It is said that he wants to push the necessary laws through
Parliament
with the help of the German parties, and for that reason is now counseling a German line in domestic politics.
Musil - Man Without Qualities - v2
But I, a mathematician, imagine the divine being as love?
How did I arrive at that?
"And how are we to participate without more ado in one of the Eternal Artist's most intimate experiences? ''
The writing broke off. But then Agathe's face was again suffused with a blush when, without raising her eyes, she took up the next page and read on:
"Lately Agathe and I have frequently had a remarkable experi- ence! When we undertook our expeditions into town. When the weather is especially fine the world looks quite cheerful and harmo- nious, so that you really don't pay attention to how different all its component parts are, according to their age and nature. Everything stands and moves with the greatest naturalness. And yet, remarkably, there is in such an apparently incontrovertible condition of the pres- ent something that leads into a desert; something like an unsuccess- ful proposal of love, or some similar exposure, the moment one does not unreservedly participate in it.
"Along our way we find ourselves walking through the narrow vio- let-blue streets of the city, which above, where they open to the light, bum like fire. Or we step out of this tactile blue into a square over which the sun freely pours its light; then the houses around the square stand there looking taken back and, as it were, placed against the wall, but no less expressively, and as if someone had scratched them with the fine lines of an engraving tool, lines that make every- thing too distinct. And at such a moment we do not know whether all this self-fulfilled beauty excites us profoundly or has nothing at all to do with us. Both are the case. This beauty stands on a razor's edge between desire and grief.
"But does not the sight of beauty always have this effect of bright- ening the griefofordinary life and darkening its gaiety? It seems that
1226 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
beauty belongs to a world whose depths hold neither grief nor gaiety. Perhaps in that world even beauty itself does not exist, but merely some kind of almost indescribable, cheerful gra~ty, and its name arises only through the refraction of its nameless splendor in our or- dinary atmosphere. We are both seeking this world, Agathe and I, without yet being able to make up our minds; we move along its bor- ders and cautiously enjoy the profound emanation at those points where it is still mingled with the powerful lights of every day and is almost invisible! "
It seemed as if Ulrich, through his sudden idea of speaking of an Eternal Artist, had been led to bring the question of beauty into his observations, especially since, for its part, beauty also expressed the oversensitivity that had arisen between brother and sister. But at the same time he had changed his manner of thinking. In this new se- quence ofentries he proceeded no longer from his dominant ideas as they faded down to the vanishing point of his experiences, but from the foreground, which was clearer but, in a few places that he noted, really too clear, and again almost permeable by the background.
Thus Ulrich went on. "I said to Agathe: 'Apparently beauty is nothing other than having been loved. ' For to love something and beautify it is one and the same. And to propagate its love and make others see its beauty is also one and the same. That's why everything can appear beautiful, and everything beautiful, ugly; in both cases it will depend on us no less than it compels us from outside, because love has no causality and knows no fixed sequence. I'm not certain how much I've said about that, but it also explains this other impres- sion that we have so vividly on our walks: We look at people and want to share in the joy that is in their faces; but these faces also radiate a discomfiture and an almost uncanny repulsion. It emanates, too, from the houses, clothes, and everything that they have created for themselves. When I considered what the explanation for this might be, I was led to a further group of ideas, and through that back to my first notes, which were apparently so fantastic.
"A city such as ours, lovely and old, with its superb architectural stamp, which over the course of ages has arisen from changing taste, is a single great witness to the capacity for loving and the incapacity for loving long. The proud sequence of this city's structures repre- sents not only a great history but also a constant change in the direc-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 2 7
tion ofthought. Looked at in this manner, the city is a mutability that has become a chain of stone and that surveys itself differently every quarter century in order to be right, in the end, for eternal ages. Its mute eloquence is that of dead lips, and the more enchantingly se- ductive it is, the more violently it must evoke, in its most profound moment of pleasing and of expropriation, blind resistance and horror. "
"It's ridiculous, but tempting," Agathe responded to that. "In that case the swallowtail coats of these dawdlers, or the funny caps offi- cers wear on their heads like pots, would have to be beautiful, for they are most decidedly loved by their owners and displayed for love, and enjoy the favor ofwomen! "
'We made a game of it too. In a kind of merry bad temper we enjoyed it to the utmost and for a while asked ourselves at every step, in opposition to life: What, for example, does the red on that dress over there mean by oeing so red? Or what are these blues and yel- lows and whites really doing on the collars of those uniforms? And why in God's name are the ladies' parasols round and not square? We asked ourselves what the Greek pediment ofthe Parliament building was after, with its legs astraddle? Either 'doing a split,' as only a dancer or a pair of compasses can, or disseminating classical beauty? If you put yourself back that way into a preliminary state in which you are not touched by feelings, and where you do not infuse things with the emotions that they complacently expect, you destroy the faith and loyalty of existence. It's like watching someone eat silently, without sharing his appetite: You suddenly perceive only swallowing movements, which look in no way enviable.
"I call that cutting oneselfofffrom the 'meaning' oflife. To clarify this, I might begin with how we unquestionably seek the firm and solid in life as urgently as a land animal that has fallen into the water. This makes us overestimate the significance of knowledge, justice, and reason, as well as the necessity of compulsion and violence. Per- haps I shouldn't say overestimate; but in any case, by far the greatest number of manifestations of our life rest on the mind's insecurity. Faith, supposition, assumption, intimation, wish, doubt, inclination, demand, prejudice, persuasion, exemplification, personal views, and other conditions of semi-certainty predominate among them. And because meaning, on this scale, lies roughly halfway between reason-
1228 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ing and capriciousness, I am applying its name to the whole. If what we express with words, no matter how magnificent they are, is mostly just a meaning, an opinion, then what we express without words is always one.
