No More Learning

But he found that they always made far too much of it, and when the stays in mental hospitals became too unpleasant, he main- tained outright that he was only pretending. The know-it-ails would ask him how loud the sounds were; a senseless question, because of course what he heard . was sometimes as loud as a thunderclap, and sometimes the merest whisper. Even the physical pains that some- times plagued him could be unbearable or slight enough to be imagi- nary. That wasn't the important thing. Often he could not have described exactly what he saw, heard, and felt, but he knew what it was. It could be very blurred; the visions came from outside, but a shimmer of observation told him at the same time that they were really something inside himself. The important thing was that it is not at all important whether something is inside or outside; in his condition, it was like clear water on both sides of a transparent sheet of glass.
When he was feeling on top of things Moosbrugger paid no atten- tion at all to his voices and visions but spent his time in thinking. He called it thinking because he had always been impressed with the word. He thought better than other people because he thought both inside and outside. Thinking went on inside him against his will. He said that thoughts were planted in him. He was hypersensitive to the merest trifles, as a woman is when her breasts are tight with milk, but this did not interfere with his slow, manly reflectiveness. At such times his thoughts flowed like a stream running through a lush meadow swelled by hundreds ofleaping brooks.
Now Moosbrugger had let his head drop and was looking down at the wood between his fingers. "A squirrel in these parts is called a
tree kitten," it occurred to him, "but just let somebody try to talk about a tree cat with a straight face! Everyone would prick up their ears as if a real shot had gone off among the farting sound of blanks on maneuvers. In Hesse, on the other hand, it's called a tree fox. Any man who's traveled around knows such things. "
But oh, how curious the psyc. hiatrists got when they showed him a picture of a squirrel and he said: "That's a fox, I guess, or it could be a hare, or maybe a cat or something. " They'd always shoot a question right back at him then: "How much is fourteen plus fourteen? " and he would say in his deliberate way, "Oh, about twenty-eight to forty. " This "about" gave them trouble, which made Moosbrugger grin. It was really so simple. He knew perfectly well that you get twenty- eight when you go on from fourteen to another fourteen; but who says you have to stop there? Moosbrugger's gaze would always range a little farther ahead, like that of a man who has reached the top of a ridge outlined against J. :he sky and fmds that behind it there are other, similar ridges. And if a tree kitten is no cat and no fox, and has teeth like a hare's, and the. fox eats the hare, you don't have to be so partic- ular about what you call it; you just know it's somehow sewntogether out of all those things and goes scampering over the trees. Moos- brugger's experience and conviction were that no thing could be sin- gled out by itself, because things hang together. It had happened that he said to a girl, "Your sweet rose lips," but suddenly the words gave way at their seams and something upsetting happened: her face went gray, like earth veiled in a mist, there was a rose sticking out ofit on a long stem, and the temptation to take a knife and cut it off, or punch it back into the face, was oveiWhelming. Ofcourse, Moosbrugger did not always go for his knife; he only did that when he couldn't get rid of the temptation any other way. Usually he used all his enonnous strength to hold the world together.
In a good mood, he could look a man in the face and see in it his own face, as it might gaze back at him from among the minnows and bright pebbles of a shallow stream; in a bad mood, he could tell by a fleeting glance at a man's face that here was the same man who al- ways gave hl. m trouble, everywhere, no matter how differently he disguised himself each time. How can anyone object to this? W e all have trouble with the same man almost every time. If we were to investigate who the people are we get so idiotically fixated on, it is
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 59
260 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
bound to tum out to be the one with the lock to whi<;h we have the key. And in love? How many people look at the same beloved face day in, day out, yet when they shut their eyes can't say what it looks like? Or even aside from love and hate; how incessantly things are subject to change, depending on habit, mood, point of view! How qften joy bums out and an indestructible core of sadness emerges! How often a man calmly beats up another, whom he might as easily leave in peace. Life forms a surface that acts as if it oould not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing. Moos- brugger always kept his legs solidly planted on real earth, holding them together, sensibly trying to avoid whatever might confuse him. But sometimes a word burst in his mouth, and what a revolution, what a dream ofthings then welled up out ofsuch a cold, burned-out double word as tree kitten or rose lips!
Sitting on that plank in his cell that was both his bed and his table, he deplored his education, which had not taught him to express him- self properly. The little creature with her mouse eyes who was still making so much trouble for him, even though she'd been under- ground for some time, made him angry. They were all on her side. He lumbered to his feet. He felt fragile, like charred wood. He was hungry again; the prison fare fell far short of satisfying a huge man like him, and he had no money for better. In such a state it was im- possible for him to think of everything they wanted to lmow. One of these changes had come on, for days and weeks, the way March comes, or April, and then this business had happened. He lmew nothing more about it than the police already had in their files; he didn't even lmow how it had got into their flles. The reasons, the con- siderations he could remember, he had already stated in court any-
way. But what had really happened seemed to him as if he had suddenly said fluently in a foreign language something that made him feel good but that he could no longer repeat.
"I just want it over and done with as soon as possible! " Moosbrug- ger thought. ·
6o
EXCURSION INTO THE REALM OF LOGIC AND MORALS
Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility.
