reason, incur the problem Lyotard identifies as the incommensurable movement from descriptives to prescriptives which invalidates those discourses that are structured as sciences of politics. However, despite avoiding the incommensurability associated with the conflation of theoretic and practical reason, the regulative use of a maximized opinion elicits its own problems. Detached from theoretic uses of reason, opinions are grounded in conventions, habits, traditions. Lyotard insists that one must not merely take into consideration all of society as a sensible nature, as an ensemble that already has its laws, its customs, its regularities; but the capability to decide by means of what is adjudged to be done, by taking society as a supersensible nature, as something that is not there, that is not given [emphasis added]. (JG 82) Again, a straightforward appeal to common opinion amounts to conventionalism, which lacks the capability of generating prescriptives regarding what ought to be done that Lyotard insists is an essential component of any politics. To this must be added some cognition of counterfactual possibilities. Lyotard points out that Kant’s own regulative use of ideas specifically involves the idea of the not-yet-realized possibility of society as a totality of reasonable human beings. This idea does not provide any specific content which could become a principle or maxim prescribing behavior. Rather it serves as a horizon with which any and all decisions about behavior must be consistent, but again, without directly indicating any specific behavior. Lyotard is suspicious of the homogeneity implied in such an idea of a totality of reasonable human beings. After all, his starting point in The Postmodern Condition and the basis of The Differend, also repeated in Just Gaming, is the view of society as a multiplicity of language games: the view that “the social bond is not made up of a single type of statement, or, if you will, of discourse, but that it is made up of several kinds of these games” such that “social partners are caught up in pragmatics that are different from each other” (JG 93). The most salient feature of Lyotard’s description of society is thus the multiplicity or diversity of pragmatics that composes and structures human social interaction. In contrast to the Kantian idea of society as a totality or unity of reasonable beings, this picture “is precisely that of an absence of unity, an absence of totality” (JG 94). Thus, Lyotard concludes, “the idea that I

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think we need today in order to make decisions in political matters cannot be the idea of the totality, or of the unity of a body. It can only be the idea of a multiplicity or of a diversity” (JG 94). To summarize the discussion thus far: Lyotard argues that a science of politics is not possible because it is not possible to derive practical prescriptive statements from theoretic descriptive statements since the two classes of utterance involve incompatible uses of language. The result is that we are left with only the possibility of a politics of opinions. Recurrence to opinion, however, amounts to conventionalism and conventionalism is not capable of generating a sense of what ought to be done. But despite this difficulty there is no going back to true ideas of the just society. This leads Lyotard to raise the question of whether it is possible to articulate a politics of opinion that is regulated by a Kantian idea. For Kant, the regulatory idea is that of a totality or unity of reasonable beings. Lyotard’s decision to view the social bond in terms of language games, however, precludes invoking such an idea of totality, and thus he is led to ask whether it is possible to articulate a politics of opinion regulated by the idea of multiplicity or diversity. Lyotard answers that “here I must say that I don’t know” (JG 94). Something very much like Lyotard’s pagan politics — that is, judgment without criteria — constitutes a site of Musil’s intervention into problems of Modernity. I want to propose that Musil’s Essayismus offers guidance on what such a undertaking might look like. A sense of the adequacy of Essayismus for a politics of opinion regulated by an idea of multiplicity emerges through charting correspondences (and divergences) between the discursive possibilities Musil and Lyotard seek to articulate. Across Lyotard’s later work there is a primary and persistent concern for preventing different language games and different specific values and principles from being subsumed within a single game, a concern most explicitly manifested in The Differend. This concern derives from the convergence of his decision to view society in terms of language games with his focus on politics, which necessarily involves negotiating the multiple and diverse interests of numerous citizens, protecting the minority against the majority. Lyotard’s focus does not quite match Musil’s focus which might be described as a less global, more local ethical concern. Ulrich’s leave of absence from his life — the narrative with which Musil experiments with possibilities for bridging ratioïd ordinary and nicht-ratioïd ethical experience — is directed toward answering the only question worth asking: how to live. And while Ulrich’s second attempt to answer that question through a spiritual union with Agathe collapsed precisely because it fails to adequately acknowledge the claims of specifically social existence, the ethical orientation he seeks remains grounded in a highly particularized experience that is not susceptible to a universally valid prescription. So while there is an irrevocable social component

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to Musil’s ethical thinking, the problem of orientation in Modernity as he understands it devolves to the individual. For this reason, I want to relocate the question of the possibility of a politics of opinion — of judgment without criteria — from Lyotard’s focus on politics to Musil’s focus on ethics. Despite this deflection, Lyotard’s insistence that the idea regulating decision making must be an idea of multiplicity or diversity persists as a central feature of Musil’s Essayismus, but it bears on a slightly different referent. Within Lyotard’s political focus, multiplicity arises from the heterogeneity of language games in which social members are caught. Quite similarly, Musil figures Viennese society in The Man Without Qualities as fundamentally inscribed with heterogeneity, represented first of all in the discord that pervades the Parallel Campaign and which prevents it from coming to consensus about a great idea around which the empire could unify itself against Prussia. More explicitly, in the essay “Helpless Europe,” Musil diagnoses the epoch as marked by an “unprecedented intellectual fragmentation” (PS 127; GW 2:1087) that prevents a homogeneous European culture from arising on its own (PS 130; GW 2: 1091). This fragmentation consists of multiple simultaneously competing ideologies which effectively cancel one another out, leaving the individual and the collective without any clearly privileged model with which to orient itself. The result is the need for a mode of reflection capable of embracing this multiplicity. This, after all, is the very basis of Ulrich’s attraction to an essayistic orientation to the world, that is to say, his attraction to “the way an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it” (MWQ 270; GW 1:250). Despite the difference between Lyotard and Musil in terms of a political versus an ethical focus, what remains parallel in their thinking is the search for a possible mode of cognition with which political and ethical questions can be addressed in the absence of theoretic knowledge. For Lyotard a politics of opinion decoupled from theoretic knowledge finds a first approximation in Just Gaming in the form of the maximization of a regulating idea: one reflects on the maximized horizon of an idea. The maximization of the idea becomes “a sort of field where one can run and let oneself go to see how far one can reach with a given concept” (JG 75). This characterization corresponds quite closely to the general pattern of thought of Musil’s Essayismus. I want to propose, then, that Musil’s Essayismus functions in a way homologous to the maximization of a regulating idea within the operation of reflective judgment. As discussed in the previous chapter, Musil’s utopia of inductive sensibility incorporates what he terms opinions (die Meinungen) within a process of reflection that acknowledges and combines the wide range of faculties and pressures that are involved in decision making. Musil tends to regard the actual forms that human lives take as manifestations