"Therefore I say: Our reality, as far as it is dependent on us, is for the most part only an expression of opinion, although we ascribe every imaginable kind of importance to it. We may give our lives a specific manifestation in the stones of buildings: it is always done for the sake of a meaning we impute to it. We may kill or sacrifice our- selves: we are acting only on the basis of a supposition. I might even say that all our passions are mere suppositions; how often we err in them; we can fall into them merely out of a longing for decisiveness! And also, doing something out of 'free' will really assumes that it is merely being done at the instigation of an opinion. For some time Agathe and I have been sensitive to a certain hauntedness in the em- pirical world. Every detail in which our surroundings manifest them- selves 'speaks to us. ' It means something. It shows that it has come into being with a purpose that is by no means fleeting. It is, to be sure, only an opinion, but it appears as a conviction. It is merely a sudden idea, but acts as ifit were an unshakable will. Ages and centu- ries stand upright with legs firmly planted, but behind them a voice whispers: Rubbish! Never has the Hour Struck, never has the Time Come!
"It seems to be willfulness, but it enables me to understand what I see if I note in addition: This opposition between the self-obsession that puffs out the chest ofeverything we have created in all its splen- dor, and the secret trait of being given up and abandoned, which likewise begins with the first minute, is wholly and completely in agreement with my calling everything merely an opinion. By this means we recognize that we are in a peculiar situation. For every attribution of meaning shows the same double peculiarity: as long as it is new it makes us impatient with every opposing meaning (when red parasols are having their day, blue ones are 'impossible'-but something similar is also true of our convictions); yet it is the second peculiarity of every meaning that it is nevertheless given up with time, entirely ofits own accord and just as surely, when it is no longer new. I once said that reality does away with itself. It could now be put like this: I f man is for the most part only proclaiming meanings, he is
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 2 9
never entirely and enduringly proclaiming himself; but even ifhe can never completely express himself, he will try it in the most various ways, and in doing so acquires a history. So he has a history only out ofweakness, it seems to me, although the historians understandably enough consider the ability to make history a particular badge of distinction! "
Here Ulrich seemed to have embarked on a digression, but he continued in this direction: "And this is apparently the reason why I have to take note of this today: History happens, events happen- even art happens-from a lack ofhappiness. But such a lack does not lie in circumstances-in other words, in their not allowing happiness to reach us-but in our emotions. Our feeling bears the cross ofthis double aspect: it suffers no other beside itself and itself does not en- dure. By this means everything connected with it acquires the aspect of being valid for eternity, but we all nonetheless strive to abandon the creations of our feelings and change the meanings that are ex- pressed in them. For a feeling changes in the instant of its existence; it has no duration or identity; it must be consummated anew. Emo- tions are not only changeable and inconstant-as they are well taken to b e - b u t the instant they weren't, they would become so. They are not genuine when they last. They must always arise anew if they are to endure, and even in doing this they become different emotions. An anger that lasted five days would no longer be anger but be a mental disorder; it transforms itself into either forgiveness or pre- parations for revenge, and something similar goes on with all the emotions.
"Our emotions always seek a foothold in what they form and shape, and always find it for a while. But Agathe and I feel an impris- oned ghostliness in our surroundings, the reverse magnetism of two connected poles, the recall in the call, the mobility of supposedly fixed walls; we see and hear it suddenly. To have stumbled 'into a time' seems to us like an adventure, and dubious company. We find ourselves in the enchanted forest. And although we cannot encom- pass 'our own,' differently constituted feeling, indeed hardly know what it is, we suffer anxiety about it and would like to hold it fast. But how do you hold a feeling fast? How could one linger at the highest stage of rapture, if indeed there were any way of getting there at all? Basically this is the only question that preoccupies us. We have inti-
1230 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mations of an emotion removed from the entropy of the other emo- tions. It stands like a miraculous, motionless shadow in the flow before us. But would it not have to arrest the world in its course in order to exist? I arrive at the conclusion that it cannot be a feeling in the same sense as the other feelings. "
And suddenly Ulrich concluded: "So I come back to the question: Is love an emotion? I think not. Love is an ecstasy. And God Himself, in order to be able to lastingly love the world and, with the love of God-the-Artist, also embrace what has already happened, must be in a constant state of ecstasy. This is the only form in which he may be imagined-"
Here he had broken off this entry.
GREA T CHANGES
Ulrich had personally escorted the General out with the intention of discovering what he might have to say in confidence. As he accompa- nied him down the stairs, he sought at first to offer a harmless expla- nation for having distanced himself from Diotima and the others, so that the real reason would remain unstated. But Stumm was not sat- isfied, and asked: 'W ere you insulted? "
"Not in the least. "
"Then you had no right to! " Stumm replied firmly.
But the changes in the Parallel Campaign, about which in his with-
drawal from the world Ulrich had not had the least inkling, now had an invigorating effect on him, as if a window had suddenly been thrown open in a stuffy hall, and he continued: "I would still like to find out what's really going on. Since you've decided to open my eyes halfway, please finish the job! "
Stumm stopped, supporting his sword on the stone of the step, and raised his glance to his friend's face; a broad gesture, which
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 3 1
lasted the longer in that Ulrich was standing one step higher: "Noth- ing I'd like better," he said. "That's the reason I came. "
Ulrich calmly began to interrogate him. "Who's working against Leinsdorf? Tuzzi and Diotima? Or the Ministry ofWar with you and Arnheim-? "
"My dear friend, you're stumbling through abysses! " Stumm inter- rupted him. "And blindly walking past the simple truth, the way all intellectuals seem to do! Above all, I beg you to be convinced that I have passed on Leinsdorf's wish to have you visit him and Diotima only as the most selfless favor-"
"Your officer's word of honor? "
The General's mood turned sunny. "Ifyou're going to remind me of the spartan honor of my profession, you conjure up the danger that I really will start lying to you; for there might be an order from above that would obligate me to do so. So I'd rather give you my private word of honor," he said with dignity, and continued by way of explanation: "I was even intending to confide to you that recently I have seen myself at times compelled to reflect upon such difficulties; I find myself lying often these days, with the ease of a hog wallowing in garbage. " Suddenly he turned completely toward his more ele- vated friend and added the question: "How does it happen that lying is so agreeable, assuming you have an excuse? Just speaking the truth seems absolutely unproductive and frivolous by comparison! If you could tell me that, it would be, straight out, one ofthe reasons I came to hunt you up. "
"Then tell me honestly what's going on," Ulrich asked, unyielding.
