Or is
conscience
not involved?
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
She could not control her impatience any longer.
She had let herself be led astray, but no one should think she was a bad woman.
So in order to save her honor she had to find him still magical.
The blood that had risen to her throat in fear and vexation now rushed pell-mell down to her hips.
At this moment he felt that it would be quite impossible to take a bird in his hand, and this naked skin was to be pressed against his naked and unprotected skin? His breast was to be filled with warmth from her breast? He sought to draw things out with jokes. They were tortured and fearful. He said, "Isn't it true that fat women lace their feet too. Along with their shoes. And above the knot the flesh spills over a little, and there is a little unpleasant smell there. A little smell that exists nowhere else in the world. "
She said to herself: "He must be a writer; now I understand his odd behavior. Later I will play the elegant lady with him. " She resolutely began to undress; she owed it to her honor.
He became anxious; now he knew for certain: I can never take this
From the Posthumous Papers · 1705
leap into another human being, let myselfinto an utterly alien existence. Since he did not move, she stopped; she was suddenly bad-tempered; she too became fearful. What if she had fallen victim to an unconscion- able man? She did not know him. The woman, who had not revealed her name, began to have regrets. She still waited. But something told her: it will get better once we've gone further.
He felt all that. The idea . . Open up! " tortured him. Like a child's toy. That's what she wants. But over and over again there is some new wall of disappointment with no way through, and then she will get angry with me.
And the second torture was: She's pursuing me. She's just unrolling herself. Always right in front of me. What's she talking about so inces- santly? I'm supposed to fall like a dog all over the round, rolling ball of her life. Otherwise she'll do something to me. His eyes darted back and forth in the darkness like fish.
Now she was sitting before him in only shoes and stockings. Her hips rolled down in three swelling folds. She began to tremble.
She had taken off all her clothes because he had spoken about her. That seemed certain to her. And she felt that she was wronging him; did he not have to mistrust her, since he knew nothing more about her than that she had followed him? She wanted to tell him that Leopold was, of course, a good person. . . . Again silence intervened.
Then he heard himself saying the nonsensical sentence: Whoever loves is young. At the same moment he felt her arms around his neck. To save herself she had to find him enchanting. . . Beloved, beloved! Leave your eyes, you look so suffering and noble! "
Then with the strength of despair he lifted up his burden and heard himself asking: . . Would you rather make Kung Fu-tse, or do you prefer rallies? " She took these for technical terms from men's talk. She did not want to expose her ignorance. She made herself cozy with them. What does your Kung Fu-tse do? The tip of his tongue touched her lips. This ancient manner of understanding between people, such foreheads al- ways sitting above such lips, was familiar to her. The stranger knew so much. She slowly flattened out her tongue and pushed it forward. Then she quickly drew it back and smiled roguishly; when she was still a child she knew herself to be already famous for her roguish smile. And she said without thinking, moved perhaps by some unconscious association of sounds: ''I'd like rallies. My husband will be gone for a week. "
At this moment he bit off her tongue. It seemed to him to be a long time before his teeth got all the way through. Then he felt it thick in his mouth. The storm of a great deed whirled up in him, but the unfortu- nate woman was a white, bleeding mass, beating all around her in a cor-
1706 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ner of the room, circling around a high, hoarse, screeching note, around
the reeling root of a sound.
In those places where the woman and his reaction to her is described: Is this a woman at all? Or is it the being pushed from the experience into a jackal's den of the imagination, condensation of all the hatefulness of the world in the infantilely special person with skirts and ringlets, rage against the most lovable thing on earth?
It is probably unnecessary to say that this is not a true experience but a dream, for no decent person would think such a thing in a waking state.
The place of this dream lay on one of the major traffic arteries that radiate out from the center of Vienna. Even though from that time on, when world metropolises full of enormous rushing around came into being, Vienna was still only a big city, traffic in the peak hours filled this tube of streets with a dizzying stream of life, which can best be com- pared with swill being poured into a trough. Dark lumps of cars shot around in a no-longer-transparent fluid ofvoices, metals, air, stones, and wood, in a pleasantly tart smell of haste, through the standing throng of interests running in and out at the opening of a thousand stores, and the constitutive stream of pedestrians hastening toward some distant goal pushed fmward. This is the city person's drink that invigorates the nerves. At the place of this dream fifty cars a minute came by on average, at a speed of twenty miles an hour, and six hundred pedestrians. If the eye, or at least the mind, took all that in, then the stimulus had to tra- verse a path of 1,800 feet per second, leaving aside smell, hearing, aroused desire, and everything else, and observing only the mad film.
An unnatural spread.
But the place itself did not appear on this film; only the fence around its grounds did. Ifone were propelled on past this garden fence, there lay behind it well-tended grounds, and among trees one saw a small white house with broad wings and looked into the noble stillness of a scholar's home. Between it and the nature in front of the fence the un- nature of trees, muflled sound, and pure air intervened; as indeed the
From the PosthuTIUJtls Papers · 1707
un-nature of various ideals and antiquities also lie between life and the thinking of a scholar (and only a quite complicated connection makes it possible for life to afford scholars).
The scholar who had unfortunately had this dream had a great many friends among men and women, and was a quite pleasant, handsome, and well-to-do young man. In order not to expose him, and for various reasons, let us assume that his name was simply Anders [literally, "dif- ferent'': an earlier name for Ulrich-TRANs. ].
Here it could also go on:
One of his women friends happened to be with him at the moment and was called . . . and because of the moral songs she sang. She looked like a beautiful woman from an illustrated magazine of 1870. Her beauty was like a lion's skin stuffed by a furrier. She spelled out this beauty from an invisible book and underlined the teasing as well as the tragic quali- ties of love with gestures like the emphases of an eight-year-old school- girl reciting Schiller.
It would not be appropriate to inquire further into the meaning of his horrible dream, but on the other hand we cannot avoid mentioning Christian Moosbrugger, for Moosbrugger doubtless had something to do with its source. Who was Christian Moosbrugger?
What distinguished him from other good-natured and right-thinking carpenters was merely that he was to be executed on account of several sex murders.
In one of the newspaper reports, a collection of which lay in front of Anders (while he held an unopened letter in his hand), it was said of Moosbrugger that he was good-natured. All the other reports described him in similar fashion, but the thing about his smile, for instance, was wrong, and in general the business about his self-important smile, his good nature, and his monstrous deeds was by no means a simple affair.
There was no doubt that he was, at times, mentally ill. But since the bestial crimes that he committed in this condition were presented in the newspapers in the most extreme detail, and thirstily sucked up by their readers, his mental illness must have somehow partaken of the general mental health. He had cut up a woman, a prostitute of the lowest class, with a knife in the most horrifying manner, and the newspapers fully and pitilessly described the delights, to be sure incomprehensible to us, of a wound reaching from the back part of the neck to the middle of the front part; further, two stab wounds to the breast, which bored through the
I708 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
heart, two more in the left side of the back, and the cutting off of the breasts. In spite of (the most vivid retching of) their loathing, the report- ers and editors could not look away before adding up thirty-five stab wounds to the belly, which, moreover, was slit open by a wound running to the sacrum and continuing on up the back in a swarm of wounds, while the neck bore traces of strangulation.
Perhaps one ought not repeat this at all, for it is dubious whether the novelist will be allowed the protection ofthe duties ofhis calling enjoyed by the newspapers, which, like those men who prowl in the dark of night with shielded lanterns and seamen's boots, have to climb into all those things in which mankind, upon waking, is accustomed to proclaim its interest. But ultimately it cannot be said anywhere but in a less serious place than the newspapers how remarkable it is that no sooner were Moosbrugger's abominable excesses made known to thousands of peo- ple, who lose no opportunity to scold the public's desire for sensation, than they were immediately felt by these very people to be "at last some- thing interesting again": by capable officials in a hurry to get to the of- fice, by their fourteen-year-old sons, and by their spouses immersed in a cloud of household cares. People of course sighed over such a monster, but inwardly he preoccupied them more than their professions did. In- deed, it might happen that on going to bed the very correct Section Chief Tu. zzi, or the second in command of the Nature Cure Association, said to his sleepy wife: What would you do i f I were a Moosbrugger now?
c. 1932
49
ULRICH's DIARY
Often Ulrich thought that everything he was experiencing with Agathe was reciprocal hypnotic suggestion and conceivable only under the in- fluence of the idea that they had been chosen by some unusual destiny. At one time this destiny represented itself to them under the sign of the Siamese twins, at another under that of the Millennium, the love of the seraphs, or the myths of the "concave" experiencing of the world. These
From the Posthumous Papers · 1709
conversations were no longer repeated, but they had in the past assumed the more potent shadow ofreal events, ofwhich mention was made ear- lier. One might call it merely half a conviction, if one is of the opinion that the kind of thinking involved in conviction is one that has to be en- tirely certain of its subject; but there is also a total conviction that arises simply from the absenee of all objections, because an emotional mood that is strong and one-sidedly motivated keeps all doubt away from con- scious awareness: there were times when Ulrich already felt almost con- vinced of something without even knowing what it was. But if he then asked himself-for he had to assume that he was suffering from delu- sions-what it was that he and Agathe must have reciprocally imagined at the beginning, their wondrous feeling for each other or the no less remarkable alteration in their thinking in which this feeling expressed itself, that could not be determined either; for both had appeared at the very beginning, and taken singly, one was as unfounded as the other.