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of “Faith, supposition, intimation, wish, doubt, inclination, demand, prejudice, persuasion, exemplification, personal views, and other conditions of semi-certainty” (MWQ 1227; GW 1:1128). The salient point in this description is that these elements tend to find an equilibrium that is not governed by the use of logic or otherwise according to rational principles. If these are the forces that give rise to the actual forms of human existence — individual or collective — it is clear that no science of ethics or politics is possible, since these elements do not appear to be susceptible to any kind of systematic ordering. It is, however, possible to see this field of opinions as regulated by an idea of Utopie within the operation of Essayismus. It will be remembered that Utopie for Musil means roughly the same thing as experiment, and the willingness or desire to experiment is leveraged by Möglichkeitssinn. The decision to adopt Essayismus as a mode of reflection with which to negotiate the problems of Modernity thus involves projecting an idea of possibility (the very possibility of possibility) ahead of one’s contemplation and thereby hypostatizing a field in which one is free to explore an object from many sides without the expectation of coming to a totalizing understanding of it: without deriving from the reflection a univocal or unequivocal truth. In this way the idea of Utopie (possibility, experimentation) regulates reflection on whatever object essayistic attention is directed to. Possibility and experimentation — that is, the discursive space opened by Essayismus — forms a horizon within which reflection is to be carried out. It “regulates” in roughly the same way Kantian regulating ideas regulate. According to Lyotard, regulating ideas “allows us, if not to decide in every specific instance, at least to eliminate in all cases (and independently of the convention of positive law) decisions, or, to put it in Kant’s language, maxims of the will, that cannot be moral” (JG 74). In other words, regulating ideas do not supply specific content for decision making; instead they provide a horizon within which the viability of possibilities can be explored. Because they do not provide any specific content, regulating ideas operate in a categorically different way than do concepts. Lyotard understands this operation as a “reflective use of judgment” (JG 75). Reflective judgment receives its most important articulation in Kant’s third Critique. Critique of the Power of Judgment occupies an important but highly contested place in Kant’s critical philosophy. Philosophers tend to subordinate judgment to pure reason and practical reason while literary theorists and critics often elevate it above the modes of cognition of the first two critiques. Kant, himself, contends in the second Introduction that the third Critique bridges the gap between the determinism of the first Critique and freedom of the second Critique, thus completing and realizing the critical project.4 This latter reading would seem to make judgment a kind of keystone of Kant’s critical philosophy. Similarly,

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Lyotard has made a case that aesthetic reflective judgment does nothing less than fulfill the critical project in general (Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime 8). Regardless of the reasonableness or extravagance of the claims made for the third Critique, it addresses itself to a mode of cognitive activity — judgment — that Kant describes as fundamentally different from theoretical or practical reason, and which Lyotard specifically invokes in Just Gaming as a response to the impossibility of a science of politics. In the (second) Introduction to the Critique of Power of Judgment, Kant distinguishes between two modes of judgment: The power of judgment in general is the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of judgment, which subsumes the particular under it . . . is determining. If, however, only the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting. (66-7) In The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics, Rodolphe Gasché points out that “in the case of certain objects of experience or empirical representations, determining — that is to say, cognitive — judgments are at a loss. They cannot muster a determined concept under which to subsume the things in question” and cognition comes to a halt (IF 16). As Gasché points out, Kant indicates two kinds of objects (situations) which are not susceptible to determining judgment: “the manifold of intuition, concerning single things and the multiple laws of nature for which no unifying concept is available, or the organized forms of nature that cannot be accounted for on the basis of mechanical causality alone” (IF 23). The potential objects of awareness to which the mind is directed in these cases lack the features which constitute them as determinate phenomena and thereby make them susceptible to systematic cognition. In general, what they lack is the basic form of an object that is necessary for cognition. In the case of these objects, reflective judgment becomes the only modality capable of something like cognition. Gasché explains that when Kant holds that to reflect, or to deliberate (überlegen), is “to compare and combine given representations either with other representations or with one’s cognitive powers, with respect to a concept which is thereby made possible,” the first type of comparison refers to the kind of reflection required in determining judgments . . . whereas the second type of comparison describes reflection in aesthetic reflective judgments. (IF 17)

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Gasché emphasizes that Kant refers to reflective judgment as “mere” (bloß) reflective judgment, and significant portions of The Idea of Form address the restrictive “mere,” which he takes to imply that reflection is bereft of features normally exhibited by determining judgment. The key feature absent in merely reflective judgment is a principle according to which individual representations could be subsumed. Whereas determining judgment is guided by the understanding (which furnishes the concepts under which particulars are subsumed), reflective judgment is not guided by a principle supplied by another faculty. Lacking any principle supplied by the reason or the understanding, merely reflective judgment must give itself such a principle: as the power that constitutes the union between the understanding and reason — nature and freedom — reflective judgment gives unity and unification to itself, as the principle of its own reflection. In giving itself to itself as its own principle — and as we will see, this principle is the (inner) formal purposiveness of the forms and products of nature, their adequacy to reason — merely reflective judgment becomes capable of approaching the particular in view of its possible comprehensibility. (IF 24) On the basis of its effort to unify the understanding and reason, reflective judgment supplies itself with the principle of the inner formal purposiveness of nature: that is, it supplies itself with the general principle that the forms and products of nature are adequate (susceptible) to human reason. Enabled and guided by this principle of inner formal purposiveness, reflective judgment orients itself toward particular intuitions as possible objects for comprehension. In other words, the principle of purposiveness makes objects into possible objects of experience. Reflective judgment, guided by the principle of “inner formal purposiveness,” supplies objects with the minimal form necessary without which they could not become objects of experience at all. Thus Gasché concludes that “aesthetic reflective judgment is concerned first and foremost with establishing the purposiveness of what it beholds, its inner organization or form, so as to secure the very possibility of intuitive representation” (IF 35). Again: “the task of reflective judgment, as distinct from the task of determining judgment, is to render intelligible what is particular and contingent by showing it to have a unity that is thinkable by us” (IF 16). Gasché carefully distinguishes the Kantian notion of form from two other notions of form commonly misapplied to Kant. These are the idea of form as differentiated from content and the idea of form as a harmonious internal organization. Against these notions, Gasché insists that reflective judgment supplies a mere form for what is otherwise “an

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exuberance of indeterminateness prior to any fixing of objective meaning and its constraining formal characteristics” (IF 66). This mere form is what reflective judgment secures. I want now to propose that Musil’s Essayismus operates as a discursive strategy homologous to reflective judgment that secures a minimal form for the shape of ethical experience, which, as a complex interaction of thoughts, feelings, and circumstances is not susceptible to systematic ordering through the application of a priori concepts, and therefore not susceptible to determining judgment.5 The indeterminacy of the elements constituting ethical experience is precisely what makes conventional morality deeply problematic for Musil, whose quest for an alternative mode of ethical cognition is guided by the conviction that systematic thought is applied in realms of the soul only by violence. More specifically, what Essayismus as reflective judgment secures is the “mere” shape or form of an individual’s life in the absence of an ethically adequate form supplied by the social circumstances of a pseudo-real Modernity. Transposed into the context of Musil’s ethical thought, Kant’s “mere form” concerns the constellation of thoughts, feelings, and circumstances prior to any ordering by determining concepts. The complexity of this constellation — the fact that it lacks form — is what makes genuinely ethical experience nicht-ratioïd in the first place. The securing of such a form for the components of ethical experience answers to the question “how to live life,” and, crucially, it does so in a way that avoids the violence to the particularity of ethical experience that is characteristic of conventional morality. We are given a sense of the complexity of interaction between thought, feeling and circumstance in the galley chapters of The Man Without Qualities in which Agathe finds the diary entries in which Ulrich tries to work out a description of the operation of emotions. This operation involves a trinity composed of external stimuli acting upon internal and external circumstances. The nature of the interaction determines whether and how the stimulus will be responded to (MWQ 1258; GW 1:1156). The individual components that make up the conditions of an emotional experience (temperament, character, age, education, predisposition, principles, prior experience), however, “have no definite boundaries and lose themselves in the person’s being and destiny” (MWQ 1258–9; GW 1:1156). Ulrich adds to this the observation that “external and internal circumstances . . . are not independent of each other” (MWQ 1259; GW 1:1156). The component parts are so intertwined that in their interaction it is impossible to specify a point in time at which the emotion begins and ends. Another complication is that “an experience changes its meaning if its course happens to veer from the sphere of the particular forces that steered it at the beginning into a sphere of other mental connections” (MWQ 1260; GW 1:1158). These and other factors lead Ulrich