"In total honesty, and also quite simply: I don't know! " Stumm protested.
"But you have a mission! " Ulrich probed.
The General answered: "In spite of your truly unfriendly dis- appearance, I have stepped over the corpse of my self-respect to confide this mission to you. But it is a partial mission. A teeny com- mission. I am now a little wheel. A tiny thread. A little Cupid who has been left with only a single arrow in his quiver! " Ulrich observed the portly figure with the gold buttons. Stumm had definitely become more self-reliant; he did not wait for Ulrich's response but set him- self in motion toward the door, his sword clanking on every step. And as the entry hall, whose noble furnishings would otherwise have in-
1232 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
stilled in him a reverence for the master ofthe house, arched up over the two of them as they came down, he said over his shoulder to this master: "It's clear you still have not quite grasped that the Parallel Campaign is now no longer a private or family undertaking but a po- litical process of international stature! "
"So now it's being run by the Foreign Minister? " Ulrich volleyed. "Apparently. "
"And consequently Tuzzi? ''
"Presumably; but I don't know," Stumm quickly added. "And of
course he acts as if he knows nothing at all! You know what he's like: these diplomats pretend to be ignorant even when they really are! "
They walked through the front door, and the carriage drove up. Suddenly Stumm turned, confidingly and comically pleading, to Ul- rich: "But that's why you should really start frequenting the house again, so that we have a quasi-confidant there! "
Ulrich smiled at this scheming, and laid his arm around the Gen- eral's shoulder; he felt reminded of Diotima. "What is she up to? '' he asked. "Does she now recognize the man in Tuzzi? ''
"What she's up to? " the General responded, vexed. "She gives the impression of being irritated. " And he added good-naturedly: "To the discriminating glance, perhaps even a moving impression. The Ministry of Education gives her hardly any other assignments than deciding whether the patriotic association Wiener Schnitzel should be allowed to march in the parade, or a group called Roast Beefwith Dumplings as well-"
Ulrich interrupted him suspiciously. "Now you're talking about the Ministry of Education? Weren't you just saying that the Foreign Ministry had appropriated the campaign? ''
"But look, maybe the Schnitzels are really the affair of the Interior Ministry. Or the Ministry of Trade. Who can predict? " Stumm in- structed him. "But in any case, the Congress for World Peace as a whole belongs to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the extent that it's not already owned by the two Ministerial Presidiums. "
Ulrich interrupted him again. "And the War Ministry is nowhere in your thoughts at all? "
"Don't be so suspicious! " Stumm said calmly. "Ofcourse the War Ministry takes the most active interest in a congress for world peace; I would say no less an interest than police headquarters would take in
From the Posthumous Papers · 1233
an international congress of anarchists. But you know what these ci- vilian ministries are like: they won't grant even a toehold to the likes ofus! "
"And-? " Ulrich asked, for Stumm's innocence still made him suspicious.
"There's no 'and'! " Stumm assured him. "You're rushing things! If a dangerous business involves several ministries, then one of them wants to either shove it off on, or take it away from, one of the others; in both cases the result of these efforts is the creation of an inter- ministerial commission. You only need to remind yourself how many committees and subcommittees the Parallel Campaign had to create at the beginning, when Diotima was still in full command of its ener- gies; and I can assure you that our blessed council was a still life com- pared with what's being worked up today! " The carriage was waiting, the coachman sitting bolt upright on his coach box, but Stumm gazed irresolutely through the open vehicle into the bright-green garden that opened beyond. "Perhaps you can give me a little-known word with 'inter' in it? " he asked, and toted up with prompting nods of his head: "Interesting, interministerial, international, intercurrent, in- termediate, interpellation, interdicted, internal, and a few more; be- cause now you hear them at the General Staff mess more often than the word 'sausage. ' But if I were to come up with an entirely new word, I could create a sensation! "
Ulrich steered the General's thoughts back to Diotima. It made sense to him that the highest mandate came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from which it in all probability followed that the reins were in Tuzzi's hands: but then, how could another ministry offend this powerful man's wife? At this question Stumm disconso- lately shrugged his shoulders. "You still haven't got it through your head that the Parallel Campaign is an affair of state! " he responded, adding spontaneously: "Tuzzi is slyer than we thought. He himself would never have been able to ascribe such a thing to it, but inter- ministerial technology has allowed him to hand over his wife to an- other ministry! "
Ulrich began to laugh softly. From the message clothed in these rather odd words he could vividly imagine both people: magnificent Diotima-the power station, as Agathe called her-and the smaller, spare Section Chief, for whom he had an absolutely inexplicable
1234 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sympathy, although he knew Tuzzi looked down on him. It was fear of the moon-nights of the soul that drew him to this man's rational feelings, which were as dryly masculine as an empty cigarette case. And yet, when they had broken over the head of this diplomat, the sufferings ofthe soul had brought him to the point of seeing in every- one and everything only pacifist intrigues; for pacifism was for Tuzzi the most intelligible representation of soulful tenderness! Ulrich re- called that Tuzzi had finally come to regard Arnheim's increasingly open efforts concerning the Galician oil fields-indeed, his efforts concerning his own wife-as merely a divertissement whose purpose was to deflect attention from a secret enterprise of a pacifistic nature: so greatly had the events in his house confused Tuzzi! He must have suffered unbearably, and it was understandable: the spiritual passion that he found himself unexpectedly confronting not only offended his concept of honor, just as physical adultery would have done, but struck directly and contemptuously at his very ability to fonn con- cepts, which in older men is the true retirement home of manly dignity.