This sometimes made him think of the idea of a hypnotic suggestion, and then he felt the uncanny anxiety that steals up on the independent will which sees itself treacherously attacked and shackled from within. "What am I to understand by this? How is one to explain this vulgar notion of hypnosis, which I use as facilely as everyone else, without un- derstanding it? I was reading about it today," Ulrich noted on a piece of paper. "The language of animals consists of affective expressions that evoke the same affects in their companions. Warning call, feeding call, mating call. I might add that these utterances activate and permeate not only the same affect but also quite directly the action associated with it. The terror call, the mating call, goes right through them! Your word is in me and moves me: if the animal were a person it would feel a mysteri- ous, incorporeal union! But this affective suggestibility is also supposed to be still completely intact in people, in spite of the highly developed language of reason. Affect is contagious: panic, yawning. It easily evokes the ideas appropriate to it: a cheerful person spreads cheerfulness. It also encroaches on unsuitable vehicles: this occurs in all gradations, from the silliness of a love token to the complete frenzy of love, whose brainstorms are worthy of the madhouse. But affect also knows how to exclude what is inappropriate, and in both ways evokes in people that persistent unified attitude that gives the state ofhypnotic suggestion the power of fixed ideas. Hypnosis is only a special case of these general relations. I like this explanation, and I'll adopt it. A singular, persistent, unified attitude, but one that blocks us offfrom the totality oflife: that is our condition! "
Ulrich was now beginning to write many such pages. They formed a sort of diary, with whose aid he sought to preserve the mental clarity he
1710 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
felt was threatened. But immediately after he had put the first of his notes on paper, he thought of a second: "What I have called magnanim- ity may also be connected with hypnotic suggestion. By passing over what is not part of it, and seizing hold of what furthers it, it is magnani- mous. " When that was done, his observations did not, of course, seem nearly as remarkable as they had before he had written them down, and he made another effort to look for an indisputable milestone of the con- dition in which he found himself together with his sister. He found it once more in the realization that thinking and feeling were changed in the same sense, and they not only corresponded with each other to a remarkable degree but also stood in contrast to the ordinruy condition as something one-sided, indeed almost insoluble and addictive, an inevita- ble synthesis of aspirations and insights of all kinds. When their conver- sations were in the right mood-and the susceptibility to this was extremely great-the impression they gave was never that one word was forcing another, or one action dragging the next along after it, but that something was aroused in the mind to which the answer followed as the next-higher step. Every movement of the mind became the discovery of a new, even finer movement; they furthered each other reciprocally, and in this manner gave rise to the impression of an intensification that did not end, and ofa discussion that rose without falling. It seemed that the last word could never be spoken, for every end was a beginning, and every final result the start of a new opening, so that every second shone like the rising sun but at the same time carried with it the peaceful pass- ing of the setting sun. "If I were a believer, I would find in this the con- firmation of the unfathomable assertion that His nearness is for us as inexpressible a raising up as our oppressive helplessness allows us to feel! " Ulrich wrote.
He recalled having read with his senses on fire, in those early years when he was entering upon his intellectual life, the description of similar feelings in all sorts of books that he never read through to the end be- cause impatience and a will that urged him to assert his own power pre- vented him, although he was moved by them, indeed for just that reason. Then too, he had not lived as was to have been expected, and when he now happened to pick up several of these books again, which was something he did gladly, meeting the old witnesses once more made it seem as if he were quietly entering a door in his house that he had once arrogantly slammed shut. His life seemed to lie unrealized behind him, or perhaps even before him. Intentions not carried out can be like rejected lovers in dreams, who have remained beautiful over many years while the astonished wanderer returning home sees himself devastated: in the exquisite expansion ofthe powerofone's dreams, one thinks these
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 1 1
lovers make one grow young again, and this was the mood, divided be- tween enterprise and doubt, between the tips of flame and ashes, in which Ulrich now most frequently found himself. He read a great deal. Agathe, too, read a great deal. She was already content that the passion for reading, which had accompanied her in all the circumstances of her life, no longer served as mere distraction but had a purpose, and she kept up with her brother like a girl whose blowing dress leaves her no time to think about the path she's taking. It happened that brother and sister got up in the night, after just having gone to bed, and met each other anew with their books, or that they prevented each other from going to bed at all, in spite of the late hour. About this Ulrich wrote: "It seems to be the only passion we permit ourselves. Even when we are tired we don't want to part. Agathe says: 'Aren't we brother and sister? ' That means: Siamese twins; for otherwise it would be meaningless. Even when we're too tired to talk she won't go to bed, because we can't sleep beside each other. I promise to sit beside her until she falls asleep, but she doesn't want to undress and get into bed; not out of shame but be- cause she would be doing something before I did. We put on bathrobes. A few times we've even fallen asleep leaning on each other. She was warm with the fervor of her mind. I had, to support her, wrapped my arm around her body and didn't even realize it. She has fewer ideas than I do, but a higher temperature. She must have a very warm skin. In the morning we are pale with fatigue, and sleep for part of the day. Inciden- tally, we don't derive the slightest intellectual progress from this read- ing. We burn in the books like the wick in oil. We assimilate them really without any effect other than our burning. . . . "
Ulrich added: "The young person listens with only half an ear to the voice ofthose books which become his destiny: he flees them in order to raise his own voice! For he is not seeking truth; he is seeking himself. That's the way it was with me too. Large-scale conclusion: There are always new people and always the old events, merely mixed in new com- binations! Moral fragility of the age. They are essentially like our read- ing, a burning for its own sake. When was the last time I told myself that? Shortly before Agathe's arrival. Ultimate cause of this phenome- non? The absence of system, principles, a goal, and also absence of the possibility of intensifying life and any logical consequence in it. I hope to be able to write down some things that have occurred to me about this. It's part of the 'General Secretariat. ' But the strange thing about my present condition is that I am further away than ever from such active participation in intellectual work. That's Agathe's influence. She radiates immobility. Nevertheless, this incoherent state has peculiar weight. It is pregnant with meaning. What characterizes it, I would say, is the great
1712 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
amount of rapture it contains; although this notion is of course as vague as all the rest. Temporizing restriction, which I allow myself to be guilty of! Our condition is that other life which has always hovered before me. Agathe is working toward it, but I ask myself: can it be carried out as actual life? Not long ago she, too, asked me about that. . . . "
But Agathe, when she had done so, had merely lowered her book and asked: "Can you love two people who are enemies? " She added by way of explanation: "I sometimes read something in a book that contradicts what I have read in another book, but I love both passages. Then I think of how both of us, you and I, contradict each other about lots of things. Isn't that what it depends on?
Or is conscience not involved? "
Ulrich immediately recalled that in the irresponsible state of mind in which she had altered the will, she had asked him something similar. This led to a remarkable depth and undermining beneath the present situation, for the main current of his thoughts led Agathe's statement without reflection back to Lindner. He knew that she was seeing him; she had, to be sure, never told him so, but also made no efforts to con- ceal it.
The response to this open manner of concealment was Ulrich's diary. Agathe was not supposed to know anything about it.
When he wrote in it, he suffered from the feeling of having commit-
ted an act of disloyalty. Or it reinforced and liberated him, for the chill- ing state of the wrong secretly committed destroyed the intellectual magic spell that was feared as much as it was desired.
That is why in response to Agathe's question Ulrich smiled but gave no other answer.
But now Agathe had suddenly asked: "Do you have mistresses? " This was the first time that she was again addressing such a question to him. "You should, of course," she added, "but you told me yourself that you don't love them! " And then she asked: "Do you have another friend be- sides me? ''
She said this casually, as if she were no longer expecting an answer, but also in an easy and playful way, as ifa tiny quantity ofa very precious substance were lying in the palm of her hand and she was preoccupied with it.
Late at night Ulrich wrote down in his diary the answer he had given.
so
AN ENTRY
It was only one oflife's small challenges that she asked me this question, and what it means is: But you and I are still living outside of the "condi- tion"! One might just as well exclaim: "Give me some water, please! " or: "Stop! Leave the light burning! " It is the request of a moment, some- thing hasty, unconsidered, and nothing more. I say "nothing more," but still I know that it's nothing less than ifa goddess were running to catch a bus! A most unmystic gait, an implosion of absurdity! Such small experi- ences demonstrate how much our Other Condition assumes a single, specific state of mind, and capsizes in an instant if one disturbs its equi- librium.