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to characterize the origin and progression of emotional experience as virtually incalculable: My emotion arises inside me and outside me; it changes from the inside to the outside; it changes the world directly from inside and indirectly, that is through my behavior, from outside; and it is therefore, even if this contradicts our prejudice, simultaneously inside and outside, or at least so entangled with both that the question as to what in an emotion is internal and what external, and what in it is ‘I’ and what the world, becomes almost meaningless. (MWQ 1264; GW 1:1161) These passages make up the last, mostly finished sections of the book, after which it begins to unravel into multiple drafts. The tone of these passages is provisional not just for Ulrich (who is struggling to understand the nature and operation of emotional experience), but for Musil as well. They have the feel of someone groping for answers or at least perspectives. In the sequence of these chapters, Ulrich considers various accounts of the operations of the emotions, various scientific and psychological theories of their nature, weighing them against one another. In other words, the novel ends fully in the mode of Essayismus. Ulrich’s (Musil’s) essayistic reflection on the nature of emotions concerns the materials for which a minimal form must be secured in order to bring the novel to a conclusion in the form of an answer to the only question Ulrich found worth asking: how to live. It looks as though Musil (re)turns in the final stages of the novel to Essayismus as a strategy for working out — for working through — the material that must be ordered to bring Ulrich’s quest for orientation to a satisfactory conclusion. Part of what emerges from these essayistic reflections is a sense of the inescapable complexity and incalculable interaction of the elements involved, and thus the need for an alternative cognition than that associated with conventional morality. In other words, if the novel that begins with Ulrich’s leave of absence from his life finally heads off in this direction, it is because ordinary determining judgment is not capable of carrying out an adequate cognition of these particulars necessary to bring the narrative to a conclusion. The task of securing a minimally cognizable form for the components of ethical experience is co-determined by key features of the way Musil sets up his quest for orientation in Modernity. More specifically, the notion of form is central to the way Musil conceptualizes human being in the first place. In the essay “The German as Symptom” he explains that A person exists only in forms given to him from the outside. “He polishes himself on the world” is much too mild an image; it ought

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to read: He pours himself into its mold. It is social organization which through its forms gives the individual the possibility of expressing himself at all, and it is only through expression that he becomes a human being. (PS 165; GW 2:1370) Similarly: “Precisely the shapelessness of his disposition requires the individual to accommodate himself to forms, to take on the character, customs, morality, life-style, and the whole apparatus of an organization” (PS 168–9; GW 2:1374). Or again: “Life shapes itself in ready-made forms: it is socially performed. The feeling of love, for instance, finds modes, modifications, degrees, etc., already prepared, into which it pours itself and in which it becomes reality. Without guidelines the individual disintegrates” (PS 158; GW 2:1362). One massively thematized allusion to such disintegration is, of course, Ulrich’s Eigenschaftslosigkeit, which is precipitated by the cultural condition Musil terms pseudoreality (Seinesgleichen geschieht). It will be recalled that in the Nachlaß Musil explicates Seinesgleichen geschieht as the feeling that experience repeats itself (GW 1:1844). In other words, human experience in Modernity is structured as the repetition of life according to models. We can return to the correspondence between Musil’s Seinesgleichen geschieht and Heidegger’s “fallenness into the they” to recognize the former as an inauthentic — that is, ethically inadequate — existence. Ulrich takes a leave of absence from his life, distancing himself from a priori models of social existence, precisely in order to access a more authentic, more ethically satisfactory, Being. However, once he leaves those models behind he is left without a determinate structure for his life. This is one importance sense in which he is Eigenschaftslos, given that the Eigenschaften he effectively disowns correlate with — are supplied by — the modes of social being he disavows. Ulrich’s quest for ethical orientation, in other words, turns into the task of finding a determinate shape or form for the constituent parts of his life. Early in his career Musil characterizes human experience as a complex of cognitive functions: “Man not only thinks, he feels, desires, senses, acts” (PS 49–50; GW 2:1336). While these functions can and do operate in isolation, they also combine and interact: “When a thought seizes us, bowls us over etc., it does in the area of feelings what a revolutionary insight does in the purely rational area. The depth of its effect is a sign of how great masses of feeling are empathetically involved” (PS 49–50; GW 2:1336). Musil also characterizes such purely rational philosophical positions (pessimism, stoicism, Epicurean wisdom) as “as by no means simply rational structures, but also experiences” (PS 49–50; GW 2:1336). As these examples indicate, Musil’s formulation of human experience focuses on the interaction — the interpenetration — of thoughts and feelings,

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particularly of the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd elements of experience. One implication to be drawn from this description is that thought and feeling interact in unpredictable yet powerful ways. The focus on interaction here recalls the basis of Ulrich’s advice to Diotima to “let things happen” (MWQ 625; GW 1:573). His advice amounts to suggesting that Diotima allow the ratioïd and nicht-ratioïd components of her experience to interact in a free accord, unlegislated by conventional morality.6 Musil’s approach to the problem of ethical orientation is decisively structured by the question of whether or not such experience is systematizable: in other words, by the question of what kind of precision is possible in domains that do not admit a conceptual ordering. He observes in “The German as Symptom” that while conventional morality is scientific in its requirement of reproducibility, “the need for the unequivocal, repeatable, and fixed is satisfied in the realm of the soul by violence” (PS 182; GW 2:1388). Thus, ethical orientation requires a mode of cognition that does not follow the thought patterns of the natural sciences and other similarly systematic discourses. Ethical experience, on Musil’s understanding, cannot be ordered by the application of a priori categories under which particulars might be subsumed. This is tantamount to rejecting the possibility of a science of ethics just as Lyotard rejects that of a science of politics, and for very much the same reasons. Despite the highly particular constellation and the complex, chaotic interaction of the elements making up experience, however, ethical orientation does requires something approaching a conceptual order. Musil remains for this reason invested in looking for some mediation of this complex experience, some integration of the ratioïd and the nichtratioïd that figures his equivocal relation to Modernity. Ulrich eventually retracts his suggestion that Diotima allow the components of experience to find their own equilibrium, and that retraction is grounded in an acknowledgement that “the world is no hovering, insubstantial thing but craves the most concentrated solidity” (MWQ 645; GW 1:591). This acknowledgment is followed by a series of reflections which lead Ulrich to see his life as composed of two trees, one of precision, one of soul. Ulrich’s retraction and the proposal that the Parallel Campaign establish a Secretariat of Precision and Soul dramatize the importance of some kind conceptual ordering amid the persistent tension between the conceptual and non-conceptual elements of experience. It returns us, in other words, to Musil’s preoccupation with the question of how much and what kinds of order are possible in domains which do not admit systematization, and it therefore returns us to his appeal to Essayismus as a discursive strategy capable of mediating the ratioïd and the nicht-ratioïd. Musil’s sense that Essayismus secures a minimal form for experiences in the domain of the otherwise nicht-ratioïd emerges as an explicit element in his appeal to the essay as a model for ethical orientation:

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The accepted translation of “essay” as “attempt” contains only vaguely the essential allusion to the literary model, for an essay is not a provisional or incidental expression of a conviction capable of being elevated to a truth under more favorable circumstances or being exposed as an error . . . an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought. (MWQ 273; GW 1:253) “Form” here means something like the shape of one’s soul, and, more specifically, the precise configuration of the thoughts, feelings, desires, and sensations that constitute an individual’s ethical experience. That complex of elements is “charged,” in a sense, by the introduction of a decisive thought. In other words, the presence of a powerful idea transforms the ratioïd and nicht-ratioïd elements into a specifically energized configuration. The ability of Essayismus to secure a minimal form for this complex of interrelated, interdependent elements that make up ethical experience directly results from the specifically functional understanding it is capable of producing. Mach’s functional understanding is a mode of cognition which involves describing the mutual dependencies that exist between a number of phenomena.7 The twin bases of Machean positivism are the conclusions that concepts like heat, mass, and force are abstractions from experience that correspond to nothing real in nature, and that the concept of causality is overly reductive with respect to what is actually given in sensory experience. Mach consequently advocates replacing explanation of physical phenomena with their description. In moving from explanation to description he redirects the focus of attention onto the structure — that is, the form — of the phenomena apart from any a priori conceptualization of them as instances of “heat” or “mass.” In other words, Machean functional understanding is specifically designed to decouple as much as possible descriptions of the interaction of phenomena from a priori conceptual determination in order to capture the specific character of the interaction, which tends to become obliterated through the application of concepts. Thus, the form Mach proposes to describe via functional relations corresponds closely to the “exuberance of indeterminateness prior to any fixing of objective meaning” Gasché characterizes as the object of a specifically reflective use of judgment. Both Mach and Musil are trying to understand complex phenomena in ways that involve a minimum of a priori determination. For Mach the answer is functional understanding, which, in the absence of physical concepts and the notion of causality, offers a minimal cognition of experience (phenomena) in the form of a description of reciprocal quantitative dependencies. It is a mode of description focused on the mutual

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dependencies of the phenomena involved — on the ways they modify one another. Cognition in the form of functional understanding is “minimal” in the sense that what is understood about the phenomena in question is determined as minimally as possible by antecedent, a priori concepts. For Musil, regarding the domains that are not susceptible to conceptual ordering, the essay is “the strictest form attainable in an area where one cannot work precisely” [emphasis added] (PS 49; GW 2:1334). That is, even for domains of experience where systematic concepts cannot be applied, some minimal form can be secured for the components of experience, and a certain minimal cognition can take place. Operating as reflective judgment, Essayismus secures this form for the components of ethical experience, thus allowing a minimal cognition free from determination by a priori moral concepts. It thus answers Lyotard’s call for a mode judgment without criteria. Lyotard’s turn toward a “pagan” judgment without criteria was motivated by the impossibility of a science of politics, by the observation that prescriptive statements cannot be derived from descriptive statements about the way the world really is, or by what justice really entails. This observation occasions the necessity of decoupling practical reason from theoretical reason, a model for which he finds in the example of Kantian reflective judgment. This escape from a science of politics marks one description of Lyotard’s postmodernism, in the sense that political and ethical judgment is conducted apart from the signature discursive techniques of Modernity, namely some version of episte¯me¯, as for example Condorcet’s appeal to the methods of the natural sciences to guide human history. Put differently, what makes Lyotard postmodern in this case is his abandoning the possibility of a rehabilitated Western reason capable of grounding political and ethical thought on a rational foundation that transcends individual cases and is allowed to legislate them. Lyotard’s rejection of a science of politics is closely paralleled by a similar move in Latour, who, it will be recalled, criticizes Socrates’s invocation of episte¯ me¯ in the context of political decision making.8 Like Lyotard, Latour does so on the grounds that theoretical reason — “a step-by-step persuasion that forces one to assent no matter what” — fails to conform to the pragmatic conditions of democratic political decision making (Pandora’s Hope 230). In effect, Latour objects that Socrates appeals to a mode of reason inscribed with the kind of purification he finds characteristic of modern science: that is, a sharp division between the world of nonhumans and that of humans. The remedy, once again, is to re-imagine science not as a discourse of the exclusively nonhuman world, but as enlacing humans and nonhumans. This tendency toward dereification makes up the central observation of Latour’s nonmodernism. Musil’s response to the dangers of linking theoretical and practical reason lies closer to Latour’s example than to Lyotard’s. Rather than

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strictly decoupling theoretical reason from practical reason, Essayismus dereifies that very distinction in negotiating the ratioïd claims for order with the nicht-ratioïd elements that make up ethical experience. It is on this basis, finally, as I have tried to illustrate in the sequence of these chapters, that Musil’s Essayismus constitutes an intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity as a discursive strategy of the nonmodern.

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Notes

Notes to Introduction: Robert Musil en marge 1 The project of identifying the most important works of German literature in the twentieth century was undertaken by Literaturhaus München. On January 13, 1999 a roundtable discussion took place in München to discuss the results of the experiment. 2 Hans-Jochen Pieper’s Musils Philosophie: Essayismus und Dichtung im Spannungsfeld der Therorien Nietzsches und Machs and Charlotte DreslerBrumme’s Nietzsches Philosophie in Musils Roman “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” are two recent book-length efforts to read Musil into explicitly philosophical contexts. In his 1994 bibliography of Musil scholarship, Christian Rogowski emphasizes a series of attempts starting in the late 1980s to approach Musil’s work from explicitly philosophical perspectives. Thus, Matthias Luserke has considered Musil’s notion of Möglichkeit in connection with Kantian modal theory. Ralf Bohn situates Musil’s fiction against the background of Schelling’s nature philosophy. In separate studies Dieter P. Farda and Peter L. Berger have worked out phenomenological reading of Musil’s Möglichkeitssinn and the idea of multiple possible realities. So, too, in “Möglichkeitssinn und Philosophie der Möglichkeit” has Michael Jakob addressed Musil’s connection to philosophical reflection on possibility. Another phenomenological reading is Harmut Cellbrot’s Die Bewegung des Sinnes: Zur Phänomenologie Robert Musils im Hinblick auf Edmund Husserl. In “Musil als Philosoph” Friedrich Wallner makes a case for reading Musil as a precursor to the so-called Austrian “turn” in philosophy initiated by Wittgenstein, as anticipating essential aspects of the end of philosophy, and as therefore working toward a new function for philosophy itself (109). This reading emerges from a comparison between Musil and Mach as well as Wittgenstein. Peter Kampits has also examined Musil’s connection to Wittgenstein, finding in Musil a reflection on and critique of language (154). Other readings of Musil and Mach include Rudolf Haller’s “Carl Stumpf, Ernst Mach, und Robert Musil,” Claudia Monti’s “Funktion und Fiktion: die Mach-Dissertation Robert Musils in den Jahren Zwischen den Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß un den Essays,” Daniel Steuer’s “Ernst Mach and Robert Musil: Laws of Conservation and the Metaphysical Imagination,” and Peter D. Smith’s “The Scientist as Spectator: Musil’s Törleß and the Challenge to Mach’s Neo-Positivism.” Reinhard Pietsch has written about Musil in connection with Derrida’s