And Ulrich cheerfully continued his thought aloud: "Apparently the moment his wife's patriotic campaign became the object of pub- lic teasing, Tuzzi completely regained control over his lost mental faculties, as befits a high official. It must have been then at the latest that he recognized all over again that more things are going on in the lap ofworld history than would find room in a woman's lap, and your Congress for World Peace, which turned up like a foundling, will have woken him with a start! " With coarse satisfaction, Ulrich de- picted to himself the murky, ghost-ridden state that must have come first, and then this awakening, which perhaps did not even have to be associated with a feeling of awakening; for the moment the souls of Arnheim and Diotima, wandering around in veils, started to touch down in reality, Tuzzi, freed from every haunting spirit, again found himself in that realm of necessity in which he had spent almost his entire life. "So now he's getting rid of all those friends of his wife's who are saving the world and uplifting the Fatherland? They always were a thorn in~ side! " Ulrich exclaimed with great satisfaction, and turned queryingly to his companion.
Stumm, portly and lost in thought, was still standing in the door- way. "So far as I know, he told his wife that she owed it to him and
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1235
his position, especially under these changed conditions, to bring the Parallel Campaign to an honorable conclusion. She would get a decoration. But she had to entrust herself to the protection and in- sights of the ministry he had selected for that purpose," he reported conscientiously.
"And so he's made peace with y o u -I mean, with the Ministry of War and Arnheim? "
"It looks that way. Because of the Peace Congress, he seems to have argued with the government for support of the rapid modern- ization of our artillery, and with the Minister of War concerning the political consequences.
It is said that he wants to push the necessary laws through Parliament with the help of the German parties, and for that reason is now counseling a German line in domestic politics. Di- otima told me that herself"
'Wait a minute! " Ulrich interrupted. "German line? I've forgotten everything! "
"Quite simple! He always said that everything German was a mis- fortune for us; and now he's saying the opposite. "
Ulrich objected that Section Chief Tuzzi never expressed himself so unambiguously.
"But he does to his wife," Stumm replied. "And between her and me there's a kind of bond ordained by fate. "
'Well, how do things stand between her and Arnheim? " asked Ul- rich, who was at the moment more interested in Diotima than in the concerns of the government. "He no longer needs her; and I suppose that's making his soul suffer! "
Stumm shook his head. "That's apparently not so simple either! " he declared with a sigh.
Up to now he had answered Ulrich's questions conscientiously but without emotion, and perhaps for that very reason relatively sensibly. But since the mention of Diotima and Arnheim, he looked as if he wanted to come out with a quite different story, which seemed to him more important than Tuzzi's finding himself. "You might have long thought that Arnheim had had enough of her," he now began. "But they're Great Souls! It may be that you can understand some- thing about such souls, but they are them! You can't say, was there something between them or was there nothing between them? Today they still talk the way they used to, except that you have the
1236 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
feeling: now there definitely isn't anything between them: They're always talking in what you might call 'last words'! "
Ulrich, remembering what Bonadea, the practitioner of love, had told him about its theoretician, Diotima, held up to Stumm Stumm's own, more measured statement that Diotima was a manual of love. The General smiled thoughtfully at this. "Perhaps we aren't judging it from a broad enough perspective," he generalized discreetly. "Let me preface this by saying that before her I never heard a woman talk that way; and when she starts talking, it's like having ice bags all over me. Besides, she's doing this less often now; but when it occurs to her even today she speaks, for instance, of this World Peace Con- gress as a 'pan-erotic human experience,' and then I feel myself all of a sudden unmanned by her cleverness. But"- a n d he intensified the significance of his words by a brief pause-"there must be some- thing in it-some need, some so-called characteristic of the age- because even in the War Ministry they're beginning to talk that way now. Since this Congress has turned up, you can hear officers of the General Staff talking about love of peace and love of mankind the way they talk about the Model 7 machine gun or the Model82 medi- cal supply wagon! It's absolutely nauseating! "
"Is that why you called yourself a disappointed specialist in love just now? " Ulrich interjected.
"Yes, my friend. You have to excuse me: I couldn't stand hearing you talk so one-sidedly! But officially I derive great profit from all these things. "
"And you no longer have any enthusiasm for the Parallel Cam- paign, for the celebration of great ideas, and such things? " Ulrich probed out of curiosity.
"Even such an experienced woman as your cousin has had enough of culture," the General replied. "I mean culture for its own sake. Besides, even the greatest idea can't stop your ears from getting boxed! "
"But it can cause someone else's getting his ears boxed next time. "
"That's right," Stumm conceded. "But only ifyou use the spiritfor something, not if you serve it selflessly! " Then he looked up at Ul- rich, curious to enjoy along with him the effect ofhis next words, and lowering his voice expectantly, certain of success, he added: "But even ifI would like to, I can't anymore: I've been removed! "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1237
''I'm impressed! " Ulrich exclaimed, instinctively acknowledging the insight of the military authorities. But then he followed another sudden idea and said quickly: "Tuzzi got you into this mess! "
"Not a bit ofit! " Stumm protested, sure ofhimself.
