On Robert Musil's "The Man without Qualities"

How the the philosophical novel clarifies the ideas of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and other philosophers, and why existentialist questions are more relevant than ever, today.

“There is nothing one can hold responsible for this, nor can one say how it all came about. There are no persons or ideas or specific phenomena that one can fight against. There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything…”

-Robert Musil[1]

Throughout his philosophical novel The Man without Qualities, author Robert Musil wrestles with this question, maybe the key question of modern life, of why there is “just something missing in everything.” He takes this as an existential fact of the modern world, and his novel is an exploration of the effects of this fact, and a look at how different types of people deal with this fact. The novel is sometimes grouped in with Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in a trinity of the three best works of 20th-century literature, but it is by far the least discussed. But as life becomes even more like how Musil described—characterized by how there’s something missing in everything—his novel only becomes more relevant.

Before becoming a novelist, Musil was a talented, successful engineer. He uses his scientific mind to probe the meaninglessness and absurdity at the center of modern existence, in ways that resonate increasingly as the world gets exponentially worse, with seemingly no end in sight. He dissects the technical, dynamic nature of modern life, and the lack of a correspondingly dynamic evolution in the human personality, in the self. The experience of modern existence is as the external world gets more amazing, but the internal world gets more impoverished—and it seems like these two tendencies can just keep on accelerating, with no end, or reconciliation. As modern life bombards us with ever more input, the content of the human personality as such seems to wither. The overstimulation of modern life, combined with the hollowness of liberal bourgeois freedom, worked in a kind of negative dialectic against the formation, coherence, and integrity of the self--this was of great concern to Musil, as it was to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, but Musil brings a 20th century novelist’s and engineer’s eye to it. Kierkegaard, in particular, echoes Musil’s concern that we no longer have enough context or opportunity for encounters that facilitate the process of selfhood. For Kierkegaard, the self is only actual once it reaches the level of ethical choice--the kinds of ethical choices that foster what he calls “the inmost and holiest thing of all in a man, the unifying power of personality…”[1] Before this stage, we are stuck in what he calls the “aesthetic stage” of life, where we are only capable of experiencing life on an aesthetic level, in terms of what is interesting or boring to us, before quickly moving on to the next thing—some people stay in this stage their whole lives. The so-called “ethical stage,” where the individual starts to be able to make choices and commitments—rather than just responding to stimuli that you find interesting, as in the aesthetic stage. For Kierkegaard, the great moral problem of the “present age,” as he called it, of modernity, is a lack of meaningful choices, of a context in which to make them, and so a crisis of selflessness.

We have so much stimulation, so much confusion, so much uncertainty. Everything moves so fast and none of it makes much sense, and doesn’t seem especially worth engaging in. Kierkegaard wrote brilliantly about this feeling in the early 19th century, in ways that are all too resonant today. This crisis of indecision Kierkegaard foresees is has two parts--in modern life providing too many choices, too much stimulation, overwhelming us, and making our choices harried and haphazard. But Kierkegaard also sees a deeper tendency in the “present age” to buy into what he thought was a dangerous illusion—that one may put off their most important choices indefinitely, what he calls “the choice of life,” transcending from the aesthetic stage to the ethical, indefinitely, without it having an impact on their self-development or self-understanding. In other words—the superficiality of modern existence, how light and fake liberal bourgeois freedom and socializing are, leads us to live lives without any urgent need to make moral, spiritual, or ethical commitments or choices, which leads to a society in which existential crises are normalized.