These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health but also have a substandard disease. Nature has a peculiar prefer- ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus, she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe- cility and sanity. But the law takes no notice of this. It says: Non datur tertium sive medium inter duo contradictoria, or in plain language, a person is either capable or not capable of breaking the law; between two contraries there is no third or middle state. It is this ability to choose that makes a person liable to punishment. His liability to pun- ishment makes him legally a person, and as a person in the legal sense he shares in the suprapersonal benefaction of the law. Anyone who cannot grasp this right away should think of the cavalry. A horse that goes berserk every time someone attempts to mount it is treated with special care, given the softest bandages, the best riders, the choicest fodder, and the most patient handling. But ifa cavalryman is guilty of some lapse, he is put in irons, locked in a flea-ridden cage, and deprived of his rations. The reasoning behind this difference is that the horse belongs merely to the empirical animal kingdom, while the dragoon belongs to the logical and moral kingdom. So un- derstood, a person is distinguished from the animals-and, one may add, from the insane-in that he is capable, according to his intellec- tual and moral faculties, ofacting against the law and ofcommitting a
crime. Since a person's liability to punishment is the quality that ele- vates him to the status of a moral being in the first place, it is under- standable that the pillars of the law grimly hang on to it.
There is also the unfortunate complication that court psychiatrists,
262 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
who would be called upon to oppose this situation, are usually far more timid professionally than the jurists. They certify as really in- sane only those persons they cannot cure-which is a modest exag- geration, since they cannot cure the others either. They distinguish between incurable mental diseases, the kind that with God's help will improve after a while of their own accord, and the kind that the doctor cannot cure either but that the patient could have avoided, assuming of course that the right influences and considerations had providentially been brought to bear on him in time. These second and third groups supply those lesser patients whom the angel of medicine treats as sick people when they come to him in his private practice, but whom he shyly leaves to the angel of law when he en- counters them in his forensic practit! e.
Such a case was Moosbrugger. In the course of his life, respectable enough except when interrupted by those unaccountable fits of bloodthirstiness, he had as often been confined in mental institutions as he had been let go, and had been variously diagnosed as a para- lytic, paranoiac, epileptic, and manic-depressive psychotic, until at his recent trial two particularly conscientious forensic psychiatrists had restored his sanity to him. Of course, there was not a single per- son in that vast crowded courtroom, the doctors included, who was not co~vincedthat 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 con- scientious minds. For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly re- sponsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.
Not that this excludes the eXistence of persons whose circum- stances and predispositions make it hard for them to "resist immoral impulses" and "opt for the good," as the lawyers put it, and Moos- brugger was such a person, in whom circumstances that would have no effect at all on others were enough to trigger the "inten"t'' to com- mit an offense. First, however, his powers of reasoning and judgment were sufficiently intact, in the view of the court, so that an effort on
his part could just as well have left the crime uncommitted, and there was no reason to exclude him from the moral estate of responsibility. Second, a well-ordered judicial system demands that every culpable act that is wittingly and willingly performed be punished. And third, judicial logic assumes that in all insane persons-with the exception of the most unfortunate, who when asked to multiply 7 times 7 stick out their tongue, or answer "Me" when asked to name His Imperial and Royal Majesty-there is still present a minimal power of dis- crimination and self-control and that it would only have taken a spe- cial effort of intelligence and willpower to recognize the criminal nature of the deed and to resist the criminal impulses. It is surely the least one has a right to expect from such dangerous persons!
Law courts resemble wine cellars in which the wisdom of our forefathers lies in bottles. One opens them and could weep at how unpalatable the highest, most effervescent, degree of the human striving for precision can be before it reaches perfection. And yet it seems to intoxicate the insufficiently seasoned mind. It is a well- known phenomenon that the angel of medicine, if he has listened too long to lawyers' arguments, too often forgets his own mission. He then folds his wings with a clatter and conducts himself in court like a reserve angel of law.
THE lDEAL OF THE THREE TREA TISES, OR THE UTOPIA OF EXACT LIVING
This is how Moosbrugger had come by his death sentence. It was only thanks to the influence of Count Leinsdorf and His Grace's fri(mdship for Ulrich that there was now a chance to review Moos- brugger's mental condition one more time. Ulrich actually had no intention of taking any further interest in Moosbrugger's fate, theb. or later. The depressing mixture of brutality and suffering that is the
Pseudoreality Prevails · :z63
264 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
nature of such people was as distasteful to him as the blend of preci- sion and sloppiness that characterized the judgments usually pro- nounced upon them. He lmew precisely what he had to think of Moosbrugger, if he took a sober view of the case, and what measures one might try with such people who belong neither in prison nor in freedom and for whom the mental hospitals were not the answer ei- ther. He also realized that thousands of other people lmew this, too, and were constantly discussing every such problem from the aspects that each ofthem was interested in; he also knew that the state would eventually kill Moosbrugger because in the present state of incom- pleteness this was simply the cleanest, cheapest, and safest solution. It may be callous to resign oneself to this; but then, our speeding traffic claims more victims than all the tigers of India, yet the ruth- less, unscrupulous, and casual state of mind in which we put up with it is what also enables us to achieve our undeniable successes.
This state of mind, so perceptive in detail and so blind to the total picture, finds its most telling expression in a certain ideal that might be called the ideal of a life's work and that consists of no more than three treatises. There are intellectual activities where it is not the big books but the short monographs or articles that constitute a man's proud achievement. If someone were to discover, for instance, that under hitherto unobserved circumstances stones were able to speak, it would take only a few pages to describe and explain so earth-shat- tering a phenomenon. On the other hand, one can always write yet another book about positive thinking, and this is far from being of only academic interest, since it involves a method that makes it im- possible ever to arrive at a clear resolution of life's most important questions. Human activities might be graded by the quantity of words required: the more words, the worse their character. All the bowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to peo- ple flying, complete with proofs, would fill a hand~ of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. The thought sug- gests itself 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. .