Up to this point the conversation had taken place in the vicinity of the door, and besides the two men there was a third participant who was waiting for them to finish, staring straight ahead so motionlessly that for him the world stopped between the ears of two pairs of horses. Only his fists in their white cotton gloves, through which the reins ran, surreptitiously moved in irregular, soothing rhythms, be- cause the horses, not quite so accessible to military discipline as peo- ple, were getting more and more bored with waiting, and were pulling impatiently at their harnesses. At last the General com- manded this man to take the carriage to the gate and exercise the horses there until he got in; he then invited Ulrich to walk through the garden on foot, so that he could fill him in properly about what had gone on, without being overheard.
But Ulrich thought he saw vividly what it was all about, and at first didn't let Stumm get a word in. "It makes no difference whether Tuzzi took you out of the game or not," he said, "for in this matter you are, ifyou will excuse me, only a minor figure. What's important is that almost at the very moment when he began to get suspicious on account of the Congress and began to face a difficult and onerous test, he simplified his political as well as his personal situation the quickest way he could. He went to work like a sea captain who hears of a big storm coming and doesn't let himself be influenced by the still-dreaming ocean. Tuzzi has now allied himselfwith what repelled him before--Arnheim, your military policies, the German line-and he would also have allied himselfwith. the efforts ofhis wife if, in the circumstances, it had not been more useful to wreck them. I don't know how I should put it. Is it that life becomes easy if one doesn't bother with emotions but merely keeps to one's goal; or is it a mur- derous enjoyment to calculate with the emotions instead of suffering from them? It seems to me I know what the devil felt when he threw a fistful of salt into life's ambrosia! "
The General was all fired up. "But that's what I told you at the beginning! " he exclaimed. "I only happened to be talking about lies, but genuine malice is, in all its forms, an extraordinarily exciting
1238 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
thing! Even Leinsdorf, for instance, has rediscovered a predilection for realpolitik and says: Realpolitik is the opposite ofwhat you would like to do! "
Ulrich went on: "What makes the difference is that before, Tuzzi was always confused by what Diotima and Arnheim were talking about together; but now it can only make him happy, because the loquacity of people who aren't able to seal off their feelings always gives a third person all sorts of footholds. He no longer needs to lis- ten to it with his inner ear, which he was never good at, but only with the outer, and that's roughly the difference between swallowing a disgusting snake or beating it to death! "
"What? " Stumm asked.
"Swallowing it or beating it to death! "
"No, that bit about the ears! "
"I meant to say: it was fortunate for him that he retreated from the
inward side of feeling to the outward side. But perhaps that might still not make sense to you; it's just an idea I have. "
"No, you put it very well! " Stumm protested. "But why are we using others as examples? Diotima and Arnheim are Great Souls, and for that reason alone it'll never work right! " They were strolling along a path but had not got very far; the General stopped. "And what happened to me isn't just an army story! " he informed his ad- mired friend.
Ulrich realized he hadn't given him a chance to speak, and apolo- gized. "So you didn't fall on account ofTuzzi? " he asked politely.
"A general may perhaps stumble over a civilian minister, but not over a civilian section chief," Stumm reported proudly and matter- of-factly. "I believe I stumbled over an idea! " And he began to tell his story.
To HER DISPLEASURE, AGA THE IS CONFRONTED WITH A HISTORICAL SYNOPSIS OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS
Agathe, meanwhile, had come upon a new group of pages, in which her brother's notes continued in a quite different manner. It ap- peared that he had suddenly made up his mind to ascertain what an emotion was, and to do this conceptually and in a dry fashion. He also must have called up all manner of things from his memory, or read them specifically for this purpose, for the papers were covered with notes relating in part to the history and in part to the analysis of the concept of the emotions; altogether, it formed a collection of fragments whose inner coherence was not immediately apparent.
Agathe first found a hint about what had moved him to do this in the phrase "a matter of emotion! " which was written in the margin at the beginning; for she now remembered the conversation, with its profound oscillations that bared the foundations of the soul, which she and her brother had had on this subject in their cousin's house. And she could see that if one wanted to find out what a matter of emotions was, one had to ask oneself, whether one liked it or not, what emotion was.
This served her as a guide, for the entries began by saying that everything that happens among people has its origin either in feel- ings or in the privation of feelings; but without regard to that, an an- swer to the question of what an emotion was could not be gained with certainty from the entire immense literature that had grappled with the issue, for even the most recent accomplishments, which Ul- rich really did think were advances, called for an act of trust of no small degree. As far as Agathe could see, he had not taken psycho- analysis into account, and this surprised her at first, for like all people stimulated by literature, she had heard it spoken of more than other kinds of psychology. Ulrich said he was leaving it out not because he
1239
I240 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
didn't recognize the considerable merits of this significant theory, which was full of new concepts and had been the first to teach how many things could be brought together that in all earlier periods had been anarchic private experience, but because its method was not really appropriate to his present purpose in a way that would be wor- thy of its quite demanding self-awareness. He laid out as his task, first, to compare the existing major answers to the question of what emotion is, and went on to note that on the whole, only three answers could be ascertained, none ofwhich stood out so clearly as to entirely negate the others.
Then followed sketches that were meant to work this out: "The oldest but today still quite prevalent way of representing feeling pro- ceeds from the conviction that clear distinctions can be made among the state of feeling, its causes, and its effects. This method under- stands by the emotions a variety of inner experiences that are funda- mentally distinct from other kinds-and these are, according to this view, sensation, thinking, and willing. This view is popular and has long been traditional, and it is natural for it to regard emotion as a state. This is not necessary, but it comes about under the vague im- pression of the perception that at every moment of an emotion, and in the middle ofits dynamic changes, we can not only distinguish that we are feeling but also experience, as something apparently static, that we are persisting in a state of feeling.