So the problem of modernity for Kierkegaard is not so much that bad things are happening, but that nothing with existential significance will be able to happen, because the possibility conditions of selfhood, of subjectivity itself, have been so degraded. Kierkegaard was the first to really dissect the kind of smooth, featurelessness of modern existence that has become so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore. He sees one thing above all coming to dominate the experience of modern life—the crowd, the mass. The crowd is the opposite of what we need to be, if we are to be able to make the kind of meaningful choices that facilitate the process of self-formation that constitutes what Kierkegaard calls the “stages on life’s way.” A crowd can’t really choose—what is a choice that a crowd makes? At best, it will be one that a lot of people in that crowd are unhappy with. In the modern world, Kierkegaard says that “Nobody wants to be this strenuous thing: an individual; it demands an effort. But everywhere services are readily offered through the phony substitute: a few! Let us get together and be a gathering, then we can probably manage. Therein lies mankind’s deepest demoralization.” The individual has a hard time in the world—it’s always been that way. That’s what the story of Socrates is mostly about—the emergence onto the world-historical stage of someone so individualistic, on a scale that nobody had ever seen before, that nobody knew what to make of him, so they eventually felt like they had to just kill him! But Kierkegaard thinks that the present age is much more hostile to the individual than any other time in history—and there’s no doubt that he was right 200 years ago, and he’s even more right now. And since the modern world makes the conditions of individuality harder than ever, that means truth itself is in danger of dying off—a process that was somewhat in its early stages when he was writing, but is basically fully completed and irreversible at this point. As he wrote, “Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.” The crowd, the mass with no opinion, is all that we ever hear now—everything is dictated by its whim, but it has no essence, no being, no opinion, no perspective, no style. And that’s the whole problem with the world now—it’s dominated by aggressive, arrogant nothingness. Nothingness has come to so dominate existence now, and become so common, that we treat the only thing that is really something—the self itself—as nothing, as an afterthought. As he says, “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.” This kind of quiet, endless loss of the self as the defining feature.

Bourgeois society pumps us so full of so much noise, confusion, and superficiality, leaving us with no space for our own actual self to develop much content. We aren’t presented with meaningful choices, only constant superficial ones, so in the absence of real choice, we can’t reach higher stages of existential development. Musil picks up on this problem, and seeks to find a more “ethically satisfactory”[2] way of being in the modern world, so that existence is not experienced as missing its soul—so that modern life can feel like something rather than nothing. He wants to find a way of life that feels true, authentic, right. But he fully engages, with scientific detail and objectivity, the unpleasant truth that modern existence just doesn’t lend itself to feeling like anything other than nothing.

Yet everything is progressing and expanding and growing so much all around us all the time, so how could this be? The novel is set in dynamic, bustling Vienna, on the eve of the Great War. Musil balances the maximalism of modern reality, expanding with technology and science and big social projects—and the lack of any kind of corresponding dynamic feeling or growth, or even content, of the increasingly minimalistic self. The contrast between modernity’s technological growth and the static self-conception of humanity has resulted in sharper, firmer and more pervasive convictions that life is meaningless. We see everything happening, bigger and faster and more often, but it means less and less to us, because we mean less and less to ourselves.

The existential question is about what should be done to make life maximally meaningful, or at least minimally squandered. Musil addresses this question in the differing ways of being of two characters in two of his characters, Walter and Ulrich. Walter sees value and meaning in life, even modern Vienna, while Ulrich, the titular “man without qualities,” does not. Ulrich takes a cynical, darkly absurdist view of life, while Walter views life as more or less a pleasant, hopeful prospect. Walter takes a more accretive perspective to existence, while Ulrich’s perspective is more totalizing—Walter can take life as it comes, allowing meaning to build up by accretion, but Ulrich needs to find total meaning all at once, and since he never can, he holds existence itself to be meaningless and worthless.