Such had in fact been the mood and the tendency of a period-a
number of years, hardly of decades-of which Ulrich was just old enough to have lmown something. At that time people were think- ing-"people" is a deliberately vague way of putting it, as no one could say who and how many thought that way; let us say it was in the air-that perhaps life could be lived with precision. Today one won- ders what they could have meant by that. The answer would possibly be that a life's work can as easily be imagined as consisting of three poems or three actions as of three treatises, in which the individual's capacity for achievement is intensified to its highest degree. It would more or less come down to keeping silent when one has nothing to say, doing only the necessary where one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent unless one has that inef- fable sense of spreading one's arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation. One will observe that this would be the end of most of our inner life, but that might not be such a painful loss. The thesis that the huge quantities of soap sold testify to our great cleanliness need not ~pply to the moral life, where the more recent principle seems more accurate, that a strong compulsion to wash suggests a dubious state of inner hygiene. It would be a useful experiment to try to cut down to the minimum the moral expenditure (ofwhatever kind) that accompanies all our actions, to satisfy ourselves with being moral only in those exceptional cases where it really counts, but otherwise not to think differently from the way we do about standardizing pen- cils or screws. Perhaps not much good would be done that way, but some things would be done better; there would be no talent left, only genius; the washed-out prints that develop from the pallid resem- blance ofactions to virtues would disappear from the image oflife; in their place we would have these virtues' intoxicating fusion in holi- ness. In short, from every ton of morality a milligram of an essence would be left over, a millionth part of which is enough to yield an enchanting joy.
But the objection will be raised that this is a utopia. Of course it is. Utopias are much the same as possibilities; 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. If this possibility is disentangled from its restraints and allowed to develop, a utopia arises. It is like what happens when a scientist observes the change of an element
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 65
266 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
within a compound and draws his conclusions. Utopia is the experi- ment in which the possible change of an element may be obsezved, along with the effects of such a change on the compound phenome- non we call life. If the element under obsezvation is precision itself, one isolates it and allows it to develop, considering it as an intellec- tual habit and way of life, allowed to exert its exemplary influence on everything it touches. The logical outcome of this should be a human being full of the· paradoxical interplay of exactitude and indefinite- ness. He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the tem- perament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite. The stable internal conditions guaranteed by a sys- tem of morality have little value for a man whose imagination is geared to change. Ultimately, when the demand for the greatest and most exact fulfillment is transferred from the intellectual realm to that of the passions, it becomes evident-as alfeady indicated-that the passions disappear and that in their place arises something like a primordial fire of goodness.
Such is the utopia ofprecision. One doesn't know how such a man will spend the day, since he cannot continually be poised in the act of creation and will have sacrificed the domestic hearth fire of limited sensations to some imaginary cmlflagration. But this man of preci- sion exists already! He is the inner man who inhabits not only the scientist but the businessman, the administrator, the sportsman, and the technician, though for the present only during those daytime h~urs they call not their life but their profession. This man, given to taking everything seriously and without bias, is biased to the point of abhorrence against the idea of taking himself seriously, and there is, alas, no doubt that he would regard the utopia of himself as an im- moral experiment on persons engaged in serious business.
Which is why Ulrich, in his concern with the question of whether everything else should be subordinated to the most powerful forms ofinner achievement-in other words, whether a goal and a meaning can be found for what is happening and has happened to us-had . always, all his life, been quite alone.
THE EARTH TOO, BUT ESPECIALLY ULRICH, PAYS HOMAGE TO THE UTOPIA OF ESSAYISM
Precision, as a human attitude, demands precise action and precise being. It makes maximal demands on the doer and on life. But here a distinction must be made.
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 differ- ence being that the imaginary kind sticks to the facts and the pedan- tic kind to imaginary constructs. The precision, for instance, with which Moosbrugger's peculiar mentality was fitted into a two-thou- sand-year-old system of legal concepts resembled a madman's pe- dantic 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. But with respect to the big question of whether Moosbrugger could be legally condemned to death, the psychiatrists were absolutely precise: they did not dare say more than that Moosbrugger's clinical picture did not exactly corre- spond to any hitherto observed syndrome, and left any further con- clusions entirely to the jurists.
The courtroom on that occasion offered an image of life itself, in that all those energetic up-to-the-minute characters who wouldn't dream of driving a car more than five years old, or letting a disease be treated by methods that had been the best ten years ago, and who further give all their time, willy-nilly, to promoting the latest inven- tions and fervently believe in rationalizing everything in their domain . . . these people nevertheless abandon questions of beauty, justice, love, and faith-that is, all the questions of humanity-as long as their business interests are not involved, preferably to their wives or, where their wives are not quite up to it, to a subspecies of men given to intoning thousand-year-old phrases about the chalice and sword of life, to whom they listen casually, irritably, and skep'tically, without believing any of it but also without considering the possibility that it
268 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
might be done some other way. Thus there are really two kinds of outlook, which not only conflict with each other but, which is worse, usually coexist side by side in total noncommunication except to as- sure each other that they are both needed, each in its place. The one is satisfied to be precise and stick to the facts, while the other is not, but always looks at the whole picture and derives its insights from so-called great and eternal truths. The first achieves success, the other scope and prestige. Clearly, a pessimist could say that the re- sults in the first case are worth nothing and in the second case are not. true. For what use will it be on the Day ofJudgment, when all human achievements are weighed, to offer up three articles on formic acid, or even thirty? On the other hand, what do we know of the Day of Judgment if we do not even know what may have become of formic acid by then?