"The more modem way of representing emotion, on the other hand, proceeds from the obseiVation that it is most intimately as- sociated with action and expression; and it follows both that this view is inclined to consider emotion as a process and that it does not direct its attention to emotion alone but sees it as a whole, together with its origin and forms of expression. This approach originated in physiol- ogy and biology, and its efforts were first directed at a physiological explanation of spiritual processes or, more emphatically, at the physi- cal totality in which spiritual manifestations are also involved. The results of this can be summarized as the second main answer to the problem of the nature of emotion.
"But directing the thirst for knowledge toward the whole instead of its constituent elements, and toward reality instead of a precon- ceived notion, also distinguishes the more recent psychological investigations of emotion from the older kinds, except that its aims
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 4 1
and leading ideas are naturally derived from its own discipline. This leads these recent investigations to yield a third answer to the prob- lem ofwhat emotion is, an answer that builds on the others as well as standing on its own. This third answer, however, is no longer in any way part of a retrospective view, because it marks the beginning of insight into the concept formation currently under way or regarded as possible.
"I wish to add, since I mentioned earlier the question of whether emotion is a state or a process, that this question actually plays just about no role at all in the developments I have outlined, unless it be that of a weakness common to all views, which is perhaps not entirely unfounded. If I imagine an emotion, as seems natural in the older manner, as something constant that has an effect both inwardly and outwardly, and also receives input from both directions, then I am obviously faced with not just one emotion but an indeterminate number of alternating emotions. For these subcategories of emotion, language rarely has a plural at its disposal: it knows no envies, angers, or spites. For language these are internal variations of an emotion, or emotion in various stages of development; but without question a se- quence of stages points just as much toward a process as does a se- quence ofemotions. If, on the other hand-which would accord with this and also seem to be closer to the contemporary view-one be- lieves that one is looking at a process, then the doubt as to what emo- tion 'really' is, and where something stops belonging to itself and becomes part of its causes, consequences, or accompanying circum- stances, is not to be solved so easily. In a later place I shall come back to this, for such a divided answer customarily indicates a fault in the way the question is put; and it will, I think, become clear that the question of whether emotion is a state or a process is really an illu- sory one, behind which another question is lurking. For the sake of this possibility, about which I can't make up my mind, I will let this question stand. "
"I will now continue following the original doctrine of emotion, which distinguishes four major actions or basic states of the soul. It goes back to classical antiquity and is presumably a dignified rem- nant of antiquity's belief that the world consists of the four elements
1242 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
earth, air, fire, and water. In any event, one often hears mention even today offour particular classes ofelements ofconsciousness that can- not be reduced to each other, and in the class of 'emotion' the two feelings 'pleasure' and 'lack of pleasure' usually occupy a privileged position; for they are supposed to be either the only ones, or at least the only ones involving emotions that are not in any way alloyed with anything else. In truth they are perhaps not emotions at all but only a coloration and shading of feelings in which have been preserved the original distinction between attraction and flight, and probably also the opposition between succeeding and failing, and other contrasts of the originally so symmetrical conduct of life as well. Life, when it succeeds, is pleasurable: Aristotle said it long before Nietzsche and our time. Kant, too, said that 'pleasure is the feeling of furthering life, pain that of hindering it. ' And Spinoza called pleasure the 'tran- sition in man from lesser to greater perfection. ' Pleasure has always had this somewhat exaggerated reputation of being an ultimate ex- planation (not least on the part of those who have suspected it of deception! ).
"But it can really arouse laughter in the case of thinkers who are not quite major and yet are suspiciously passionate. Here let me cite from a contemporary manual a lovely passage of which I would not like to lose a single word: 'What appears to be more different in kind than, for example, joy over an elegant solution to a mathematical problem and joy over a good lunch! And yet both are, as pure emo- tion, one. and the same, namely pleasure! ' Also let me add a passage from a court decision that was actually handed down just a few days ago: 'The purpose of compensation is to bestow upon the injured party the possibility of acquiring the feelings of pleasure correspond- ing to his usual circumstances, which balance the absence of plea- sure caused by the injury and its consequences. Applied to the present case, it already follows from the limited choice of feelings of pleasure that correspond to the age of two and a quarter years, and the ease of providing means for them, that the compensation sought is too high. ' The penetrating clarity expressed in both these examples permits the respectful observation that pleasure and the absence of pleasure will long remain as the hee and the haw of the doctrine of feeling. "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1243
"If I look around further, I discover that this doctrine that care- fully weighs pleasure and the absence of pleasure understands by 'mixed feelings' the 'connection of the elements of pleasure and lack of pleasure with the other elements of consciousness,' meaning by these grief, composure, anger, and other things upon which lay peo- ple place such high value that they would gladly find out more about them beyond the mere name. 'General states offeeling' such as live- liness or depression, in which mixed feelings of the same kind pre- dominate, are called 'unity of an emotional situation. ' 'Affect' is what this connection calls an emotional situation that occurs 'suddenly and violently,' and such a situation that is, moreover, 'chronic' it calls 'passion. ' Were theories to have a moral, the moral of this doctrine would be more or less contained in the words: Ifyou take small steps at the beginning, you can take big leaps later on! "
"But in distinctions such as these, whether there is just one plea- sure and lack ofpleasure or perhaps several; whether beside pleasure and the absence of pleasure there are not also other basic opposi- tions, for instance whether relaxation and tension are not such (this bears the majestic title of singularistic and pluralistic theory); whether an emotion might change and whether, if it changes, it then becomes a different emotion; whether an emotion, should it consist of a sequence of feelings, stands in relation to these the way genus stands in relation to species, or the caused to its causes; whether the stages an emotion passes through, assuming it is itself a state, are conditions of a single state or different states, and therefore different emotions; whether an emotion can bring about a change in itself through the actions and thoughts it produces, or whether in this talk about the 'effect' of an emotion something as figurative and barely real is meant as if one were to say that the rolling out of a sheet of steel 'effects' its thinning, or a spreading out of clouds the overcast- ing of the sky: in such distinctions traditional psychology has achieved much that ought not to be underestimated. Of course one might then ask whether love is a 'substance' or a 'quality,' and what is
1244 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES involved with regard to love in terms of'haeccity' and 'quiddity'; but