The ethical drama of the novel is perhaps most succinctly stated in this exchange between Walter and Clarisse, boyhood friends of Ulrich’s who have become lovers in adulthood, and are discussing Ulrich: “…I can tell you that the strength you marvel at in him is pure emptiness.”[3] Walter is doing his best to convince Clarisse that her admiration for Ulrich is misplaced, because for all of Ulrich’s many brash, intriguing qualities, there is no integral, unified person at the center of it. For all the many sharp, vivid qualities Ulrich has, that so set him apart from everyone else, he himself is, mostly, nothing. He appears strong, dynamic, and confident because there is a vast interconnected web of interests, capacities, talents, opinions, theories, and competencies where the self should be. This may sound like a desirable way of being, but Ulrich carries it to an extreme. He is not simply a cool guy with lots of interests and talents-- he is a point on which talents and interests converge; as Musil writes, “…he had to suppose that the personal qualities he had achieved in this way had more to do with one another than with him…If Ulrich had been asked to say what he was really like he would have been at a loss, for like so many people he had never tested himself other than by a task and his relation to it.”[4] Existence itself has been reduced to a collection of processes, systems, competencies, and tasks.

For Walter, who does have some appreciation for intellect, culture, and art, the “pure emptiness” he sees at Ulrich’s core is a betrayal of what it means to live a good, meaningful life, and so is morally unacceptable. Ulrich would never think in those terms. Walter is aware of the hypocrisies of past ages and of the value in questioning tradition, but not to the extent that the very idea of being a person dissolves into dust as well, as it does for Ulrich. Clarisse has chosen to live with Walter, while only admiring Ulrich from a safe distance, and that’s for a good reason. Ulrich is attractive to Clarisse as a sort of fascinating curiosity, because he epitomizes the illness of the modern age:  “…that experiences have made themselves independent of people…”[5] He is more a collection of experiences than a person. Much is done by the modern person, much more than could have been done by even the most advanced of premodern persons, but Musil shows that the tradeoff is a hollowing out of the very self that has all of these new experiences. The modern man accrues so many qualities in order to navigate and make sense of modern life, but he ends up not really adding up to much—your qualities have you, rather than you having them. The idea of being a person is itself an absurd proposition to Ulrich, while Walter thinks human dignity can still be salvaged, that an meaningful way of being can still be salvaged from the wreckage of modernity, of the death of God and the reign of absurdity, meaninglessness, and nihilism. Ulrich is a collection of experiences and philosophical flourishes that happens to have human form, while Walter is an integral person who has moderate, sensible interests, he partakes in a variety of experiences and dabbles in philosophical speculations, and doesn’t lose himself in them. Ulrich is more of an agglomerative collection of attributes, than a conglomerative entity reaching out to experience the world. The fact that Walter can regard Ulrich as missing something vital, as being devoid of an essential content, implies that he has possession of these qualities himself. Walter seems to have struck a balance between having a reasonable assortment of experiences and insights, without allowing those experiences and insights to overwhelm his essential being. He is not his experiences—he has his experiences. Ulrich has done and thought so much that he himself has vanished in the doing and thinking of these things, while Walter has more skillfully navigated these problems.

Aware of the attraction Ulrich’s way of being has for Clarisse, Walter feels compelled to defend the basic idea of living a healthy adult life and of being a person, declaring to Clarisse: “Everything Ulo tells you is inhuman. I promise you I have the courage, when I come home, simply to have a cup of coffee with you, listen to the birds, take a little walk, chat with a neighbor, and let the day fade out quietly: that’s human life!”[6] The fact that this basic picture of human life needs to be defended suggests how far along Ulrich’s brand of emptiness has progressed in attractiveness and plausibility. This is also an insight into the specific corrosive effects of modernity, of having made the sort of quiet, peaceful, serene evenings that premodern persons would have been thrilled to experience into oppressively dull slogs. The merits of a peaceful, quiet evening would not have needed to be defended to a premodern person, but to modern eyes, such merits are very much in doubt. There’s something missing in everything, as Musil says—even in perfectly content, peaceful evenings. The possibility of happiness, contentment, and simply living a good life is thrown into doubt by every facet of Ulrich’s being. Everything he says, even down to his appearance and his gestures, question not only the possibility of happiness, but its value. The question is—why would Clarisse find emptiness attractive and confuse it with strength? And why would Walter need to point out that Ulrich’s strength is emptiness, and that this emptiness is bad? How has everything gotten so confused?