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Notes notion of dissémination in his book Fragment und Schrift: Selbstimplikative Strukturen bei Robert Musil. Other explicit attempts to read Musil into connection with themes of postmodernity include Michael Hofmann’s “Musil und Lyotard: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften und die Postmoderne,” and Ulrike Zeuch’s “‘Eine Gerechtigkeit mit Flammen Statt mit Logik’: Zur Gerechtigkeitsdiskussion in der Postmoderne und Musils Moral des anderen Zustands.” See Karl Corino, Robert Musil: Eine Biographie 316. My concern in the present work is with the question of the horizon of philosophy as it is understood in the so-called continental tradition. It is worth noting, however, that Musil has also be observed to bear a close relation to the question of the horizon of philosophy as it is treated in the analytical tradition. This is, of course, not surprising when it is noted that Musil and Wittgenstein lived and worked in the same cultural historical moment: turn-of-the-century Vienna. It is also worth remembering in this connection that the so-called Vienna circle was at one time known as Verein-Ernst Mach, after the philosopher on whom Musil wrote his doctoral dissertation. Connections between Musil and Wittgenstein have been addressed, for example, by Peter Kampits, who discusses correspondences between Musil and Wittgenstein concerning what is sayable and what is not sayable in philosophy, and he has addressed Musil’s effort to bridge or reject such a distinction. See especially Kampits 157–8. Habermas’ fullest articulation of communicative reason is given in his Theory of Communicative Action volumes I and II. For an alternative abridged account, see “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason,” Chapter XI in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. For a discussion of the scientific origins of instrumental reason, see Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1: 145–56. See C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures. The term “modernism” refers to different cultural phenomena, even different historical epochs, depending on the field in which one encounters it. Latour’s focus is principally on the natural sciences, or, better, on the sociological analysis of the natural sciences. He tends to use the term “modernism” to refer to intellectual practices that characterize work in the natural sciences following the so-called scientific revolution that began around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Part of what Latour is suspicious of in scientific modernism is the appeal to an ultimate truth about the way the world really is. It is in this same sense that, In Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Stephen Toulmin has characterized the drive of modern philosophy as the quest for certainty. Thus, in light of Habermas’ observation that the version of reason institutionalized in Modernity was massively informed by the intellectual practices of the natural sciences, Latour’s usage of the term “modernism” is roughly convergent with what is termed “philosophical modernism”: that is, approximately, Western philosophy since Descartes. In the field of literary

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studies, the term “modernism” tends to be used as a historical category referring to a literary movement beginning in the end of the nineteenth century and extending roughly until World War II. Matters converge once again, in that literary modernism is often recognized as enacting a critique of basic features of Modernity including the thought and linguistic practices institutionalized in Modernity. I suggest a slightly different translation from that given in the passage as cited. Musil’s original reads: “eine weitreichende geistige Ordnung.” In their 1990 translation of Musil’s essays, Burton Pike and David Luft translate “geistige” here as “spiritual. “Geist,” however, in the sense of “mind” or “intellect,” can also suggest “conceptual.” Thus a possible alternative translation of this passage is: “a far-reaching conceptual order.” I think this fits better with the opposition Musil seems to have in mind between scientific and artistic domains, since it is difficult to see how, in the ordinary sense, scientific work results in a “spiritual” order. Christian Schärf has given an excellent history of the genre of the essay in his book, Geschichte des Essays: von Montaigne bis Adorno. Birgit Nübel has provided a succinct synopsis of critical treatments of the essay in the introduction to her book Robert Musil: Essayismus als Selbstreflexion der Moderne. See especially 13–28. Both Schärf’s and Nübel’s historical accounts emphasize the difficulty of identifying consistent features across the wide variety of texts that have been designated as essays. This difficulty precludes anything like a definition of the genre. For another useful discussion of the essay as a genre, particularly in connection with novelists, see also Thomas Harrison, Essayism: Conrad, Musil, and Pirandello. See Jacques Derrida, Grammatology, 10–13. For a discussion of Musil’s relation to accounts of so-called “narrative” knowledge, specifically that of Jean-François Lyotard, see Michael Hofmann, “Musil und Lyotard: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften und die Postmoderne,” especially 154–60. For a detailed discussion of the epistemological status of Musil’s Partiallösungen, see Marike Finlay, The Potential of Modern Discourse: Musil, Peirce, and Pertubation 56–61. Musil’s original reads: “eine Entdinglichung des Ich wie der Welt.”

Notes to Chapter 1: The thought figure of the nonmodern 1 See Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language” 215–37. 2 Immanuel Kant, “What is Called ‘Enlightenment’?” 3 Although Marx does not himself use the term “false consciousness,” he does discuss the imaginary representation of dominant social relations under the heading of “ideology.” See, for example his discussion of the Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas in The German Ideology especially 64-68. Similarly, Louis Althusser discusses illusory representations of the real conditions of social existence in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation.” See Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays 162-65. 4 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology 158.

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5 It should be noted that, confronted with a plethora of incommensurable language games, Lyotard does not simply abandon the effort to make decisions about justice or morality. He is not nihilistic in that sense, which is too often wrongly attributed to postmodernism. So, for example, in Just Gaming he takes up the problem of how one can choose in the absence of any absolute criteria. 6 For a recent, standard translation see Plato: Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras. Ed. Malcolm Schofield. Trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Notes to Chapter 2: Something other than reason’s other 1 Most recently, Hans-Jochen Pieper’s Musils Philosophie: Essayismus und Dichtung im Spannungsfeld der Theorien Nietzsches und Machs and Charlotte Dresler-Brumme’s Nietzsches Philosophie in Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. 2 In this connection, see also Musil’s discussion of the “Theorem of Shapelessness” (Gestaltlosigkeit) in “The German as Symptom” (PS 163–66; GW 2:1371-1375). 3 Musil makes an explicit connection between Dionysiac intoxication and the quasi-mystical experience he terms the “Other Condition” in his essay “The German as Symptom” (PS 186; GW 2:1393). 4 See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 37–41. 5 Hans-Georg Pott has pointed out that Musil never abandons this kind of causal-scientific thinking that he encountered in his training in engineering and philosophy. Following Ernst Mach, Pott argues, Musil’s functionalism includes the idea that one effect can have multiple causes or one cause can have multiple effects. See “Das Subjekt bei Robert Musil” 403. 6 There are various characterizations of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. In terms of a theory of knowledge, Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgens understand it as consisting of four claims: 1) that no accurate representation of the world as it is in itself is possible; 2) that there is nothing to which our theories stand in the required correspondence relation to enable us to say that they are true or false; 3) that no method of understanding our world is privileged; and 4) that human needs always help to constitute the world for us (Cambridge Companion 4). Magnus and Higgens also offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism which does not see it as a theory of knowledge but as a renaming of facts as “interpretations” which frees human representations of the world from the Socratic logic of true/ false (Cambridge Companion 5). 7 Musil’s appreciation for Nietzsche’s sense of possibility (Möglichkeitssinn) is limited by the very question of application with which Ulrich struggles. Thus Musil notes that Nietzsche “speaks of nothing but possibilities, nothing but combinations without showing us how even a single one of them could be worked out in reality” (Diaries 15; Tagebücher 1:19). 8 For a discussion of Musil’s sense of utopias, see Hermann Wiegmann, “Musils Utopiebegriff und seine literaturtheoretischen Konsequenzen.”