is one ever certain of not having to raise this question yet again? "
"All such questions contain a highly useful sense of ordering, al- though considering the unconstrained nature of emotions, this seems slightly ridiculous and is not able to help us much with regard to how emotions determine our actions. This logical-grammatical sense of order, like a pharmacy equipped with its hundred little drawers and labels, is a remnant of the medieval, Aristotelian-scho- lastic observation of nature, whose magnificent logic came to grief not so much on account of the experiences people had with it as on account ofthose they had without it. It is particularly the fault ofthe developing natural sciences and their ~ew kind of understanding, which placed the question of what is real ahead of the question of what is logical; yet no less, too, the misfortune that nature appears to have been waiting for just such a lack of philosophy in order to let itself be discovered, and responded with an alacrity that is by no means yet exhausted. Nevertheless, so long as this development has not brought forth the new cosmic philosophical egg, it is still useful even today to feed it occasionally from the old bowl, as one does with laying hens. And this is especially true for the psychology of the emo- tions. For in its buttoned-up logical investiture it was, ultimately, completely unproductive, but the opposite is only too true for the psychologists of emotion who came after; for in regard to this rela- tion between logical raiment and productivity, they have been, at least in the fine years oftheir youth, well-nigh sans-culottes! "
"What should I call to mind from these beginnings for more gen- eral advantage? Above all that this more recent psychology began with the beneficent sympathy that the medical faculty has always had for the philosophical faculty, and it cleared away the older psychol- ogy ofemotion by totally ceasing to speak ofemotions and beginning to talk instead about 'instincts,' 'instinctive acts,' and 'affects. ' (Not that talk of man as a being ruled by his instincts and affects was new; it became the new medicine because from then on man was exclu- sively to be so regarded. )
From the Posthumous Papers · 1245
"The advantage consisted in the prospect of reducing the higher human attitude ofinspiration to the general invigorated attitude con- structed on the basis of the powerful natural constraints of hunger, sex, persecution, and other fundamental conditions of life to which the soul is adapted. The sequences of actions these determine are called 'instinctive drives,' and these arise without thinking or purpose whenever a stimulus brings the relevant group of stimuli into play, and these are similarly activated in all animals of the same species; often, too, in both animal and man. The individual but almost invari- able hereditary dispositions for this are called 'drives'; and the term 'affect' is usually associated in this connection with a rather vague notion according to which the 'affect' is supposed to be the experi- ence or the experienced aspect of the instinctive action and of drives stimulated to action.
"This also mostly assumes, either emphatically or discreetly, that all human actions are instinctive actions, or combinations from among such actions, and that all our emotions are affects or parts or combinations of affects. Today I leafed through several textbooks of medical psychology in order to refresh my memory, but not one of their thematic indexes had a mention of the word 'emotion,' and it is really no mean accomplishment for a psychology of the emotions not to contain any emotions! "
"This is the extent to which, even now, a more or less emphatic intention dominates in many circles to substitute scientific concepts meant to be as concrete as possible for the useless spiritual observa- tion of the soul. And however one would originally have liked emo- tions to be nothing more than sensations in the bowels or wrists (which led to such assertions as that fear consists of an accelerated heartbeat and shallow breathing, or that thinking is an inner speaking and thus really a stimulation of the larynx), what is honored and es- teemed today is the purified concept that reduces all inner life to chains of reflexes and the like, and this serves a large and successful school by way of example as the only permissible task of explaining the soul.
"So if the scientific goal may be said to be a broad and wherever possible ironclad anchoring in the realm of nature, there is still
1246 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
blended with it a peculiar exuberance, which can be roughly ex- pressed in the proposition: What stands low stands firm. In the over- coming of a theological philosophy of nature, this was once an exuberance of denial, a 'bearish speculation in human values. ' Man preferred to see himself as a thread in the weave of the world's car- pet rather than as someone standing on this carpet; and it is easy to understand how a devilish, degrading desire for soullessness also rubbed off on the emptiness of the soul when it straggled noisily into its materialistic adolescence. This was later held against it in reli- giously straitlaced fashion by all the pious enemies of scientific think- ing, but its innermost essence was nothing more than a good-natured gloomy romanticism, an offended child's love for God, and therefore also for his image, a love that in the abuse of this image still has un- conscious aftereffects today. "
"But it is always dangerous when a source of ideas is forgotten without this being noticed, and thus many things that had merely derived their unabashed certainty from it were preserved in just as unabashed a state in medical psychology. This gave rise in places to a condition of neglect involving precisely the basic concepts, and not least the concepts of instinct, affect, and instinctive action. Even the question of what a drive is, and which or how many there are, is an- swered not only quite disparately but without any kind of trepida- tion. I had an exposition before me that distinguished among the 'drive groups' of taking in food, sexuality, and protection against dan- ger; another, which I compared with it, adduced a life drive, an asser- tion drive, and five more. For a long time psychoanalysis, which incidentally is also a psychology of drives, seemed to recognize only a single drive. And so it continues: Even the relationship between in- stinctive action and affect has been determined with equally great disparities: everybody does seem to be in agreement that affect is the 'experience' of instinctive action, but as to whether in this process the entire instinctive action is experienced as affect, including exter- nal behavior, or only the internal event, or parts of it, or parts of the external and internal process in a particular combination: sometimes one of these claims is advanced, sometimes the other, and sometimes both simultaneously. Not even what I wrote before from memory
From the Posthumous Papers · 1247 without protest, that an instinctive action happens 'without intention
or reflection,' is correct all the time. "
"Is it then surprising ifwhat comes to light behind the physiologi- cal explanations of our behavior is ultimately, quite often, nothing but the familiar idea that we let our behavior be steered by chain reflexes, secretions, and the mysteries ofthe body simply because we were seeking pleasure and avoiding its opposite? And not only in psy- chology, also in biology and even in political economy-in short, wherever a basis is sought for an attitude or a behavior-pleasure and its lack are still playing this role; in other words, two feelings so paltry that it is hard to think ofanything more simpleminded. The far more diversified idea ofsatisfying a drive would indeed be capable of offering a more colorful picture, but the old habit is so strong that one can sometimes even read that the drives strive for satisfaction because this fulfillment is pleasure, which is about the same as con- sidering the exhaust pipe the operative part of a motor! "
And so at the end Ulrich had also come to mention the problem of simplicity, although it was doubtless a digression.