In locating the meaning of life in the modern world in its smaller quieter simpler moments, Walter is echoing Nietzsche’s critique of conventional morality. Modern life has less room for the extremes, the great, profound experiences, and the revelations which used to be the essence of virtue and morality—rather, ethical stakes now are much lower, and are entwined in more modest experiences. As Nietzsche says, “Wrath, hatred, love, pity, desire, recognition, joy, pain: all these are names indicating extreme conditions; the milder and middle stages, and even more particularly the ever active lower stages, escape our attention, and yet it is they which weave the warp and woof of our character and destiny.”[7] Walter likewise claims that the ethical question of the meaning of life, “the one question worth thinking about,”[8] is a subtle, nuanced concern embedded into basic daily choices of comportment and attitude. Musil says of Walter that “Since everything became for him an ethical movement, he could hold forth convincingly on the immorality of ornament, the hygiene of simple forms…”[9] Walter finds ethical value in the smallest experiences of daily life, and so life has plenty of meaning for him. He doesn’t have Ulrich’s problem. This ability of Walter’s is significant--Walter is an example of the “minority” that Nietzsche speaks of in this passage: “When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences--their insignificant, everyday experiences--so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others--and how many there are!--are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.”

What is this ability that the “minimality” has to “make much of little” really about? Walter’s view of life is such that meaning accretes gradually but steadily through his countless basic, quiet, pleasant moments. Ulrich, on the other hand, dismisses the possibility of meaning entirely because the grand, soul-forming, challenging experiences he views as the crucible of meaning seem unreachable in the mediocre modern world. Ulrich is an expert of making little of much—he could have every experience and still see it as meaningless. Since Ulrich sees no means for experiencing the heroic, mettle-testing, proving grounds in which a meaningful life may be forged, he dismisses existence entirely. His ideas about what a meaningful life consists of are incompatible with the lowness of the modern world around him. For Walter, the heroic, great-souledness Ulrich pines for is an illusion, a fantasy, and despite its posturing as the peak of virtue, is actually far easier than finding true fulfillment in the really achievable, present realities of modern life. Ulrich, rather than a dynamic, great souled warrior-poet, is in fact far weaker than his posturing, as it takes a stronger, more disciplined character to take responsibility for charging one’s daily stream of minor interactions and experiences with moral weight. This would be a way to cure oneself from boredom and from the modern symptom of sensing that something is missing in everything, to see oneself as a permanently unfinished construct that can be solidified and infused with ethical substance based on how one responds to the countless small tests of daily life.

Ulrich seeks a totalizing experience of meaning, granted by grand tests of one’s moral worth. In lieu of such occasions, now impossible in our diminished modern world, it is better to reconceive the many small things one is faced with every day as occasions for meaning-making. Rather than bitterly deriding the lack of moral proving grounds in our fallen modern world, we should view whatever is around as chances for meaningfulness to accrete in our lives. Nietzsche’s early aphorism “Pangs of conscience after parties” illustrates how this idea of investing moral weight into situations not conventionally associated with grander meaning may manifest itself:

Why do we feel pangs of conscience after ordinary parties? Because we have taken important matters lightly; because we have discussed people with less than complete loyalty, or because we were silent when we should have spoken; because we did not on occasion jump up and run away; in short, because we behaved at the party as if we belonged to it.[10]

If we take matters lightly in our small moments, then we end up having a lightness and emptiness to our entire existence. Most people would treat a dinner party as simply a chance to eat and gossip, and be perfectly content in doing so; but the minority, who knows how to make much of little, like Walter, will sense it as a chance to improve himself. The small moments are our greatest chance to find some kind of moral weight for ourselves in the modern world. Walter shows how this might still exist in this world, and his defense of the fundamental value of human existence as a whole comes not from regarding existence as a forum in which one may “hold forth on the immorality of ornament,” and use a mediocre dinner party as a testing ground for one’s earnestness the next. Life should not be considered valuable from the start, or viewed as an abstract, looming proposition that is inherently meaningful, in a way that will always elude our understanding—rather, after having exercised minor moral victories, one becomes more aware of circumstances for confronting oneself and one’s surroundings in an ethically charged way, and life retroactively gains meaning by accretion. This is the difference between Walter’s accretive existential perspective—that existence gains meaning bit by bit in the small moments—and Ulrich’s more totalizing approach, that the meaning of existence is an all or nothing proposition—that since you can’t find it all anywhere at once, it doesn’t exist anywhere.