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9 For a more detailed discussion of the experimental structure of The Man Without Qualities see Chapter 5 below. Also see Patrizia McBride’s The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity, 128–64. 10 For a discussion of experimentation in Nietzsche see Charlotte DreslerBrumme, Nietzsches Philosophie in Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 57–68. 11 “Wissensch.[aft] ist eine Sublimation des Bösen, der Kampf, die Jagd, uws.” 12 “Auseinandersetzung des Möglichkeitsmenschen mit der Wirklichkeit.” 13 Seine Gefahr is zu große Ungebundenheit (GW 1:1881). Notes to Chapter 3: Disclosing concealed being 1 See Descartes’ Second Meditation in Meditations on First Philosophy (The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes 2: 19. 2 “Dasein” is Heidegger’s term for specifically human being. For a discussion of the term, see Magda King 47. 3 Following the practice of Macquarrie and Robinson, I will use Being to refer to existence as such and being to refer to the existence of entities. Although Hubert Dreyfus has opposed the capitalization as a misunderstanding of German orthography, I find the different spellings useful for clarity. 4 “Thrownness” (Geworfenheit) is Heidegger’s term for the fact of Dasein’s having come into existence in the world. Heidegger writes that the “characteristic of Dasein’s Being . . . ‘that it is’ . . . we call [the] throwness of this entity into its ‘there’; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-inthe-world, it is the ‘there’” (B&T 174). 5 “Facticity” (Faktizität) is Heidegger’s term for the fact of Dasein’s existence: “Whenever Dasein is, it is as a Fact; and the factuality of such a Fact is what we shall call Dasein’s “facticity” (B&T 82). “Facticity” one component of the complex structure of “Care.” For a discussion of the “Care” structure, see Magda King 36. 6 The distinction between ontic and ontological is absolutely fundamental for the project Heidegger proposes to carry out in Being and Time. The term “ontic” corresponds to the being of entities, while the term “ontological” refers to Being in general. The precise mistake Heidegger proposes to correct with Being and Time is the decision made at the beginning of Greek philosophy to base the inquiry into Being in general on the merely ontic being of entities. His point is that a starting place in beings is insufficiently fundamental for an analysis of Being as such. Heidegger’s divergence from traditional ontology, his destruction of metaphysics, is thus crucially related to his decision to carry out a fundamental ontology aimed not at beings but at Being — that is, not an ontic but an ontological analysis. For Heidegger’s discussion of the distinction between ontic and ontological, see Being and Time 32. For an introductory commentary of Heidegger’s usage of these terms see Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. 19–21. 7 It must be emphasized that Musil does not think it possible to (authentically) possess one’s Eigenschaften. Rather, he holds that, fundamentally,

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Notes Daseins are existentially Eigenschaftslos — that Eigenschaftslosigkeit is part of Dasein’s existential (ontological) Being in Modernity at least in so far as its Being is a fallen Being. It would not be the case, for example, that possessing Eigenschaften would amount to seizing one’s authentic Being. And Musil certainly doesn’t mean that, on Walter’s example, the remedy to Eigenschaftslosigkeit is to return to some pre-modern mode of existence such as Walter’s aestheticism is meant to do. This explains how Ulrich can acknowledge and accept his Eigenschaftslosigkeit and still be concerned with attaining an authentic Being. In characterizing Musil conception of the human subject, Hans-Georg Pott points to Musil’s understanding of what remains after the removal of one’s characteristics as an interior space. He also points to Musil’s representation of the human as consisting of nine characteristics plus a tenth characteristic which describes the form of an observer that observes the other nine. According to Pott, what is decisive in Musil’s account is that neither the nine nor the additional tenth characteristic provides sufficient ground for the existence of the subject in an ontological sense. See Hans-Georg Pott, “Das Subjekt bei Robert Musil” 404. In Subject Without Nation Stefan Jonsson explains Walter’s expressivist sensibility as a retreat to the intérieur, where that intérieur implies a substantial (in essense, Cartesian) subject, and thus exhibits a ontic understanding of human existence. Following Georg Lukács, Jonsson reads the expressivist subject as a strategic antidote to the reification of the individual at the hands of an increasingly rationalized lifeworld. See especially Chapter 1: “Topographies of Inwardness: The Expressivist Paradigm of Subjectivity” 21–59. Heidegger explains that “The average everydayness of concern becomes blind to its possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is merely ‘actual’. This tranquillizing does not rule out a high degree of diligence in one’s concern, but arouses it. In this case no positive new possibilities are willed, but that which is at one’s disposal becomes ‘tactically’ altered in such a way that there is a semblance of something happening” (B&T 239). For a brief explanation of the difference between an existentiell and an existential understanding see Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time”, Division 1, 20-23. For a discussion of the non-conceptual status of the Other Condition see Chapter 3 above, page 56 ff. “Ein Hauptthema fürs Ganze ist also: Auseinandersetzung des Möglickeitsmenschen mit der Wirklichkeit” (GW 1:1881). “der Versuch, am Rande und außerhalb von etablierten Diskursarten zu funktionieren” (Howe 2). “Der Essayismus wirkt gerade dort, wo die herkömmlichen Methoden und Formeln dieser etablierten Diskurse der darzustellenden Wirchlichkeit nicht mehr adäquat sind” (Howe 2). “Es ist eine Denkhaltung, die als Ziel nicht die Erkenntnis, sondern menschliche

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Umbildung hat. Umbildung is Loslösung des Menschen aus seiner erstarrten Beziehung zur Umwelt, auf daß neue Beziehungen zwischen den Menschen enstehen können” (Roth 127). 17 “Das Experiment erforscht neue Horizonte indem es neue Kombinationen vorschlägt und dadurch eine Dynamik entwickelt, die die Gegebenheiten des bestehenden Systems transzendiert” (“Diskursexperimente” 180). 18 For a discussion of modes of subjectivity in Musil’s thinking see Chapter 4 below. Notes to Chapter 4: Order without system 1 On Habermas’ description, Hegel’s solution was to replace such a subjugating subjectivity with an “absolute self-relation of a subject that attains self-consciousness from its own substance and has its unity within itself as the difference between the finite and the infinite” (PDM 33). 2 Musil expressly differentiates Expressionism from systematic critique in one of his Tagebücher entries, insisting that “Der Expressionismus verzichtet auf Analyse” (Dairies 254; TB 1:47). For a commentary of Musil’s relation to Expressionism see Fabrizio Cambi, “Musil und der Expressionismus.” 3 Friedrich Wallner has pointed out that Mach’s philosophy, about which Musil wrote his doctoral dissertation, centrally involves a dissolution of the Cartesian subject. According to Wallner, Mach insisted that the “I” is not the primary entity constituting the self but, rather, the elements that make up sensory experience. See Friedrich Wallner, “Musil als Philosoph” 95. 4 In the Appendix A to Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, Burton Pike and David Luft offer a translation of the section of Musil’s Tagebücher in which these observations appear, namely Heft 26. Their translation does not, however, translate the fragmentary notes that come before the body of the entry. In those notes heading the entry, Musil indicates the proposed title as “Versuche einen anderen Menschen zu finden” (TB 1: 663). In his translation of the Tagebücher (Diaries: 1899–1942) Phillip Payne renders the proposed title as “Attempts to find an ‘other’ human being” (Diaries 324). Pike and Luft translate “anderen Mensch” as “Outsider” (PS 291), whereas Payne translates it “An ‘Other’ Person” (Diaries 328). 5 “Die ganze Aufgabe ist: Leben ohne Systematic aber doch mit Ordnung” (TB 1:653). 6 One important point of disagreement between Mach and Musil is that Mach claims the analyses of science which result in the elimination of physical concepts implies their meaninglessness for other discourses as well. Musil explicitly rejects this assertion (On Mach’s Theories 53). This is important because in positing general epistemological conclusions drawn from the priorities of the natural sciences, Mach engages in a series of exclusions. What Musil objects to is that while Mach justifies this series of exclusions with the view that science should be an economical adaptation of thought to the world, this task of science does not necessarily hold for other intellectual endeavors, and, therefore, that which is excluded from science on the basis of economy of thought need not necessarily

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Notes be excluded from other intellectual endeavors. In other words, Machean positivism is another example of Enlightenment reason effecting a series of exclusions in order to arrive at certainty on the basis of a simplification. Mark Poster’s criticism on this point is typical of the observation. See Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context, 23–5. For another such accusation see Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism” especially 72–3. Originally coined by Max Weber, the phrase “disenchantment of the world” refers to the displacement of myth by science. For a discussion of this process and its implications see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3, and especially “Odysseys or Myth and Enlightenment,” 43–80. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. For Derrida’s discussion of the non-conceptual status of différance see “Différance” 11. Marike Finlay discusses the place of Partiallösungen in Musil’s work in The Potential of Modern Discourse. See especially 58–64.