It was between these two poles of Neither and Nor that the pen- dulum of evolution was swinging when mankind first learned, more than eighteen but not quite twenty centuries ago, that there would be such a spiritual court at the end ofthe world. It corresponds to the experience that a swing in one direction is always followed by a swing in the opposite direction. And while it might be conceivable and de- sirable for such a revolution to proceed. as a spiral, which climbs · higher with every change of direction, for unknown reasons evolu- tion seldom gains more than it loses through detours and destruc- tion. So Dr. Paul Arnheim was quite right when he told Ulrich that world history never allows the negative to prevail; world history is optimistic, it always decides enthusiastically for the one, and only af- terward for its opposite! And so, too, the pioneer dreams of precision
were followed by no attempt whatever to realize them but were abandoned to the unwinged uses of engineers and scientists, while everyone else reverted to a more worthy and far-reaching frame of mind.
Ulrich could still remember quite well how uncertrunty had made its comeback. Complaints were heard in ever greater number from people who followed ·a somewhat uncertain calling-writers, critics, women, and those practicing the profession of being the new genera- tion-all protesting that pure knowledge tore apart every sublime achievement of mankind without ever being able to put it back to- gether, and they demanded a new humane faith, a return to inner
primal values, a spiritual revival, and all sorts ofthings ofthat kind. At first Ulrich had naively assumed that the outcries came from hard- riding people who had dismounted, limping, screaming to have their sores rubbed with soul; but he gradually realized that these repetitive calls for a new dispensation, which had struck him as so comical at first, were being echoed far and wide. Science had begun to be out- dated, and the unfocused type ofperson that dominates the present had begun to assert itself.
Ulrich had refused to take this seriously and went on developing his intellectual bent in his own way.
From the earliest youthful stirrings of self-confidence, which are often so touching, even moving, to look back upon in later years, all sorts of once-cherished notions lingered in his memory even now, among them the expression "living hypothetically. " It still expressed the courage and the inescapable ignorance of life that makes every step an act of daring without experience; it showed the desire for grand connections and the aura of revocability a young man feels as he hesitantly ventures into life. Ulrich felt that none of this really needed to be taken back. A thrilling sense of having been chosen for something is the best and the only certain thing in one whose glance surveys the world for the first time. If he monitors his feelings, he finds nothing he can accept without reservation. He seeks a possible beloved but can't tell whether it's the right one; he is capable ofkill- ing without being sure that he will have to. The drive of his own na- ture to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were fmal and complete. He suspects that the given order•ofthings is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no prin- ciple, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the set- tled, 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 atti- tude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclu- sions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end. He seeks to understand himself
Pseudoreality Prevails · 269
270 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may en- rich him inwardly, even ifit should be morally or intellectually taboo; he feels like a stride, free to move in any direction, from equilibrium to equilibrium, but always forward. And when he sometimes thinks he has found the right idea, he perceives that a drop of indescribable incandescence has fallen into the world, with a glow that makes the whole earth look different.
Later, when Ulrich's intellectual capacity was more highly devel- oped, this became an idea no longer connected with the vague word "hypothesis" but with a concept he oddly termed, for certain rea- sons, "essay. " It was more or less in 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-that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life. The value of an action or a quality, and indeed its meaning and nature, seemed to him to depend on its surrounding circumstances, on the aims it served; in short, on the whole--constituted now one way, now an- qther-to which it belonged. This is only a simple description of the fact that a murder can appear to us as a crime or a heroic act, and making love as a feather that has fallen from the wing of an angel or that of a goose. But Ulrich generalized this: all moral events take place in a field of energy'whose Constellation charges them with meaning. They contain good and evil the way an atom contains the possibilities of certain chemical combinations. They are what they
will become, so to speak; and just as the word "hard" denotes four entirely different essences, depending on whether it is connected with love, brutality, zeal, or discipline, the significance of all moral events seemed to him to be the function of other events on which they depended. In this way an open-ended system of relationships arises, in which independent meanings, such as are ascribed to ac- tions and qualities by way of a rough first approximation in ordinary life, no longer exist at all. What is seemingly solid in this system be- comes a porous pretext for many possible meanings; the event occur- ring becomes a symbol of something that perhaps may not be happening but makes itself felt through the symbol; and man as the quintessence of his possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his existence, confronts man as recorded fact, as reality, as charac-
ter. Accordingly, Ulrich felt that he was basically capable of every virtue and every baseness; the fact that in a balanced social order virtues as well as vices are tacitly regarded as equally burdensome attested for him to what happens in nature generally, that every play of forces tends in time toward an average value and average condi- tion, toward compromise and inertia. Ulrich regarded morality as it is commonly understood as nothing more than the senile form ofa sys- tem of energies that cannot be confused with what it originally was without losing ethical force.
It is possible that these views also reflected some uncertainty about life, but uncertainty is sometimes nothing more than mistrust ofthe usual certainties, and anyway, it is good to remember that even so experienced a person as mankind itself seems to act on quite simi- lar principles. In the long run it revokes everything it has done, to replace it with something else; what it used to regard as a crime it regards as a virtue, and vice versa; it builds up impressive frame- works of meaningful connections among events, only to allow them to collapse after a few generations. However, all this happens in suc- cession instead of as a single, homogeneous experience, and the chain of mankind's experiments shows no upward trend. By contrast, a conscious human essayism would face the task of transforming the world's haphazard awareness into a will. And many individual lines of development indicate that this could indeed happen soon. The hos- pital aide clothed in lily-white, who, with the help of acids, thins out a patient's stool in a white china dish in order to obtain a purple smear, rubbing it until the right hue rewards her attention, is already living, whether she knows it or not, in a world more open to change than is the young lady who shudders at the sight of the same stuff in the street. The criminal, caught up in the moral magnetic field of his act, can only move like a swimmer who has to go with the current that sweeps him along, as every mother knows whose child has ever suf- fered this fate, though no one would believe her, because there was no place for such a belief. · Psychiatry calls great elation "a hypomanic disturbance," which is like calling it a hilarious- distress, and regards all heightened states, whether of chastity or sensuality, scrupulosity or carelessness, cruelty or compassion, as pathologically suspect- how little would a healthy life mean if its only goal were a middle condition between two extremes!