To Walter, Ulrich’s pure emptiness, a reaction to the dissolution of the availability of grand, extreme phenomena, is itself just another kind of extremeness, and an example of how Ulrich, for all of his seemingly sophisticated postmodern immoralism, misses the point of what the new way of finding meaning should be. That is, it ought to be measured out steadily in our daily lives, following the accretive principle Musil lays out early in the novel: “A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody’s little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats.”[11] Walter finds Ulrich to be so ridiculous and misguided because Ulrich reacts to the absence of “rare heroic feats” in postmodern life by negating life entirely, rather than realizing that moral weight and, subsequently, meaningfulness, is generated through the sum of little everyday efforts.

Yet the question remains—why would Clarisse confuse emptiness with strength? What about our situation today would cause someone to do this? The 20th Century philosopher E. M. Cioran analyzes our postmodern situation by noting that “The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.”[12] The strongest people, then, are those who are so abundantly full of life that every conception of meaning falls short of their requirements, and because they are so fully alive they end up hollowing themselves out in their endless search for authenticity. Clarisse interprets Ulrich’s emptiness as the high price he has paid for being so full—fullness looks like emptiness, and emptiness looks like fullness.

Walter and Ulrich are similar in their desire to evaluate each experience according to strict ethical standards, yet Walter’s authenticity is accretive while Ulrich’s is totalizing. Ulrich’s first encounter with his mistress Bonadea shows how he treats his experiences in a totalizing way, emptying himself out onto them and then complaining of his emptiness. After getting into a fight with three men on the street, Ulrich is rescued by a woman in a cab, and lays down in the back and frantically says “The fascination of such a fight…was the rare chance it offered in civilian life to perform so many varied, vigorous, yet precisely coordinated movements in response to barely perceptible signals at a speed that made conscious control quite impossible.”[13] Ulrich treats the confrontation as he treats everything--as if the experience could only be meaningful if he exhaustively articulates its internal logic. He is so desperate to develop a self, that every experience becomes charged with the possibility of him finally figuring out who he is. He is only really alive, only really exists, in this kind of pure possibility. The feeling of lacking a self thus becomes compounded because every experience is looked toward as being the one that will tell him who he is, and they never do, so experience itself gradually comes to be regarded as meaningless.

It seems that Ulrich violates this crucial Nietzschean guideline: “Woe to the thinker who instead of being the gardener of his plants, is merely the soil from which they spring.”[14] Walter would be satisfied with the life of a gardener, because even though being a gardener might not be everything, it is something—but Ulrich is the soil, and as such is pure possibility; soil can produce many kinds of matter, based on environmental variables. As soil, every experience Ulrich encounters is potentially a nutritive element that will make him grow into something substantive and distinct. But because he expects the growth to take place all at once as the result of a single input, and no such totalizing input exists, he remains only dirt and never a gardener. Of course existence seems meaningless to Ulrich—he’s dirt!

Notes

[1] Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (New York: Vintage, 1995), 56.
[2] Mark M. Freed, Robert Musil and the NonModern (New York: Continuum, 2011), 150. [3] Ibid., 62.
[4] Ibid., 157.
[5] Ibid., 158.
[6] Ibid., 66.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 119.
[8] Musil, 275.
[9] Ibid., 59.
[10] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 185.
[11]Musil, 7.
[12] E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 45. [13] Musil, 24.
[14] Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day, 295.