And yet it is such moments that make one really happy. How beautiful Agathe's voice is! What trust lies in such a tiny request, popping up in the midst of a high and solemn context! It's touching, the way a bouquet of expensive flowers snagged with a wool thread off the beloved's dress is touching, or a protruding piece of wire for which the hands of the bouquet maker were too weak. At such moments one knows exactly that one is overestimating oneself, and yet everything that is more than one- self, all the thoughts of mankind, seem like a spiderweb; the body is the finger that tears it at every moment and to which a wisp still clings.
I just said: The hands of the bouquet maker and abandoned myself to the seesaw feeling of a simile, as if this woman could never be old and fat. That's moonshine of the wrong sort! And that's why I gave Agathe a methodical lecture rather than a direct answer. But I was really only de- scribing the life that hovers before me. I'd like to repeat that and, if I can, improve on it.
In the center stands something I have called motivation. In ordinary life we act not according to motivation but according to necessity, in a concatenation of cause and effect; of course something of ourselves is always involved in this concatenation, which makes us think we are free. This freedom of will is man's ability to do voluntarily what he wishes involuntarily. But motivation has nothing to do with wishing; it cannot be divided according to the opposition of freedom and compulsion: it is the highest freedom and the most profound compulsion. I chose the word because I couldn't find a better one; it's probably related to the painter's term "motif. " When a landscape painter goes out in the morn-
1714 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ing with the intention offinding a motifhe will usually find it, that is, he will find something that fulfills his intention; yet it would be more accu- rate to say: something that fits in with his intention-the way a word, unless it happens to be too big, fits in every mouth. For something that fulfills is rare, it overfills immediately, spilling over the intention and seizing hold of the entire person. The painter who originally intended to paint "something," even though "from his own point of view," now paints to paint, he paints for the salvation of his soul, and only in such moments does he really have a motif before him; at all other times he merely talks himself into thinking he does. Something has come over him that crushes intention and will. When I say it has nothing at all to do with them, I am of course exaggerating. But one must exaggerate when one is looking at the region that one's soul calls home. There are surely all sorts of transitions, but they are like those of the spectrum: you go through innumerable gradations from green to red, but when you are there you are all there, and there is no longer the slightest trace ofgreen.
Agathe said the gradation is the same as when one more or less lets things happen, does some things from inclination, and finally when one acts from love.
At any rate, there is something similar in speaking, too. One can clearly make a distinction between a thought that is only thinking and a thought that moves the entire person. In between are all sorts of tran- sitions. I said to Agathe: Let's only talk about what moves the entire person!
But when I'm alone I think how murky that is. A scientific idea can also move me. But that isn't the kind of moving that matters. On the other hand, an affect, too, can move me totally, and yet afterward I am merely confounded. The truer something is, the more it is turned away from us in a peculiar way, no matter how much it may concern us. I've asked myself about this remarkable connection a thousand times. One might think that the less "objective" something is, the more "subjec- tive," the more it would have to be turned toward us in the same way, but that is false; subjectivity turns its back on our inner being in just the same way that objectivity does. One is subjective in questions where one thinks one way today and another tomorrow, either because one doesn't know enough or because the object itself depends on the whim of the emotions: but what Agathe and I would like to say to each other is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that on some bet- ter occasion could be raised to the status of truth, but could equally well be recognized as error, and nothing is more alien to our condition than the irresponsibility and sloppiness of such witty brainstorms, for be- tween us everything is governed by a strict law, even ifwe can't articu-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 71 5
late it. The boundary between subjectivity and objectivity crosses with- out touching the boundary along which we are moving.
Or should I perhaps rather restrict myself to the uprooted subjectivity of the arguments one carries on as an adolescent with one's friends? to their mixture of personal sensitivity and impartiality, their conversions and apostasies? These are the preliminary stage of politics and histo:ry and of humanitarianism, with their vague wishy-washiness. They move the entire self, they are connected with its passions and seek to lend them the dignity of a spiritual law and the appearance of an infallible system. What they mean to us lies in their indications of how we ought to be. And all right, even when Agathe tells me something, it's always as if her words go through me and not merely through the sphere of thoughts to which they are addressed. But what happens between us doesn't ap- pear to have great significance. It is so quiet. It avoids knowledge. "Milky" and "opalizing" are the words that occur to me: what happens between us is like a movement in a shimmering but not ve:ry transparent liquid, which is always moved along with it as a whole. What happens is almost entirely a matter of indifference: everything goes through life's center. Or comes from it to us. Happens with the remarkable feeling that everything we have ever done and could do is also involved. If I t:ry to describe it as concretely as possible, I would have to say: Agathe gives me some answer or other or does something, and right away it takes on for me as much significance as it has for her, indeed apparently the same significance, or one like it. Perhaps in reality I don't understand her rightly at all, but I complement her in the direction of her inner motion. Because we are in the same state of excitement, we are evidently guess- ing at what can intensify it and have to follow along unresistingly. When two people find themselves in anger or in love, they intensify each other in similar fashion. But the uniqueness of the excitement, and the signifi- cance that everything assumes in this state of excitement, is precisely what is extraordinary.
If I could say that we are accompanied by the feeling of living in har- mony with God, it would be simple; but how can one describe without presuppositions what it is that constantly excites us? "In harmony" is right, but with what cannot be said. We are accompanied by the feeling that we have reached the middle of our being, the secret center, where life's centrifugal force is preserved, where the incessant twisting of expe- rience ceases, where the conveyor belt of stamping and ejecting that makes the soul resemble a machine stops, where motion is rest; that we have arrived at the axis of the spinning top. These are symbolic expres- sions, and I absolutely hate these symbols, because they are so ready to hand and spread out endlessly without yielding anything. Let me see if I
1716 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
can attempt it once again, and as rationally as possible: the state of ex-
citement in which we live is that of correctness. This word. which used
this way is as unusual as it is sensible, calms me somewhat. The feeling of
correctness contains contentment and satiation. Conviction and the
bringing of things to the still point are part of it; it is the profound state
into which one falls after attaining one's goal. IfI continue to represent
it to myself this way and ask myself: what is the goal that is attained? I
don't know. Yet it's reallynot quite right, either, to speak ofa state ofthe
attained goal; it's at least just as true that this state is accompanied by an
enduring impression of intensification. But it is an intensification with-
out progression. It is also a state of the highest happiness, although it
does not lead beyond a weak smile. At every second we feel ourselves
swept away, yet externally and internally we hold ourselves rather inert;
the motion never ceases, but it oscillates in the smallest space. Also in-
volved is a profound collectedness combined with a broad dispersion
and the awareness ofanimated activity, with a breakthrough by means of
a process we do not sufficiently understand. Thus my intention to limit
myself to the most neutral description immediately results again in sur-
prising contradictions. But what presents itself so disjointedly to the
mind is, as experience, of great simplicity. It is simply there; so to be
0
properly understood it would also have to be simplel
There is also between Agathe and me not the slightest discrepancy in
the opinion that the question: "How should I live? ," which we have both taken upon ourselves, is to be answered: This is the way we should live!
And sometimes I think it's crazy.
END OF THE ENTRY
I now see the task more clearly. Something in human life makes happi- ness short, so much so that happiness and brevity apparently go together like siblings. This makes all the great and happy hours of our existence
"This dilemma, that the state of highest happiness is a state of inertness and passivity instead of leading to the simplicity of experience (= action), Is one that Musil returns to again and again, both philosophically and in terms of how to work it Into the fabric of the noveL-TRANs.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 1 7
disjointed-a time that drifts in time in fragments-and gives to all other hours their necessruy, emergency coherence. This "something" causes us to lead a life that does not touch us inwardly. It causes us to gobble people as easily as to build cathedrals. It is the reason why all that happens is always only "pseudoreality," what is real merely in an exter- nal sense. It bears the guilt for our being deceived by all our passions. It evokes the ever-recurring futility of youth and the senseless eternal upheaval of the ages. It explains why activity is merely the result of the instinct for activity rather than a person's decision, why our actions com- plete themselves as insistently as if they belonged more to each other than to us, and why our experiences can fly in the air but not in our will. This "something" has the same significance as our not quite knowing what to do with all the spirit we produce; it also causes us to not love ourselves and is the reason we may well find ourselves talented but, all things considered, see no purpose in it.
This "something" is: that over and over again we leave the condition of significance in order to enter the state ofwhat is in and of itself mean- ingless in order to bring some significance to it. We leave the condition ofthe meaningful and enter the state ofthe necessruy and makeshift; we leave\the condition of life to step into the world of the dead. But now that I have written this down, I notice that what I am saying is a tautology and apparently meaningless. Yet before I wrote, what was in my head was: "Agathe gives me some answer or other, a sign; it makes me happy"; and then the thought: 'We do not step out ofthe world of the intellect in order to put intellect in an unintellectual world. " And it seemed to me that this thought was complete, and that the "stepping out" characterizes exactly what I mean. And I only need to put myself back in that state for it still to seem to me to be so.