How drab it would be if its ideal
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 71
272. · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
were really no more than the denial of the exaggeration of its ideals! To recognize this is to see the _moral :norm no longer as a set of rigid commandments but rather as a mobile equilibrium that at every mo- ment requires continual efforts at renewal. We are beginning tore- gard as too limiting the tendency to ascribe involuntarily acquired habits of repetitiveness to a man as his character, and then to make his character responsible for the repetitions. We are learning to rec- ognize the interplay between inner and outer, and it is precisely our understanding of the impersonal elements in man that has given us new clues to the personal ones, to certain simple patterns of behav- ior, to an ego-building instinct that, like the nest-building instinct of birds, uses a few techniques to build an ego out of many various ma- terials. We are already so close to knowing how to use certain influ- ences to contain all sorts of pathological conditions, as we can a wild mountain stream, and it will soon be a mere lapse of social responsi- bility or . a lingering clumsiness if we fail to transform criminals into archmgek at the right time. And there is so much more one could add, scattered manifestations of ~gs that have not yet coalesced to act together, the general effect of which is to make us tired of the crude approximations of simpler times, gradually to make us experi- e~ce the necessity of altering the basic forms and foundations of a moral order that over two thousand years has adjusted only piece- meal to evolving tastes and exchanging it for a new morality capable of fitting more closely the mobility of facts.
Ulrich was convinced that the only thing missing was the right for- mula, the expression that the goal of a movement must find in some happy moment before it is achieved, in order that the last lap can be accomplished. Such an expression is always risky, not yet justified by the prevailing state of affairs, a combination of exact and inexact, of precision and passion. But it was in just those years that should have spurred him on that something peculiar happened to Ulrich. He was no philosopher. Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they. subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought. This apparently also accounts for the pres- ence of great philosophers in times of great tyrants, while epochs of progressive civilization and democracy fail to bring forth a convinc- ing philosophy, at least to judge by the disappointment one hears so widely expressed on the subject. Hence today we have a terrifying
amount of philosophizing in brief bursts, so that shops are the only places where one can still get something without Weltanschauung, while philosophy in large chunks is viewed with decided mistrust. It is simply regarded as impossible, and even Ulrich was by no means innocent of this prejudice; indeed, in the light of his scientific back- ground, he took a somewhat ironic view of philosophy. This put him in a position where he was always being provoked to think about what he was observing, and yet at the same time was burdened with a certain shyness about thinking too hard.
· But what finally determined his attitude was still another factor. There was something in Ulrich's nature that in a haphazard, paralyz- ing, disarming way resisted all logical systematizing, the single- minded will, the specifically directed drives of ambition; it was also connected with his chosen term, "essayism," even though it con- tained the very elements he had gradually and with unconscious care eliminated from that concept. The accepted transla~on 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 ofbeing elevated to a truth under more favorable circumstances or of being exposed as an error (the only ones of that kind are those articles or treatises, chips from the scholar's work- bench, with which the learned entertain their special public); 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 subjectiv- ism. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inappli- cable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable. There have been more than a few such essayists, masters of the inner hovering life, but there would be no point in naming them. Their domain lies between reli- gion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry; they are saints with and without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adve·nture who have gone astray.
Nothing is more revealing, by the way, than one's involuntary ex- perience oflearned and sensible efforts to interpret such essayists, to tum their living wisdom into knowledge to live by and thus extract some "content" from the motion of those who were moved: but
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 73
274 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
about as much remains of this as of the delicately opalescent body of a jellyfish when one lifts it out of the water and lays it on the sand. The rationality of the uninspired will make the teachings of the in- spired crumble into dust, contradiction, and nonsense, and yet one has no right to call them frail and unviable unless one would also call an elephant too frail to survive in an airless environment unsuited to its needs. It would be regrettable ifthese descriptions were to evoke an i. mpression of mystery, or of a kind of music in which harp notes and sighing glissandi predominate. Th~ opposite is the case, a,nd the underlying problem presented itself to Ulrich not at all intuitively but quite soberly, in the following form: A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectiv- ity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants some- thing in between? Examples ofwhat lies in between can be found in every moral precept, such as the well-kno\vn and simple: Thou shalt not kill. One sees right off that th_at is neither a fact nor a subjective experience. We know that we adhere to it strictly in some respects, while allowing for a great many, if sharply defined, exceptions; but in a very large number of cases of a third kind, involving imagination, desires, drama, or the enjoyment of a news story, we vacillate errati- cally between aversion and attraction. What we cannot classify as ei- ther a fact or a subjective experience we sometimes call an imperative. We have attached such imperatives to the dogmas ofreli- gion and the law and thereby give them the status of deduced truth. But the novelists tell us about the exceptions, from Abraham's sacri- fice of Isaac to the most recent beauty who shot her lover, and dis- solve it again into something subjective. We can cling to one of these poles or let ourselves be swept back and forth between them by the tide-but with what feelings? The feeling of most people for this precept is a mixture of wooden obedience (including that of the "wholesome type" that flinches from even thinking of such a thing but, only slightly disoriented by alcohol or passion, promptly does it) and a mindless paddling about in a w~ve of possibilities. Is there re- ally no other approach to this precept? Ulrich felt that as things stood, a man longing to ·do something with all his heart does not know whether he should do it or leave it undone. And yet he sus- pected that it could be done, or not done, wholeheartedly. In them- selves, an impulse to act and a taboo were equally meaningless to
him. Linking them to a law from above or within aroused his critical intelligence; more than that, the need to ennoble a self-sufficient moment by giving it a noble pedigree diminished its value. All this left his heart silent, while only his head spoke; but he felt that there might be another way to make his choice coincide with his happiness. He might be happy because he didn't kill, or happy because he killed; but he could never be the indifferent fulflller of an imperative demanded of him. What he felt at this moment was not a command- ment; it was a region he had entered. Here, he realized, everything was already decided, and soothed the mind like mother's milk. But what gave him this insight was no longer thinking, nor was it feeling in the usual incoherent way: it was a "total insight" and yet again only amessage carried to him from far away by the wind, and it seemed to him neither true nor false, neither rational nor irrational; it. seized him like a faint, blissful hyperbole dropped into his heart.