Notes to Chapter 5: Toward a nonmodern avant-garde 1 See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society. 2 See Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics 83–222. 3 See Herbert Marcuse, “On the Affirmative Character of Culture.” 4 See Herbert Marcuse, “On the Affirmative Character of Culture.” 5 For an alternative reading of the relation between the modern and the postmodern, and the relation between Musil and Lyotard, see Michael Hofmann, “Musil und Lyotard: Der Mann ohne Eigneschaften und die Postmoderne” 150–66. 6 For Lyotard’s reservations toward the unity Habermas has in mind, see “Answering the Question: What is Postmoderism?” 72. 7 See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 26. 8 One formulation this autonomy takes is in Lyotard’s insistence on the separation between artistic and cultural activity; see “After the Sublime, the State of Aesthetics” 136. In this connection see also his suspicion of “reconciliatory speculation” (“Introduction: About the Human” 4). 9 Ulrich’s understanding of ethical experience is imprinted with the understanding of natural phenomena Musil encountered in Machean positivism. Mach advocates understanding natural phenomena by describing their reciprocal quantitative dependencies on one another, instead of in terms of cause and effect. On Musil’s reading of Mach, see pages 102–4. 10 “Ein Hauptthema fürs Ganze ist also: Auseinandersetzung des Möglichkeitsmenschen mit der Wirklichkeit. Sie ergibt 3 Utopien: Die Utopie der induktiven Gesinnung. Die Utopie des anderen (nicht ratioïden, motivierten usw) Lebens in Liebe . . . Die Utopie des reinen a[nderen] Z[ustands] . . .” (GW I: 1881–2). 11 “Utopie des motivierten Lebens u. Ut[opie]. des a[nderen]Z[ustands]. wird ab T[age]b[uch]-Gruppe der Erledigung zugeführt. Als letztes bleibt--im Umkehrung

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der Reihenfolge — die der induktiven Gesinnung, also des wirklichen Lebens, übrig! Mit ihr schleißt das Buch” (GW 1: 1887). 12 “der anders u. realer ist als der des a[nderen] Z[ustands]. Zusammenzufassen als der der induktiven Gesinnung” (GW 1:1877). 13 On Musil’s differentiation of two kinds of precision see above, Chapter 2, page 48. 14 For Musil’s discussion of the experimental sense of utopia, see GW 1:1878). Notes to Chapter 6: Judgment without criteria 1 In particular, Habermas references Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. 2 See The Postmodern Condition 26. 3 This “postmodern” tendency has a long history, going back to Nietzsche’s criticism of what he terms “Socratism.” See Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 4 and 108–110. 4 See Kant’s discssion in Section III of the second Introduction: On the Critique of the Power of Judgment, as a Means for Combining the Two Parts of Philosophy into One Whole. More specifically, Kant writes that the power of judgment “will likely effect a transition from the pure faculty of cognition, i.e., from the domain of the concepts of nature, to the domain of the concept of pure freedom” (Critique of the Power of Judgment 66). 5 For an alternative commentary on the connection between reflective judgment and the essay see Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text. 6 The self-finding equilibrium Musil attributes to the feelings and the faculties recalls the free accord into which faculties of reason, imagination, and understanding fall in the case of Kantian aesthetic judgment. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties 49. 7 For a more detailed account of Mach’s positivism and Musil’s relation to it see Chapter 4 above, page 102. 8 See above, page 30 ff and also Latour, Pandora’s Hope 219–28.

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Musil, Robert. Diaries. Ed. Mark Mirsky. Trans. Phillip Payne. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1998. ——. “The German as Symptom.” Precision and Soul. 150–92. ——. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Adolf Frisé. 2 vols. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. ——. “Helpless Europe.” Precision and Soul. 116–33. ——. The Man Without Qualities. Trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ——. “Mind and Experience.” Precision and Soul. 134–49. ——. On Mach’s Theories. Ed. G. H. von Wright. Trans. Kevin Mulligan. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1982. ——. “On the Essay.” Precision and Soul. 48- 51. ——. Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses. Ed. and Trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ——. “Sketch of What the Writer Knows.” Precision and Soul. 61–5. ——. Tagebücher. Ed. Adolph Frisé. 2 vols. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976. Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. ——. “Nietzsche, Modernity, Aestheticism.” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.. 223–51. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ——. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ——. “The Dionysiac World View.” The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. 120-138. ——. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ——. Human, All Too Human. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ——. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. 141–53. ——. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 57–123. ——. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Vintage, 1968. Nübel, Birgit. Robert Musil: Essayismus als Selbstreflexion der Moderne. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Ostermann, Eberhard. “Robert Musil und die Meinung: Zur Utopie der induktiven Gesinnung.” Denkformen-Lebensformen: Tagung des Engeren Kreises der Allgemeinen Gesellschaft für Philosophie in Deutschland,

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Index

Adorno, Theodor W. 7, 105–6, 114 on the essay 105–6 and Max Horkheimer 114 aestheticism 115–17 avant-garde historical avant-garde 117–18, 119, 120 postmodern avant-garde 120–2 Bürger, Peter aestheticism 115–17 historical avant-garde 117–18 Condorcet, Marquis de 137, 139 Corax 141 delegitimation 18, 45 dereification (Entdinglichung ) 11, 24, 30, 33, 102, 108, 135, 154 Derrida, Jacques 2, 29, 92–3, 107, 120–1 Descartes, René 22, 45, 60–1, 89, 90, 96, 105 determining judgment see Kant and Essayismus dialectic of enlightenment 3, 12, 35–7, 90–1, 107–8, 113, 138 Dialectic of Enlightenment 28, 114 essayism (Essayismus) see Musil and Montaigne Foucault, Michel 26–7, 84, 92–3, 106–7, 109–10

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Gasché, Rodolphe on determining vs reflective judgment 146–8 “mere” (bloß) form 147–8 purposiveness, principle of 147 Habermas, Jürgen communicative (intersubjective) reason 3, 3n. 5 dialectic of enlightenment 3, 35–7, 91, 107 and Hegel 3, 36, 90–2 and Heidegger 3 and Nietzsche 3, 12, 35, 36–7, 92, 93, 107 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 2–3, 11, 12, 15–16, 35, 37, 110 project of Enlightenment 35, 48, 106–7, 110 project of Modernity 16–17, 28, 51, 89–92, 94, 102, 104, 121, 137 Theory of Communicative Action 3n. 5, 137 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 17, 90–2 Phenomenology of Spirit 17, 90–1 Heidegger, Martin Chapter 3 passim ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) 68 anxiety /dread (Angst) 68–9 authenticity/authentic Being (Eigentlichkeit / eigentliches Dasein) 68 Being-in-the-world 63