I must ask myself how a stranger might understand me. When I say "significance," he would certainly understand: what is significant. When I say "intellect," he would first of all understand: stimulation, active thinking, receptivity, and the exercise ofwill. And it would seem to him a matter of course that one must step out of the world of the intellect and carry its significance into life; indeed, he would consider such a striving for "intellectualization" as the worthiest fulfillment of human tasks. How can I express that "intellectualization" is already original sin, and "not to leave the world of the intellect" a commandment that knows no gradations but is fulfilled either entirely or not at all?
Meanwhile a better explanation has occurred to me. The state of ex- citement in which we find ourselves, Agathe and I, doesn't urge us to actions or to truths, which means that it doesn't break anything off from the edge, but flows back into itself again through that which it evokes.
1718 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
This is of course only a description of the form of what happens. But when I describe in this way what I experience, I am able to grasp the changed, indeed quite different, role that my conduct, my action, has: What I do is no longer the discharge of my tension in the final form of a state in which I have found myself, but a channel and relay station on the way back to significance!
To be sure, I almost said: ''Way back to an intensification of my ten- sion"-but then one of those contradictions occurred to me which our condition exhibits, namely that it demonstrates no progression and therefore can't very well demonstrate intensification either. Accord- ingly, I thought I ought to say "way back to myself"-how imprecise all this isl-but the condition is not in the least egotistic but full of a love turned toward the world. And so I simply wrote "significance" again, and the word is good and natural in its context, without my having so far succeeded in getting at its content. -
But as uncertain as all this is, a life has always hovered before me whose centerpiece this would be. In all the other ways I've lived, I al- ways had the obscure feeling of having seen it, forgotten it, and not found it again. It robbed me of satisfaction in everything that was mere calculating and thinking, but it also made me come home after every adventure and from every passion with the stale feeling of having missed the mark, until finally I lost almost all desire to have an effect in the world. That happened because I did not want to let anything compel me to leave the sphere of significance. Now I can also say what "motif" is. Motif is what leads me from significance to significance. Something hap- pens, or something is said, and that increases the meaning of two human lives and unites them through its meaning, and what happens, which physical or legal concept it represents, is quite unimportant, plays abso- lutely no role in it.
But can I imagine what that means in its fullest extent, can I even imagine what it means in its smallest? I must try. A person does some- thing . . . no, I can't duck it: Professor Lindner does something! He arouses Agathe's inclination. I feel this event, want to spoil it and negate it - and the moment I yield to my dislike, I step out of the sphere of significance. What I feel can never become a motif for Agathe. My breast may be full of vexation or anger, my head an arsenal of sharp and ready objections-my heart is empty! My condition is then suddenly negative! My state is no longer positive! There's another marvelous pair of notions I've got hold of! What makes me think of the characteriza- tions "positive" and "negative"? I unexpectedly recall a day when I was also sitting with some paper in front of me and trying to write--at the time it was to be a letter to Agathe. And gradually it comes to mind: a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1719
condition of "do" and a condition of "don't" as the two component ele- ments of every morality, the "do" prevailing during its rise, the "don't" during the satiety of its reign-is not this relationship between "chal- lenge" and "prohibition" the same as what I am now calling positive and negative? The connection between Agathe and me characterized by ev- erything being challenge and nothing prohibition? I recall speaking at that time of Agathe's passionate, affinning goodness, which in an age in which things of that sort are no longer understood looks like a primitive vice. I said: It's like returning home after the longest time and drinking water from the well of one's village! And challenge of course does not mean that we demand but means that everything we do demands the utmost from us.
Not leaving the sphere of the significant would therefore be the same as a life in pure positiveness? The thought that it is also the same as "living essentially" alarms me, although it was to be expected. For what else should "essentially" signify? The word probably comes from mysti- cism or metaphysics, and characterizes the opposition to all earthly hap- penings that are without peace and full of doubts; but since we have separated ourselves from Heaven, it lives on on earth as the longing to find among thousands of moral convictions the one that gives life a meaning that does not change. Endless conversations between Agathe and me on the subject! Her youthful desire for moral instruction along- side the defiance in which she wanted to kill Hagauer and has at least really injured him in a material way! And the same search for conviction everywhere in the world; the intimation that man can't live without mo- rality, and the deep disquiet at how his own emotions undermine every one of them! Where is the possibility of a "whole" life, a "complete" conviction, a love that is without any admixture of not-love, without a shred of self-seeking and selfishness? What that means is: only living positively. And it means: not wanting to admit any happening without "significance" whenever I speak of a "never-ending condition," in con- trast to the "eternally futile moment-to-moment quality" of our usual way of acting, or of the alliance of every momentary state with a "lasting state" of the emotions, which restores our "responsibility. " I could go on repeating such expressions for pages, expressions that characterized what we meant from one side or another. We summarized it as "living essentially," always somewhat embarrassed by the term's bombastic- transcendental overtones, but we had no other that would have been simpler to use. So it is no small surprise for me to suddenly find almost in my hands what I was seeking in the clouds!
Of course it is part of the peculiarity of our condition that every new observation assimilates all the earlier ones, so that there is no hierarchy
1720 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
among them; they seem, rather, to be infinitely entangled. I could just as well go on to call OUI condition magnanimous, which in fact I did some days ago, as I could characterize it as creative, for creating and creation are possible only in an attitude that is positive through and through, and so that, too, would be in accord; ultimately such a life, in which every moment is to be as significant as possible, is also that "life in the sense of the maximal challenge" which I sometimes imagined as the spiritual complement to the laconic resolve of true science. But whether maxi- mal, magnanimous, creative, or significant, essential or whole, how do I account for my feelings for Professor Lindner being what they are? That's the problem I am drawn back to, the crux of the experiment, the crossroads! It occurs to me that I have deprived him of the possibility of having part of Agathe. Why? Because having part of, indeed even under- standing, is never possible through "putting oneself in the place of the other," but is possible only if both mutually take part in something greater. It's impossible for me to feel my sister's headaches; but I find myself transported with her in a state in which there is no pain, or where pain has the hovering wings of bliss!
I have doubts about this, I see the exaggeration in it. But perhaps that's only because I'm not capable of ecstasy?
Toward Lindner I would have to conduct myselfas ifI were somehow united with him in God. Even a smaller whole, like "nation" or some other confraternity, would suffice. At least it would suffice to prescribe my conduct. Even an idea in common would be enough. It merely has to be something new and dynamic that is not merely Lindner and I. So the answer to Agathe's question, what a contradiction signifies between two books both of which one loves, is: it never signifies a calculation or a balance, but signifies a third, dynamic thing, which envelops both as- pects in itself. And that's how the life was that was always before my eyes, even if rarely clearly: the people united, I united with people through something that makes us renounce our hundred dislikes. The contradictions and hostilities that exist between us cannot be denied, but one can also imagine them "suspended," the way the strong current of a liquid picks up and suspends whatever it encounters in its path. There would then not be certain feelings among people, but there would be others. All impossible feelings could be summarized as neutral and negative; as petty, gnawing, constricting, base, but also as indifferent or merely rooted in connections that were necessary. So what remains would be great, increasing, demanding, encumbered, affirming, rising: in my hurry I can't describe it adequately, but it lay in the depths of my body like a dream, and isn't what I ultimately wanted simply to love life and everyone in it? I, with my arms, my muscles, trained to the point of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 2 1
malignity, basically nothing but crazy for love and lacking love? Is this the secret fonnula of my life?
I can conceive of that when I fantasize and think of the world and people, but not when I think of Lindner, that specific, ridiculous person, the man Agathe will perhaps see again tomorrow in order to discuss with him what she does not discuss with me. So what's left? That there are two groups of emotions which can be separated to some extent, which I would now again like to characterize only as positive and negative condi- tions, without placing a value on them, but merely according to a pecu- liarity of their appearance; although I love one of these two overall conditions from the depths (that also means: well hidden) of my soul. And the reality is left that I now find myself almost constantly in this condition, and Agathe too! Perhaps this is a great experiment that fate intends with me. Perhaps everything I have attempted was there only so that I could experience this. But I also fear that there's a vicious circle lurking in everything that I think I have understood up to now. For I don't want-if I now go back to my original motif-to leave the state of "significance," and if I try to tell myself what significance is, all I come back to again and again is the state I'm in, which is that I don't want to leave a specific state! So I don't believe I'm looking at the truth, but what I experience is certainly not simply subjective, either; it reaches out for the truth with a thousand anns. For that reason it could truly seem to me to be a hypnotic suggestion. All my emotions happen to be remarkably homogeneous or harmonized, and the resistive ones are excluded, and such a condition of the emotions, which regulates action in a unified way, is precisely what is regarded as the centerpiece of a hypnosis.