And as little as one can make a truth out of the genuine elements of an essay can one gain a conviction from such a condition-at least not without abandoning the coridition, as a lover has to abandon love in order to describe it. The boundless emotion that sometimes stirred Ulrich without activating him contradicted his urge to act, which insisted on limits and forms. Now, it may be only right and natural to want to know before letting dne's feelings speak; he in- voluntarily imagined that what he wanted to find and someday would, even if it should not be truth, would be no less firm than truth. But in his special case, this made him rather like a man busily getting equipment together while losing interest in what it is meant for. If someone had asked him at any point while he was writing trea- tises on mathematical problems or mathematical logic, or engaged in some scientific project, what it was he hoped to achieve, he would have answered that there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live. But if one holds up an imperative for a long time without anything happening, the brain goes to sleep, just as the arm does that has held something up for too long; our thoughts cannot be expected to stand at attention indefi- nitely any more than soldiers On• parade in SUmmer; standing too long, they will simply fall down in a faint. As Ulrich had settled on his view of life around his twerity-sixth year, it no longer seemed quite genuine in his thirty-second. He had not elaborated his ideas any fur-
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 75
276 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ther, and apart from a vague, tense feeling such as one has when waiting for something with one's eyes closed, there was not much sign of personal emotion in him, since the days of his tremulous earli- est revelations had gone: Yet it was probably an underground move- ment of this kind that gradually slowed him down in his scientific work and kept him from giving it all he had. This generated a curious conflict in him. One must not forget that basically the scientific cast of mind is more God-oriented than the aesthetic mind, ready to sub- mit to "Him" the moment "He" deigns to show Himself under. the conditions it prescribes for recognizing Him, while our aesthetes, confronted with His manifestation, would find only that His talent was not original and that His view of the world was not sufficiently intelligible to rank Him with really God-given talents. Ulrich could not abandon himself to vague intimations as readily as anyone of that species could, but neither could he conceal from himself that in all those years of scientific scrupulosity he had merely been living against his grain. He wished something unforeseen would happen to him, for when he took what he som~whatwryly called his "holiday from life" he had nothing, in one direction or the other, that gave him peace.
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 and nothing had changed. He was waiting: all the time, he was letting himself be pushed this way and that in the insignificant and silly activity he had taken on, talking, gladly talking too much, living with the desperate tenacity of a fisherman casting his nets into an empty river, while he was doing nothing that had anything to do with the person he after all signified; deliberately doing nothing: he was waiting. He waited hid- ing behind his person, insofar as this word characterizes that part of a human being formed by the world and the course of life, and his quiet desperation, dammed up behind that fa~ade, rose higher every day. He felt himself to be in the worst crisis of his life and despised himself for what he had left undone. Are great ordeals the privilege of great human beings? He would_have liked to believe it, but it isn't so, since even the dullest neurotics have their crises. So all he really
had left in the midst ofhis deep perturbation was that residue of im- perturbability possessed by all heroes and criminals-it isn't cour- age, willpower, or confidence, but simply a furious tenacity, as hard to drive out as it is to drive life out of a cat even after it has been completely mangled by dogs.
Ifone wants to imagine how such a man lives when he is alone, the most that can be said is that at night his lighted windows afford a view of his room, where his used thoughts sit around like clients in the waiting room of a lawyer with whom they are dissatisfied. Or one could perhaps say that Ulrich once, on such a night, opened the wht- dow and looked out at the snake-smooth trunks of the trees, so black and sleekly twisted between the blankets of snow covering their tops and the ground, and suddenly felt an urge to go down into the garden just as he was, in his pajamas; he wanted to feel the cold in his hair. Downstairs he turned out the light, so as not to stand framed in the lighted doorway; a canopy of light projected into the shadow only from his study. A path led to the iron gate fronting the street; a sec- ond crossed it, darkly outlined. Ulrich walked slowly toward it. And then the darlrness towering up between the treetops suddenly, fan- tastically, reminded him of the huge form of Moosbrugger, and the naked trees looked strangely corporeal, ugly and wet like worms and yet somehow inviting him to embrace them and sink down with them in tears. But he didn't do it. The sentimentality of the impulse re- volted him at the very moment it touched him. Just then some late passersby walked through the milky foam of the mist outside the gar- den railing, and he may have looked like a lunatic to them, as his figure in red pajamas between black tree trunks now detached itself from the trees. But he stepped firmly onto the path and went back into his house fairly content, feeling that whatever was in store for him would have to be something quite different.
Pseudoreality Prevails · 277
BONADEA HAS A VISION
When Ulrich got up on the morning following 'this night, late and feelmg as if he had been badly beaten up, he was told that Bonadea had come to call; it was the flrst time since their quarrel that they would see each other.