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Index

Being-with (Mitsein) 65 concernful involvement 64 conscience (Gewissen) 70 curiosity (Neugier) 67 Dasein, definition of 63, 72 and Descartes 61 distantiality (Abständigkeit) 65 equipment 64 fallen being (Verfall) 75 fallenness (Verfallenheit) 66 groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit) 66 idle talk (Gerede) 66 inauthenticity / inauthentic Being (Uneigentlichkeit / uneigentliches Dasein) 67, 68 leveling-down (Einebung) 66, 75 ontical Being vs. ontological being 73, 73n. 6, 82, 89 phenomenology 83–4, 112 as postmodern 61 potentiality-for-Being 68, 69 presence-to-hand (Vorhandensein) 63 publicness 66–8 readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) 64–5 resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) 71 solicitude (Fürsorge) 65 the They (das Man) 66 throwness (Geworfenheit) 71, 75 uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) 69 worldhood 64 Horkheimer, Max (and Theodor Adorno) 28, 114–15 Idealism as grand narrative 17, 25, 45, 121 instrumental reason Bürger on 115–19 Habermas on 3, 90–3, 106–7, 137 Jonnson on 114–15 Lyotard on 121–2

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Musil on 123–5, 129–30, 135 judgment (determining vs. reflective) 146–8 Joyce, James 1 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Power of Judgment 141, 145–6, 145n. 4 determining vs. reflective judgment 14, 141, 145–8 idea of totality 142 immanent critique 16, 35–6, 42 regulative use of an idea 141–2, 144–5 Latour, Bruno critique of postmodernism 25–30 Culture and Nature 21–3 on democracy 153 modern Constitution 5–6, 22, 26–8 modernism 4n. 8, 23 nonmodern(ism) 6, 11, 21–33 purification and mediation (translation) 5, 21–30, 118–20 Science #2 32–3 science wars 5 on Socrates 30–2, 153 We Have Never Been Modern 4–6, 21 logocentrism 2, 7, 29, 109 Lukács, Georg 114 Lyotard, Jean-François aesthetic of the beautiful / sublime 120 avant-garde (modern and postmodern) 119, 120–2 conventionalism 140–1 Corax 141–2 le différend 121–2 The Differend 121

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Index grand narratives 17–18 idea of multiplicity / diversity 142–3 incommensurability of language games 20, 122, 138, 142 judgment without criteria 140–3 Just Gaming 13, 20–1, 138–45 language games 17, 20, 29, 138–9, 142–4 legitimation 17, 18, 121 maximization of (Kantian) idea 141–3 nature of the social bond 139, 142 “paganism” 140–1, 153 performativity 18–19, 121 on Plato 138–9 politics of opinions 140–4 The Postmodern Condition 17, 18, 20, 120–2, 138, 139, 142 prescriptive vs. descriptive statements 20, 138–40, 143, 153 on reflective judgment 141, 145 regulative use of an idea 141–3 science of politics 138–40 Mach, Ernst Analysis of Sensations 103 critique of causality 103 critique of physical concepts 103 functional relations (functional understanding) 103, 152 Musil’s dissertation on see On Mach’s Theories positivism 18, 102 Maeterlinck, Maurice 9 Marcuse, Herbert 116, 117 Möglichkeit, Möglichkeitsmensch, and Möglichkeitssinn see Musil Montaigne, Michel de 96–8, 111 Moser, Walter 9, 84–6 Musil, Robert Age of Facts 107–8, 123

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175

Eigenschaften 73–9, 89 Eigenschaftslosigkeit 72–7, 150 description of emotional experience 148–9 equivocal relation to Modernity Chapter 2 passim Essayismus and deconstruction (Umbildung) 85 as Denkmethode 47, 85 contra denotative discourse 8 as dereification 7, 11, 33, 54–5, 101–2, 110, 112, 130, 132, 135, 153–4 as discursive praxis / strategy 4, 7, 9–11, 47, 58, 62, 90, 94–5, 101–2, 108, 113, 132, 151, 154 as discursive space 3, 6–7, 44, 58, 145, as experiment 7, 13, 47, 50–1, 56, 85–6, 123, 145 and functional understanding 52, 74, 102–4, 106, 109–10, 152–3 and inductive sensibility 132–3 and interdiscursivity 9, 84–6 as life praxis 80–1 as mode of subjectivity 95, 100–2 and phenomenology 83–7 as reflective judgment 148–53 between science and art 6–7, 33, 95–6, 110 contra subject-centered reason 93–6, 98, 102, 106 and textual subjectivity 13, 96–102, 109 ethics nature of ethical experience 100, 148 vs. morality 94, 127 historical explanation 39

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Index

The Man Without Qualities Agathe 51, 54–7, 81, 129–31 Arnheim 80, 124–5 Diotima 80, 124–8 experimentation with autonomy / sublation 13, 123–30 instrumental reason 123–4, 128–30 Leinsdorf 125 Moosbrugger 49, 133 Parallel Campaign (Parallelaktion) 124–5 Secretariat of Precision and Soul 134, 151 Seinesgleichen geschieht (pseudoreality prevails) 76–7, 150 Ulrich as man without qualities 55, 72–80, 100, 124, 150 Utopia (Utopie) 50–1 of essayism 80 of exact living 48–9, (der Exaktheit) of inductive sensibility (der induktiven Gesinnung) 131–5 of life in love (des Lebens in Liebe) 81 of the Other Condition (des anderen Zustands) 82, 130 as regulating idea 145 Möglichkeitsmensch 52, 74 as ontological vs. ontic 72–4, 76–7, 79 Möglichkeitssinn 12, 50–2, 56, 74, 76–9, 89, 145 and Nietzschean free spirits 50–4 normal (ordinary) condition (normaler Zustand) 2

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On Mach’s Theories (Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs) 103 opinions (die Meinungen) 134, 144 Other Condition (anderer Zustand) 2, 4, 10–11, 54–7, 81–2, 101, 108, 126, 128–32 partial solutions (Partialllösungen) 9, 109, 134 and positivism 45, 48 see also Mach precision (Genauigkeit) 7, 33, 48–50, 104, 110–11, 133–4, 151 ratioïd and nicht-ratioïd 46, 54–8, 95–6, 150–2 Utopia (Utopie) see Man Without Qualities Nehamas, Alexander 12, 37–40, 43–4, 51 on Nietzsche’s equivocal relation to Modernity 38–44 Nietzsche, Friedrich Chapter 2 passim Apollo and Dionysos 40–1, 44 critique of reason 40–4 as entry into postmodernity 35–7 European nihilism 38–9, 45 faith in truth 43 free spirits 51–3, 56 perspectivism 46–7, 50 and Schopenhauer 40–1 on Socratism 40–2 nonmodern(ism) Chapter 1 passim Proust, Marcel 1 purification and mediation see Latour rationalization, process of 35, 48, 137–8 reflective judgment 14, 141, 144, 145–9, 148n. 5, 152–3 see also Essayismus

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Index regulating ideas (Kantian) 141–2, 144–5

177

Socrates 30–2, 40–2, 153 Tönnies, Ferdinand 114

science versus politics 31–2 science wars 5, 31 Serres, Michel 11, 24 Snow, C. P. 5 “two cultures problem” 5 Socialism as grand narrative 17–18, 45, 121 and Latour 25

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Utopia (Utopie) see Man Without Qualities Weber, Max 137

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