At this moment he felt that it would be quite impossible to take a bird in his hand, and this naked skin was to be pressed against his naked and unprotected skin? His breast was to be filled with warmth from her breast? He sought to draw things out with jokes. They were tortured and fearful. He said, "Isn't it true that fat women lace their feet too. Along with their shoes. And above the knot the flesh spills over a little, and there is a little unpleasant smell there. A little smell that exists nowhere else in the world. "
She said to herself: "He must be a writer; now I understand his odd behavior. Later I will play the elegant lady with him. " She resolutely began to undress; she owed it to her honor.
He became anxious; now he knew for certain: I can never take this
From the Posthumous Papers · 1705
leap into another human being, let myselfinto an utterly alien existence. Since he did not move, she stopped; she was suddenly bad-tempered; she too became fearful. What if she had fallen victim to an unconscion- able man? She did not know him. The woman, who had not revealed her name, began to have regrets. She still waited. But something told her: it will get better once we've gone further.
He felt all that. The idea . . Open up! " tortured him. Like a child's toy. That's what she wants. But over and over again there is some new wall of disappointment with no way through, and then she will get angry with me.
And the second torture was: She's pursuing me. She's just unrolling herself. Always right in front of me. What's she talking about so inces- santly? I'm supposed to fall like a dog all over the round, rolling ball of her life. Otherwise she'll do something to me. His eyes darted back and forth in the darkness like fish.
Now she was sitting before him in only shoes and stockings. Her hips rolled down in three swelling folds. She began to tremble.
She had taken off all her clothes because he had spoken about her. That seemed certain to her. And she felt that she was wronging him; did he not have to mistrust her, since he knew nothing more about her than that she had followed him? She wanted to tell him that Leopold was, of course, a good person. . . . Again silence intervened.
Then he heard himself saying the nonsensical sentence: Whoever loves is young. At the same moment he felt her arms around his neck. To save herself she had to find him enchanting. . . Beloved, beloved! Leave your eyes, you look so suffering and noble! "
Then with the strength of despair he lifted up his burden and heard himself asking: . . Would you rather make Kung Fu-tse, or do you prefer rallies? " She took these for technical terms from men's talk. She did not want to expose her ignorance. She made herself cozy with them. What does your Kung Fu-tse do? The tip of his tongue touched her lips. This ancient manner of understanding between people, such foreheads al- ways sitting above such lips, was familiar to her. The stranger knew so much. She slowly flattened out her tongue and pushed it forward. Then she quickly drew it back and smiled roguishly; when she was still a child she knew herself to be already famous for her roguish smile. And she said without thinking, moved perhaps by some unconscious association of sounds: ''I'd like rallies. My husband will be gone for a week. "
At this moment he bit off her tongue. It seemed to him to be a long time before his teeth got all the way through. Then he felt it thick in his mouth. The storm of a great deed whirled up in him, but the unfortu- nate woman was a white, bleeding mass, beating all around her in a cor-
1706 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ner of the room, circling around a high, hoarse, screeching note, around
the reeling root of a sound.
In those places where the woman and his reaction to her is described: Is this a woman at all? Or is it the being pushed from the experience into a jackal's den of the imagination, condensation of all the hatefulness of the world in the infantilely special person with skirts and ringlets, rage against the most lovable thing on earth?
It is probably unnecessary to say that this is not a true experience but a dream, for no decent person would think such a thing in a waking state.
The place of this dream lay on one of the major traffic arteries that radiate out from the center of Vienna. Even though from that time on, when world metropolises full of enormous rushing around came into being, Vienna was still only a big city, traffic in the peak hours filled this tube of streets with a dizzying stream of life, which can best be com- pared with swill being poured into a trough. Dark lumps of cars shot around in a no-longer-transparent fluid ofvoices, metals, air, stones, and wood, in a pleasantly tart smell of haste, through the standing throng of interests running in and out at the opening of a thousand stores, and the constitutive stream of pedestrians hastening toward some distant goal pushed fmward. This is the city person's drink that invigorates the nerves. At the place of this dream fifty cars a minute came by on average, at a speed of twenty miles an hour, and six hundred pedestrians. If the eye, or at least the mind, took all that in, then the stimulus had to tra- verse a path of 1,800 feet per second, leaving aside smell, hearing, aroused desire, and everything else, and observing only the mad film.
An unnatural spread.
But the place itself did not appear on this film; only the fence around its grounds did. Ifone were propelled on past this garden fence, there lay behind it well-tended grounds, and among trees one saw a small white house with broad wings and looked into the noble stillness of a scholar's home. Between it and the nature in front of the fence the un- nature of trees, muflled sound, and pure air intervened; as indeed the
From the PosthuTIUJtls Papers · 1707
un-nature of various ideals and antiquities also lie between life and the thinking of a scholar (and only a quite complicated connection makes it possible for life to afford scholars).
The scholar who had unfortunately had this dream had a great many friends among men and women, and was a quite pleasant, handsome, and well-to-do young man. In order not to expose him, and for various reasons, let us assume that his name was simply Anders [literally, "dif- ferent'': an earlier name for Ulrich-TRANs. ].
Here it could also go on:
One of his women friends happened to be with him at the moment and was called . . . and because of the moral songs she sang. She looked like a beautiful woman from an illustrated magazine of 1870. Her beauty was like a lion's skin stuffed by a furrier. She spelled out this beauty from an invisible book and underlined the teasing as well as the tragic quali- ties of love with gestures like the emphases of an eight-year-old school- girl reciting Schiller.
It would not be appropriate to inquire further into the meaning of his horrible dream, but on the other hand we cannot avoid mentioning Christian Moosbrugger, for Moosbrugger doubtless had something to do with its source. Who was Christian Moosbrugger?
What distinguished him from other good-natured and right-thinking carpenters was merely that he was to be executed on account of several sex murders.
In one of the newspaper reports, a collection of which lay in front of Anders (while he held an unopened letter in his hand), it was said of Moosbrugger that he was good-natured. All the other reports described him in similar fashion, but the thing about his smile, for instance, was wrong, and in general the business about his self-important smile, his good nature, and his monstrous deeds was by no means a simple affair.
There was no doubt that he was, at times, mentally ill. But since the bestial crimes that he committed in this condition were presented in the newspapers in the most extreme detail, and thirstily sucked up by their readers, his mental illness must have somehow partaken of the general mental health. He had cut up a woman, a prostitute of the lowest class, with a knife in the most horrifying manner, and the newspapers fully and pitilessly described the delights, to be sure incomprehensible to us, of a wound reaching from the back part of the neck to the middle of the front part; further, two stab wounds to the breast, which bored through the
I708 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
heart, two more in the left side of the back, and the cutting off of the breasts. In spite of (the most vivid retching of) their loathing, the report- ers and editors could not look away before adding up thirty-five stab wounds to the belly, which, moreover, was slit open by a wound running to the sacrum and continuing on up the back in a swarm of wounds, while the neck bore traces of strangulation.
Perhaps one ought not repeat this at all, for it is dubious whether the novelist will be allowed the protection ofthe duties ofhis calling enjoyed by the newspapers, which, like those men who prowl in the dark of night with shielded lanterns and seamen's boots, have to climb into all those things in which mankind, upon waking, is accustomed to proclaim its interest. But ultimately it cannot be said anywhere but in a less serious place than the newspapers how remarkable it is that no sooner were Moosbrugger's abominable excesses made known to thousands of peo- ple, who lose no opportunity to scold the public's desire for sensation, than they were immediately felt by these very people to be "at last some- thing interesting again": by capable officials in a hurry to get to the of- fice, by their fourteen-year-old sons, and by their spouses immersed in a cloud of household cares. People of course sighed over such a monster, but inwardly he preoccupied them more than their professions did. In- deed, it might happen that on going to bed the very correct Section Chief Tu. zzi, or the second in command of the Nature Cure Association, said to his sleepy wife: What would you do i f I were a Moosbrugger now?
c. 1932
49
ULRICH's DIARY
Often Ulrich thought that everything he was experiencing with Agathe was reciprocal hypnotic suggestion and conceivable only under the in- fluence of the idea that they had been chosen by some unusual destiny. At one time this destiny represented itself to them under the sign of the Siamese twins, at another under that of the Millennium, the love of the seraphs, or the myths of the "concave" experiencing of the world. These
From the Posthumous Papers · 1709
conversations were no longer repeated, but they had in the past assumed the more potent shadow ofreal events, ofwhich mention was made ear- lier. One might call it merely half a conviction, if one is of the opinion that the kind of thinking involved in conviction is one that has to be en- tirely certain of its subject; but there is also a total conviction that arises simply from the absenee of all objections, because an emotional mood that is strong and one-sidedly motivated keeps all doubt away from con- scious awareness: there were times when Ulrich already felt almost con- vinced of something without even knowing what it was. But if he then asked himself-for he had to assume that he was suffering from delu- sions-what it was that he and Agathe must have reciprocally imagined at the beginning, their wondrous feeling for each other or the no less remarkable alteration in their thinking in which this feeling expressed itself, that could not be determined either; for both had appeared at the very beginning, and taken singly, one was as unfounded as the other.