During the period of their separation, Bonadea had shed many tears. She often felt in this time that she had been ill-treated. She had often resounded like a muffled drum. She had had many adventures and many disappointments. Atid although the memory of Ulrich sank into a deep well with every adventure, after every disappointment it emerged again, helpless and reproachful as the desolate pain in a child's face. In her heart, Bonadea had already asked her friend a hundred times to forgive her jealousy, "castigating her wicked pride," as she put it, until at last she decided to sue for peace.
She sat before him, charming, melancholy, and beautiful, and feel- ing sick to her stomach. He stood in front of her "like a youth," his skin polished like marble from the great events and high diplomacy she believed him engaged in. She had never before noticed how strong and determined his face looked. She would gladly have sur- rendered herself to him entirely, but she dared not go so far, and he showed no. disposition to encourage her. This coldness saddened her beyond words, but had the grandeur of a statue. Unexpectedly, Bonadea seized his dangling. hand and kissed it. Ulrich stroked her hair pensively. Her legs turned to water in the most feminine way in the world, and she was about to fall to her knees. But Ulrich gently pushed her back in her chair, brought whiskey and soda, and lit a cigarette.
"A lady does not drink whiskey in the morning! " Bonadea pro- tested. For an instant she regained enough . energy to be offended, and her heart roseto her head with the suspicion that the matter-of- fact offer of such a strong and, as she thought, licentious drink con- tained a heartless implication. ·
But Ulrich said kindly: "It will do you good. All the women who have played a major role in politics have drunk whiskey. " For in order to justify her visit, Bonadea had said how impressed she was with the great patriotic campaign, and that she would like to lend a hand in it.
That was her plan. She always believed several things at the same time, and half-truths made it easier for her to lie.
The whiskey was pale gold and warming like the sun in May.
Bonadea felt like a seventy-year-old woman sitting on a garden bench outside her house. She was getting old. Her children were growing up. The eldest was already twelve. It was certainly disgrace- ful to follow a man one didn't even know very well into his house, just because he had eyes that looked at one like a man behind a window. One notices, she thought, little details about this man one doesn't like and that could be a warning. One could, in fact-if only there were something to hold one back at such times! -break it off, flushed with shame and perhaps even flaming with anger; but be- cause this doesn't ~appen, this man grows more and more passion- ately into his role. And one feels oneself very clearly like a stage set in the glare of artificial light; what one has before one is stage eyes, a stage mustache, the buttons ofa costume being unbuttoned, and the whole scene from the first entrance into the room to the first horrible moment of being sober again all takes place inside a consciousness that has stepped outside one's head and papered the walls with pure hallucination. Bonadea did not use precisely these words-her thought was only partly verbal anyway-but even as she was trying to visualize it she felt herself at the mercy of this change in conscious- ness. "Whoever could describe it would be a great artist-no, a por- nographer! " she thought, looking at Ulrich. She never for an instant lost her good intentions, her determination to hold on to decency, even in this condition; only then they stood outside and waited but had absolutely nothing to say in a world transformed by desire. When Bonadea's reason returned, this was her worst anguish. The change of consciousness during sexual arousal, which people pass over as something natural, was in her so overpowering in the depth and sud- denness not only of her ecstasy but< also of her remorse that it fright- ened her in retrospect as soon as she had returned to the peace of her family circle. She thought she must be going mad. She hardly
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 79
280 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
dared look at her children, for fear of banning them with her corrupt glance. And she winced whenever her husband looked at her with more than his usual warmth, but was afraid of freedom from con- straint in being alone. All this led her, in the weeks of separation, to plan that henceforth she would have no other lover beside Ulrich; he would be her mainstay and would save her from excesses with strangers.
"How could I have allowed myself to find fault with him? " she now thought as she sat facing him for the first time in so long. "He is so much more complete than I am. " She gave him credit for her-hav- ing been a much improved person duringtheir embraces, and was probably also thinking that he would have to introduce her to his new social Circle at the next charity affair. Bonadea inwardly swore an oath of allegiance, and teari of emotion came to her eyes as she turned all this over in her mind.
Ulrich meanwhile was finishing' his whiskey with the deliberate- ness of a man who has to act on a hard decision. For the time being, he told her, it was not yet possible to introduce her to Diotima.
Bonadea naturally wanted to know exactly why it was not possible; and then she wanted to know exactly when it would be possible.
Ulrich had to point out to her that she was not a person of promi- nence in the arts, nor in the sciences, nor in organized charity, so that it would take a very long time before he could convince Diotima of the need for Bonadea's assistance.
Bonadea had in the meantime been filled with curious feelings to- ward Diotima. She had heard enough about Diotima's virtues not to be jealous; rather, she envied and admired this woman, who could hold the interest of Bonadea's beloved without making improper concessions to him. She ascribed the statuesque serenity she thought she saw in Ulrich to this influence. Her term for herself was "pas- sionate," by which she understood both her dishonorable state and an honorable excuse for it. But she admired cool women with much the same feeling with which unfortunate owners ofperpetually damp hands put their hands in a hand that is particularly dry and lovely. "It is her doing! " she thought. "It is she who has changed Ulrich so much! '. ' A hard drill in her heart, a sweet drill in her knees: these two drills whirring simultaneously and in opposite direc:;tions made Bona-
dea feel almost ready to faint as she came up against Ulrich's resist- ance. So she played her trump card: Moosbrugger.