This sometimes made him think of the idea of a hypnotic suggestion, and then he felt the uncanny anxiety that steals up on the independent will which sees itself treacherously attacked and shackled from within. "What am I to understand by this? How is one to explain this vulgar notion of hypnosis, which I use as facilely as everyone else, without un- derstanding it? I was reading about it today," Ulrich noted on a piece of paper. "The language of animals consists of affective expressions that evoke the same affects in their companions. Warning call, feeding call, mating call. I might add that these utterances activate and permeate not only the same affect but also quite directly the action associated with it. The terror call, the mating call, goes right through them! Your word is in me and moves me: if the animal were a person it would feel a mysteri- ous, incorporeal union! But this affective suggestibility is also supposed to be still completely intact in people, in spite of the highly developed language of reason. Affect is contagious: panic, yawning. It easily evokes the ideas appropriate to it: a cheerful person spreads cheerfulness. It also encroaches on unsuitable vehicles: this occurs in all gradations, from the silliness of a love token to the complete frenzy of love, whose brainstorms are worthy of the madhouse. But affect also knows how to exclude what is inappropriate, and in both ways evokes in people that persistent unified attitude that gives the state ofhypnotic suggestion the power of fixed ideas. Hypnosis is only a special case of these general relations. I like this explanation, and I'll adopt it. A singular, persistent, unified attitude, but one that blocks us offfrom the totality oflife: that is our condition! "
Ulrich was now beginning to write many such pages. They formed a sort of diary, with whose aid he sought to preserve the mental clarity he
1710 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
felt was threatened. But immediately after he had put the first of his notes on paper, he thought of a second: "What I have called magnanim- ity may also be connected with hypnotic suggestion. By passing over what is not part of it, and seizing hold of what furthers it, it is magnani- mous. " When that was done, his observations did not, of course, seem nearly as remarkable as they had before he had written them down, and he made another effort to look for an indisputable milestone of the con- dition in which he found himself together with his sister. He found it once more in the realization that thinking and feeling were changed in the same sense, and they not only corresponded with each other to a remarkable degree but also stood in contrast to the ordinruy condition as something one-sided, indeed almost insoluble and addictive, an inevita- ble synthesis of aspirations and insights of all kinds. When their conver- sations were in the right mood-and the susceptibility to this was extremely great-the impression they gave was never that one word was forcing another, or one action dragging the next along after it, but that something was aroused in the mind to which the answer followed as the next-higher step. Every movement of the mind became the discovery of a new, even finer movement; they furthered each other reciprocally, and in this manner gave rise to the impression of an intensification that did not end, and ofa discussion that rose without falling. It seemed that the last word could never be spoken, for every end was a beginning, and every final result the start of a new opening, so that every second shone like the rising sun but at the same time carried with it the peaceful pass- ing of the setting sun. "If I were a believer, I would find in this the con- firmation of the unfathomable assertion that His nearness is for us as inexpressible a raising up as our oppressive helplessness allows us to feel! " Ulrich wrote.
He recalled having read with his senses on fire, in those early years when he was entering upon his intellectual life, the description of similar feelings in all sorts of books that he never read through to the end be- cause impatience and a will that urged him to assert his own power pre- vented him, although he was moved by them, indeed for just that reason. Then too, he had not lived as was to have been expected, and when he now happened to pick up several of these books again, which was something he did gladly, meeting the old witnesses once more made it seem as if he were quietly entering a door in his house that he had once arrogantly slammed shut. His life seemed to lie unrealized behind him, or perhaps even before him. Intentions not carried out can be like rejected lovers in dreams, who have remained beautiful over many years while the astonished wanderer returning home sees himself devastated: in the exquisite expansion ofthe powerofone's dreams, one thinks these
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 1 1
lovers make one grow young again, and this was the mood, divided be- tween enterprise and doubt, between the tips of flame and ashes, in which Ulrich now most frequently found himself. He read a great deal. Agathe, too, read a great deal. She was already content that the passion for reading, which had accompanied her in all the circumstances of her life, no longer served as mere distraction but had a purpose, and she kept up with her brother like a girl whose blowing dress leaves her no time to think about the path she's taking. It happened that brother and sister got up in the night, after just having gone to bed, and met each other anew with their books, or that they prevented each other from going to bed at all, in spite of the late hour. About this Ulrich wrote: "It seems to be the only passion we permit ourselves. Even when we are tired we don't want to part. Agathe says: 'Aren't we brother and sister? ' That means: Siamese twins; for otherwise it would be meaningless. Even when we're too tired to talk she won't go to bed, because we can't sleep beside each other. I promise to sit beside her until she falls asleep, but she doesn't want to undress and get into bed; not out of shame but be- cause she would be doing something before I did. We put on bathrobes. A few times we've even fallen asleep leaning on each other. She was warm with the fervor of her mind. I had, to support her, wrapped my arm around her body and didn't even realize it. She has fewer ideas than I do, but a higher temperature. She must have a very warm skin. In the morning we are pale with fatigue, and sleep for part of the day. Inciden- tally, we don't derive the slightest intellectual progress from this read- ing. We burn in the books like the wick in oil. We assimilate them really without any effect other than our burning. . . . "
Ulrich added: "The young person listens with only half an ear to the voice ofthose books which become his destiny: he flees them in order to raise his own voice! For he is not seeking truth; he is seeking himself. That's the way it was with me too. Large-scale conclusion: There are always new people and always the old events, merely mixed in new com- binations! Moral fragility of the age. They are essentially like our read- ing, a burning for its own sake. When was the last time I told myself that? Shortly before Agathe's arrival. Ultimate cause of this phenome- non? The absence of system, principles, a goal, and also absence of the possibility of intensifying life and any logical consequence in it. I hope to be able to write down some things that have occurred to me about this. It's part of the 'General Secretariat. ' But the strange thing about my present condition is that I am further away than ever from such active participation in intellectual work. That's Agathe's influence. She radiates immobility. Nevertheless, this incoherent state has peculiar weight. It is pregnant with meaning. What characterizes it, I would say, is the great
1712 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
amount of rapture it contains; although this notion is of course as vague as all the rest. Temporizing restriction, which I allow myself to be guilty of! Our condition is that other life which has always hovered before me. Agathe is working toward it, but I ask myself: can it be carried out as actual life? Not long ago she, too, asked me about that. . . . "
But Agathe, when she had done so, had merely lowered her book and asked: "Can you love two people who are enemies? " She added by way of explanation: "I sometimes read something in a book that contradicts what I have read in another book, but I love both passages. Then I think of how both of us, you and I, contradict each other about lots of things. Isn't that what it depends on?
Or is conscience not involved? "
Ulrich immediately recalled that in the irresponsible state of mind in which she had altered the will, she had asked him something similar. This led to a remarkable depth and undermining beneath the present situation, for the main current of his thoughts led Agathe's statement without reflection back to Lindner. He knew that she was seeing him; she had, to be sure, never told him so, but also made no efforts to con- ceal it.
The response to this open manner of concealment was Ulrich's diary. Agathe was not supposed to know anything about it.
When he wrote in it, he suffered from the feeling of having commit-
ted an act of disloyalty. Or it reinforced and liberated him, for the chill- ing state of the wrong secretly committed destroyed the intellectual magic spell that was feared as much as it was desired.
That is why in response to Agathe's question Ulrich smiled but gave no other answer.
But now Agathe had suddenly asked: "Do you have mistresses? " This was the first time that she was again addressing such a question to him. "You should, of course," she added, "but you told me yourself that you don't love them! " And then she asked: "Do you have another friend be- sides me? ''
She said this casually, as if she were no longer expecting an answer, but also in an easy and playful way, as ifa tiny quantity ofa very precious substance were lying in the palm of her hand and she was preoccupied with it.
Late at night Ulrich wrote down in his diary the answer he had given.
so
AN ENTRY
It was only one oflife's small challenges that she asked me this question, and what it means is: But you and I are still living outside of the "condi- tion"! One might just as well exclaim: "Give me some water, please! " or: "Stop! Leave the light burning! " It is the request of a moment, some- thing hasty, unconsidered, and nothing more. I say "nothing more," but still I know that it's nothing less than ifa goddess were running to catch a bus! A most unmystic gait, an implosion of absurdity! Such small experi- ences demonstrate how much our Other Condition assumes a single, specific state of mind, and capsizes in an instant if one disturbs its equi- librium.
And yet it is such moments that make one really happy. How beautiful Agathe's voice is! What trust lies in such a tiny request, popping up in the midst of a high and solemn context! It's touching, the way a bouquet of expensive flowers snagged with a wool thread off the beloved's dress is touching, or a protruding piece of wire for which the hands of the bouquet maker were too weak. At such moments one knows exactly that one is overestimating oneself, and yet everything that is more than one- self, all the thoughts of mankind, seem like a spiderweb; the body is the finger that tears it at every moment and to which a wisp still clings.
I just said: The hands of the bouquet maker and abandoned myself to the seesaw feeling of a simile, as if this woman could never be old and fat. That's moonshine of the wrong sort! And that's why I gave Agathe a methodical lecture rather than a direct answer. But I was really only de- scribing the life that hovers before me. I'd like to repeat that and, if I can, improve on it.
In the center stands something I have called motivation. In ordinary life we act not according to motivation but according to necessity, in a concatenation of cause and effect; of course something of ourselves is always involved in this concatenation, which makes us think we are free. This freedom of will is man's ability to do voluntarily what he wishes involuntarily. But motivation has nothing to do with wishing; it cannot be divided according to the opposition of freedom and compulsion: it is the highest freedom and the most profound compulsion. I chose the word because I couldn't find a better one; it's probably related to the painter's term "motif. " When a landscape painter goes out in the morn-
1714 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
ing with the intention offinding a motifhe will usually find it, that is, he will find something that fulfills his intention; yet it would be more accu- rate to say: something that fits in with his intention-the way a word, unless it happens to be too big, fits in every mouth. For something that fulfills is rare, it overfills immediately, spilling over the intention and seizing hold of the entire person. The painter who originally intended to paint "something," even though "from his own point of view," now paints to paint, he paints for the salvation of his soul, and only in such moments does he really have a motif before him; at all other times he merely talks himself into thinking he does. Something has come over him that crushes intention and will. When I say it has nothing at all to do with them, I am of course exaggerating. But one must exaggerate when one is looking at the region that one's soul calls home. There are surely all sorts of transitions, but they are like those of the spectrum: you go through innumerable gradations from green to red, but when you are there you are all there, and there is no longer the slightest trace ofgreen.
Agathe said the gradation is the same as when one more or less lets things happen, does some things from inclination, and finally when one acts from love.
At any rate, there is something similar in speaking, too. One can clearly make a distinction between a thought that is only thinking and a thought that moves the entire person. In between are all sorts of tran- sitions. I said to Agathe: Let's only talk about what moves the entire person!
But when I'm alone I think how murky that is. A scientific idea can also move me. But that isn't the kind of moving that matters. On the other hand, an affect, too, can move me totally, and yet afterward I am merely confounded. The truer something is, the more it is turned away from us in a peculiar way, no matter how much it may concern us. I've asked myself about this remarkable connection a thousand times. One might think that the less "objective" something is, the more "subjec- tive," the more it would have to be turned toward us in the same way, but that is false; subjectivity turns its back on our inner being in just the same way that objectivity does. One is subjective in questions where one thinks one way today and another tomorrow, either because one doesn't know enough or because the object itself depends on the whim of the emotions: but what Agathe and I would like to say to each other is not the provisional or incidental expression of a conviction that on some bet- ter occasion could be raised to the status of truth, but could equally well be recognized as error, and nothing is more alien to our condition than the irresponsibility and sloppiness of such witty brainstorms, for be- tween us everything is governed by a strict law, even ifwe can't articu-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 71 5
late it. The boundary between subjectivity and objectivity crosses with- out touching the boundary along which we are moving.
Or should I perhaps rather restrict myself to the uprooted subjectivity of the arguments one carries on as an adolescent with one's friends? to their mixture of personal sensitivity and impartiality, their conversions and apostasies? These are the preliminary stage of politics and histo:ry and of humanitarianism, with their vague wishy-washiness. They move the entire self, they are connected with its passions and seek to lend them the dignity of a spiritual law and the appearance of an infallible system. What they mean to us lies in their indications of how we ought to be. And all right, even when Agathe tells me something, it's always as if her words go through me and not merely through the sphere of thoughts to which they are addressed. But what happens between us doesn't ap- pear to have great significance. It is so quiet. It avoids knowledge. "Milky" and "opalizing" are the words that occur to me: what happens between us is like a movement in a shimmering but not ve:ry transparent liquid, which is always moved along with it as a whole. What happens is almost entirely a matter of indifference: everything goes through life's center. Or comes from it to us. Happens with the remarkable feeling that everything we have ever done and could do is also involved. If I t:ry to describe it as concretely as possible, I would have to say: Agathe gives me some answer or other or does something, and right away it takes on for me as much significance as it has for her, indeed apparently the same significance, or one like it. Perhaps in reality I don't understand her rightly at all, but I complement her in the direction of her inner motion. Because we are in the same state of excitement, we are evidently guess- ing at what can intensify it and have to follow along unresistingly. When two people find themselves in anger or in love, they intensify each other in similar fashion. But the uniqueness of the excitement, and the signifi- cance that everything assumes in this state of excitement, is precisely what is extraordinary.
If I could say that we are accompanied by the feeling of living in har- mony with God, it would be simple; but how can one describe without presuppositions what it is that constantly excites us? "In harmony" is right, but with what cannot be said. We are accompanied by the feeling that we have reached the middle of our being, the secret center, where life's centrifugal force is preserved, where the incessant twisting of expe- rience ceases, where the conveyor belt of stamping and ejecting that makes the soul resemble a machine stops, where motion is rest; that we have arrived at the axis of the spinning top. These are symbolic expres- sions, and I absolutely hate these symbols, because they are so ready to hand and spread out endlessly without yielding anything. Let me see if I
1716 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
can attempt it once again, and as rationally as possible: the state of ex-
citement in which we live is that of correctness. This word. which used
this way is as unusual as it is sensible, calms me somewhat. The feeling of
correctness contains contentment and satiation. Conviction and the
bringing of things to the still point are part of it; it is the profound state
into which one falls after attaining one's goal. IfI continue to represent
it to myself this way and ask myself: what is the goal that is attained? I
don't know. Yet it's reallynot quite right, either, to speak ofa state ofthe
attained goal; it's at least just as true that this state is accompanied by an
enduring impression of intensification. But it is an intensification with-
out progression. It is also a state of the highest happiness, although it
does not lead beyond a weak smile. At every second we feel ourselves
swept away, yet externally and internally we hold ourselves rather inert;
the motion never ceases, but it oscillates in the smallest space. Also in-
volved is a profound collectedness combined with a broad dispersion
and the awareness ofanimated activity, with a breakthrough by means of
a process we do not sufficiently understand. Thus my intention to limit
myself to the most neutral description immediately results again in sur-
prising contradictions. But what presents itself so disjointedly to the
mind is, as experience, of great simplicity. It is simply there; so to be
0
properly understood it would also have to be simplel
There is also between Agathe and me not the slightest discrepancy in
the opinion that the question: "How should I live? ," which we have both taken upon ourselves, is to be answered: This is the way we should live!
And sometimes I think it's crazy.
END OF THE ENTRY
I now see the task more clearly. Something in human life makes happi- ness short, so much so that happiness and brevity apparently go together like siblings. This makes all the great and happy hours of our existence
"This dilemma, that the state of highest happiness is a state of inertness and passivity instead of leading to the simplicity of experience (= action), Is one that Musil returns to again and again, both philosophically and in terms of how to work it Into the fabric of the noveL-TRANs.
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 1 7
disjointed-a time that drifts in time in fragments-and gives to all other hours their necessruy, emergency coherence. This "something" causes us to lead a life that does not touch us inwardly. It causes us to gobble people as easily as to build cathedrals. It is the reason why all that happens is always only "pseudoreality," what is real merely in an exter- nal sense. It bears the guilt for our being deceived by all our passions. It evokes the ever-recurring futility of youth and the senseless eternal upheaval of the ages. It explains why activity is merely the result of the instinct for activity rather than a person's decision, why our actions com- plete themselves as insistently as if they belonged more to each other than to us, and why our experiences can fly in the air but not in our will. This "something" has the same significance as our not quite knowing what to do with all the spirit we produce; it also causes us to not love ourselves and is the reason we may well find ourselves talented but, all things considered, see no purpose in it.
This "something" is: that over and over again we leave the condition of significance in order to enter the state ofwhat is in and of itself mean- ingless in order to bring some significance to it. We leave the condition ofthe meaningful and enter the state ofthe necessruy and makeshift; we leave\the condition of life to step into the world of the dead. But now that I have written this down, I notice that what I am saying is a tautology and apparently meaningless. Yet before I wrote, what was in my head was: "Agathe gives me some answer or other, a sign; it makes me happy"; and then the thought: 'We do not step out ofthe world of the intellect in order to put intellect in an unintellectual world. " And it seemed to me that this thought was complete, and that the "stepping out" characterizes exactly what I mean. And I only need to put myself back in that state for it still to seem to me to be so.