She had realized on agonizing reflection that Ulrich must have a strange liking for this horrible character. She herself simply felt re- volted by "the brutal sensuality," as she saw it, expressed in Moos- brugger's acts of violence. In this respect her feeling was much the same-though of course . she did not know this-as that of the prosti- tutes who quite single-mindedly, untainted by bourgeois romanti- cism, see in the sex murderer simply a hazard of their profession. But what she needed, including her unavoidable lapses, was a tidy and credible world, and Moosbrugger would help her to restore it. Since Ulrich had a weakness for him, and she had a husband who was a judge and could supply useful information, the thought had ripened ofits own accord in her forlorn state that she might link her weakness to Ulrich's weakness by way ofher husband; this yearning image had the comforting power ofsensuality sanctioned by a feeling ofjustice. But when she approached her spouse on the subject, he was as- tounded at her juridical fervor, although he knew how easily she got carried away by everything great and good in human nature. But since he was not only a judge but a hunter too, he put her off good- humoredly by saying that the only way to deal with such vermin was to exterminate them wherever one came across them without a lot of sentimental fuss, and he did not respond to further inquiries. On her second try, some time later, all Bonadea,could get out ofhim was the supplementary opinion that childbearing was a woman's affair while killing was a job for men, and as she did not want to stir up any suspi- cions by being overzealous on this dangerous subject she was de-- barred, for the time being, from the path of the law. This left mercy as the only way ofpleasing Ulrich by doing something for Moosbrug- ger, and this way led her-one can hardly call this a surprise, more a kind of attraction-to Diotima.
In her mind she could see herself as Diotima's friend, and she granted herself her own wish to be forced to make her admired rival's acquaintance for the sake of the cause, which brooked no delay, although of course she was too proud to seek it for herself. She was going to win Diotima over to Moosbrugger's cause-something Ulrich had clearly not succeeded in doing, as she had instantly
Pseudoreality Prevails · 2 8 1
282 • THE MA. N WITH0UT QUALITIES
guessed-and her imagination painted the situation in beautiful scenes. The tall, marmoreal Diotima would put her arm around Bonadea's warm shoulders, bowed down by sins, and Bonadea ex- pected that her own role would more or less be to anoint that di- vinely untouched heart with a drop of mortal fallibility. This was the stratagem she proposed to her lost friend.
But today Ulrich was impervious to any suggestion of saving Moosbrugger. He knew Bonadea's noble sentiments and knew how easily the flaring up of a single worthy impulse could tum into a rag- ing fire consuming her whole body. He made it clear that he did not have the slightest intention of meddling in the Moosbrugger case.
Bonadea looked up at him with hurt, beautiful eyes in which the water rose above the ice like the borderline between winter and spring.
Ulrich had never entirely lost a certain gratitude for the childlike beauty of their first meeting, that night he lay senseless on the pave- ment with Bonadea crouching by his head, and the wavering, roman- tic vagueness of tl,te world, of youth, of emotion, came trickling "into his returning consciousness from this young woman's eyes. So he tried to soften his offending refusal, to dissipate it in talk.
"Imagine yourself walking across a big park at night," he sug- gested, "and two ruffians come at you. Would your first thought be to feel pity for them and that their brutality is society's fault? "
"But I never walk through a· park at night," Bonadea promptly parried.
"But suppose a policeman came along: wouldn't you ask him to arrest them? "
"I would ask him to protect me. "
"Which means that he would arrest them. "
"I don't know what he would do with them. Anyway, Moosbrugger
is not a ruffian. "
"All right, then, let's assume he is working as a carpenter in your
house. You're alone with him in the place, and his eyes start to slither from side to side. "
Bonadea protested: "What an awful thing you're making me do! "
"Of course," Ulrich said, "but I'm only trying to show you how extremely unpleasant the kind of people are who lose their balance so easily. One can only indulge in an impartial attitude toward them
when someone else takes the beating. In that case, I grant you, as the victims of society or fate they bring out our tenderest feelings. You must admit that no one can be blamed for his faults, as seen through his own eyes; from his point of view they are, at worst, mistakes or bad qualities in a whole person who is no less good because of them, and of course he's perfectly right. "
Bonadea had to adjust her stocking and felt compelled as she did so to look up at Ulrich with her head slightly tilted back, so that- unguarded by her eye-a richly contrasting life of lacy frills, smooth stocking, tensed fingers, and the gentle pearly gleam of skin emerged around her knee.
Ulrich hastily lit a cigarette and went on:
"Man is not good, but he is always good; that's a tremendous dif- ference, don't you see? We find a sophistry of self-love amusing, but we ought t<Yconclude from it that a human being can really do no wrong; what is wrong can only be an effect of something he does. This insight could be the right starting point for a social morality. "
With a sigh, Bonadea smoothed her skirt back in place; straight- ened, and sought to calm herselfwith a sip ofthe pale golden fire.
"And now let me explain to you," Ulrich went on with a smile, "why it is·possible to have all sorts offeeling for Moosbrugger but not to do anything for him. Basically, anthese cases are like the loose end of a thread-if you pull at it, the whole fabric of society starts to unravel. I can illustrate this, for a start, by some purely rational problems. "
Somehow or other, Bonadea lost a shoe. Ulrich bent down for it, and the foot with its warm toes came up to meet the shoe in his hand like a small child. "Don't bother, don't, I'll do it myself," Bonadea said, holding out her foot to him.
"There are, to begin with, the psychiatric-juridical questions," Ul- rich continued relentlessly, even as the whiff of diminished responsi- bility rose frqm her leg to his nostrils. 'We know that medicine has already practically reached the point of being able to prevent most such crimes if only we were prepared to spend the necessary amo~nts of money. So now it's only a social question. "
"dh please, not that again! " Bonadea pleaded, now that he had said "social" for the second time. "When they get started on that at home, I leave the room; it bores me to death.