I must ask myself how a stranger might understand me. When I say "significance," he would certainly understand: what is significant. When I say "intellect," he would first of all understand: stimulation, active thinking, receptivity, and the exercise ofwill. And it would seem to him a matter of course that one must step out of the world of the intellect and carry its significance into life; indeed, he would consider such a striving for "intellectualization" as the worthiest fulfillment of human tasks. How can I express that "intellectualization" is already original sin, and "not to leave the world of the intellect" a commandment that knows no gradations but is fulfilled either entirely or not at all?
Meanwhile a better explanation has occurred to me. The state of ex- citement in which we find ourselves, Agathe and I, doesn't urge us to actions or to truths, which means that it doesn't break anything off from the edge, but flows back into itself again through that which it evokes.
1718 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
This is of course only a description of the form of what happens. But when I describe in this way what I experience, I am able to grasp the changed, indeed quite different, role that my conduct, my action, has: What I do is no longer the discharge of my tension in the final form of a state in which I have found myself, but a channel and relay station on the way back to significance!
To be sure, I almost said: ''Way back to an intensification of my ten- sion"-but then one of those contradictions occurred to me which our condition exhibits, namely that it demonstrates no progression and therefore can't very well demonstrate intensification either. Accord- ingly, I thought I ought to say "way back to myself"-how imprecise all this isl-but the condition is not in the least egotistic but full of a love turned toward the world. And so I simply wrote "significance" again, and the word is good and natural in its context, without my having so far succeeded in getting at its content. -
But as uncertain as all this is, a life has always hovered before me whose centerpiece this would be. In all the other ways I've lived, I al- ways had the obscure feeling of having seen it, forgotten it, and not found it again. It robbed me of satisfaction in everything that was mere calculating and thinking, but it also made me come home after every adventure and from every passion with the stale feeling of having missed the mark, until finally I lost almost all desire to have an effect in the world. That happened because I did not want to let anything compel me to leave the sphere of significance. Now I can also say what "motif" is. Motif is what leads me from significance to significance. Something hap- pens, or something is said, and that increases the meaning of two human lives and unites them through its meaning, and what happens, which physical or legal concept it represents, is quite unimportant, plays abso- lutely no role in it.
But can I imagine what that means in its fullest extent, can I even imagine what it means in its smallest? I must try. A person does some- thing . . . no, I can't duck it: Professor Lindner does something! He arouses Agathe's inclination. I feel this event, want to spoil it and negate it - and the moment I yield to my dislike, I step out of the sphere of significance. What I feel can never become a motif for Agathe. My breast may be full of vexation or anger, my head an arsenal of sharp and ready objections-my heart is empty! My condition is then suddenly negative! My state is no longer positive! There's another marvelous pair of notions I've got hold of! What makes me think of the characteriza- tions "positive" and "negative"? I unexpectedly recall a day when I was also sitting with some paper in front of me and trying to write--at the time it was to be a letter to Agathe. And gradually it comes to mind: a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1719
condition of "do" and a condition of "don't" as the two component ele- ments of every morality, the "do" prevailing during its rise, the "don't" during the satiety of its reign-is not this relationship between "chal- lenge" and "prohibition" the same as what I am now calling positive and negative? The connection between Agathe and me characterized by ev- erything being challenge and nothing prohibition? I recall speaking at that time of Agathe's passionate, affinning goodness, which in an age in which things of that sort are no longer understood looks like a primitive vice. I said: It's like returning home after the longest time and drinking water from the well of one's village! And challenge of course does not mean that we demand but means that everything we do demands the utmost from us.
Not leaving the sphere of the significant would therefore be the same as a life in pure positiveness? The thought that it is also the same as "living essentially" alarms me, although it was to be expected. For what else should "essentially" signify? The word probably comes from mysti- cism or metaphysics, and characterizes the opposition to all earthly hap- penings that are without peace and full of doubts; but since we have separated ourselves from Heaven, it lives on on earth as the longing to find among thousands of moral convictions the one that gives life a meaning that does not change. Endless conversations between Agathe and me on the subject! Her youthful desire for moral instruction along- side the defiance in which she wanted to kill Hagauer and has at least really injured him in a material way! And the same search for conviction everywhere in the world; the intimation that man can't live without mo- rality, and the deep disquiet at how his own emotions undermine every one of them! Where is the possibility of a "whole" life, a "complete" conviction, a love that is without any admixture of not-love, without a shred of self-seeking and selfishness? What that means is: only living positively. And it means: not wanting to admit any happening without "significance" whenever I speak of a "never-ending condition," in con- trast to the "eternally futile moment-to-moment quality" of our usual way of acting, or of the alliance of every momentary state with a "lasting state" of the emotions, which restores our "responsibility. " I could go on repeating such expressions for pages, expressions that characterized what we meant from one side or another. We summarized it as "living essentially," always somewhat embarrassed by the term's bombastic- transcendental overtones, but we had no other that would have been simpler to use. So it is no small surprise for me to suddenly find almost in my hands what I was seeking in the clouds!
Of course it is part of the peculiarity of our condition that every new observation assimilates all the earlier ones, so that there is no hierarchy
1720 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
among them; they seem, rather, to be infinitely entangled. I could just as well go on to call OUI condition magnanimous, which in fact I did some days ago, as I could characterize it as creative, for creating and creation are possible only in an attitude that is positive through and through, and so that, too, would be in accord; ultimately such a life, in which every moment is to be as significant as possible, is also that "life in the sense of the maximal challenge" which I sometimes imagined as the spiritual complement to the laconic resolve of true science. But whether maxi- mal, magnanimous, creative, or significant, essential or whole, how do I account for my feelings for Professor Lindner being what they are? That's the problem I am drawn back to, the crux of the experiment, the crossroads! It occurs to me that I have deprived him of the possibility of having part of Agathe. Why? Because having part of, indeed even under- standing, is never possible through "putting oneself in the place of the other," but is possible only if both mutually take part in something greater. It's impossible for me to feel my sister's headaches; but I find myself transported with her in a state in which there is no pain, or where pain has the hovering wings of bliss!
I have doubts about this, I see the exaggeration in it. But perhaps that's only because I'm not capable of ecstasy?
Toward Lindner I would have to conduct myselfas ifI were somehow united with him in God. Even a smaller whole, like "nation" or some other confraternity, would suffice. At least it would suffice to prescribe my conduct. Even an idea in common would be enough. It merely has to be something new and dynamic that is not merely Lindner and I. So the answer to Agathe's question, what a contradiction signifies between two books both of which one loves, is: it never signifies a calculation or a balance, but signifies a third, dynamic thing, which envelops both as- pects in itself. And that's how the life was that was always before my eyes, even if rarely clearly: the people united, I united with people through something that makes us renounce our hundred dislikes. The contradictions and hostilities that exist between us cannot be denied, but one can also imagine them "suspended," the way the strong current of a liquid picks up and suspends whatever it encounters in its path. There would then not be certain feelings among people, but there would be others. All impossible feelings could be summarized as neutral and negative; as petty, gnawing, constricting, base, but also as indifferent or merely rooted in connections that were necessary. So what remains would be great, increasing, demanding, encumbered, affirming, rising: in my hurry I can't describe it adequately, but it lay in the depths of my body like a dream, and isn't what I ultimately wanted simply to love life and everyone in it? I, with my arms, my muscles, trained to the point of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 7 2 1
malignity, basically nothing but crazy for love and lacking love? Is this the secret fonnula of my life?
I can conceive of that when I fantasize and think of the world and people, but not when I think of Lindner, that specific, ridiculous person, the man Agathe will perhaps see again tomorrow in order to discuss with him what she does not discuss with me. So what's left? That there are two groups of emotions which can be separated to some extent, which I would now again like to characterize only as positive and negative condi- tions, without placing a value on them, but merely according to a pecu- liarity of their appearance; although I love one of these two overall conditions from the depths (that also means: well hidden) of my soul. And the reality is left that I now find myself almost constantly in this condition, and Agathe too! Perhaps this is a great experiment that fate intends with me. Perhaps everything I have attempted was there only so that I could experience this. But I also fear that there's a vicious circle lurking in everything that I think I have understood up to now. For I don't want-if I now go back to my original motif-to leave the state of "significance," and if I try to tell myself what significance is, all I come back to again and again is the state I'm in, which is that I don't want to leave a specific state! So I don't believe I'm looking at the truth, but what I experience is certainly not simply subjective, either; it reaches out for the truth with a thousand anns. For that reason it could truly seem to me to be a hypnotic suggestion. All my emotions happen to be remarkably homogeneous or harmonized, and the resistive ones are excluded, and such a condition of the emotions, which regulates action in a unified way, is precisely what is regarded as the centerpiece of a hypnosis.