"What is so attractive, so specially tempting to the mind, that it finds it necessary to reduce the world ofemotions to pleasure and its lack, or to the simplest psychological processes? Why does it grant a higher explanatory value to something psychological, the simpler it is? Why a greater value to something physiological-chemical than to something psychological, and finally, why does it assign the highest value of all to reducing things to the movement of physical atoms? This seldom happens for logical reasons, rather it happens half con- sciously, but in some way or other this prejudice is usually operating. Upon what, in other words, rests this faith that nature's mystery has to be simple?
"There are, first, two distinctions to be made. The splitting up of the complex into the simple and the minuscule is a habit in everyday life justified by utilitarian experience: it teaches us to dance by im- parting the steps, and it teaches that we understand a thing better after we have taken it apart and screwed it together again. Science,
1248 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
on the other hand, uses simplicity really only as an intermediate step; even what appears as an exception subordinates itself to this. For ul- timately science does not reduce the complex to the simple but reduces the particularity of the individual case to the generally valid laws that are its goal, and which are not so much simple as they are general and summarizing. It is only through their application, that is to say at second hand, that they simplify the variety of events.
"And so everywhere in life two simplicities contrast with each other: what it is beforehand and what it becomes afterward are sim- ple in different senses. What it is beforehand, whatever that may be, is mostly simple because it lacks content and form, and therefore is generally foolish, or it has not yet been grasped. But what becomes simple, whether it be an idea or a knack or even will, both entails and participates in the power of truth and capability that compel what is confusingly varied. These simplicities are usually confused with each other: it happens in the pious talk of the simplicity and innocence of nature; it happens in the belief that a simple morality is closer in all circumstances to the eternal than a complicated one; it happens, too, in the confusion between raw will and a strong will. "
When Agathe had read this far she thought she heard Ulrich's re- turning steps on the garden gravel and hastily shoved all the papers back into the drawer. But when she was sure that her hearing had deceived her, and ascertained that her brother was still lingering in the garden, she took the papers out again and read on a bit further.
53
THE D AND L REPORTS
When General Stumm von Bordwehr began expounding in the gar- den why he thought he had stumbled over an idea, it soon became evident that he was talking with the joy that a well-rehearsed subject provides. It began, he reported, with his receiving the expected re-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1249
buke on account of the hasty resolution that had forced the Minister of War to flee Diotima's house. "I predicted the whole thing! " Stumm protested confidently, adding more modestly: "except for what came afterward. " For in spite of all countermeasures, a whiff of the distressing incident had got through to the newspapers, and had surfaced again during the riots of which Leinsdorf became the sac- rificial lamb. But on Count Leinsdorf's way back from his Bohemian landholdings, in a city where he was trying to catch the train- Stumm now spelled out what he had already indicated in Agathe's presence-his carriage had happened to get caught between the two fronts ofa political encounter, and Stumm described what happened next in the following manner: "Of course their demonstrations were about something entirely different: some regulation or other con- cerning the use oflocal national languages in the state agencies, or an issue like that, something people have got so upset about so often that it's hard to get excited about it anymore. So all that was going on was that the German-speaking inhabitants were standing on one side of the street shouting "Shame! " at those across the way, who wanted other languages and were shouting "Disgrace! " at the Germans, and nothing further might have happened. But Leinsdorf is famous as a peacemaker; he wants the national minorities living under the Mon- archy to be a national people, as he's always saying. And you know, too, if I may say so here where no one can hear us, that two dogs often growl around each other in a general way, but the moment someone tries to calm them they jump at each other's throats. So as soon as Leinsdorf was recognized, it gave a tremendous impetus to everyone's emotions. They began asking in chorus, in two languages: 'What's going on with the Commission to Establish the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Populace, Your Excellency? ' And then they shouted: 'You fake peace abroad, and in your own house you're a murderer! ' Do you remember the story that's told about him that once, a hundred years ago, when he was much younger, a co- quette he was with died during the night? This was what they were alluding to, people are saying now. And all this happened on account of that stupid resolution that you should let yourself be killed for your own ideas but not for other people's, a stupid resolution that doesn't even exist because I kept it out of the minutes!
"And how are we to participate without more ado in one of the Eternal Artist's most intimate experiences? ''
The writing broke off. But then Agathe's face was again suffused with a blush when, without raising her eyes, she took up the next page and read on:
"Lately Agathe and I have frequently had a remarkable experi- ence! When we undertook our expeditions into town. When the weather is especially fine the world looks quite cheerful and harmo- nious, so that you really don't pay attention to how different all its component parts are, according to their age and nature. Everything stands and moves with the greatest naturalness. And yet, remarkably, there is in such an apparently incontrovertible condition of the pres- ent something that leads into a desert; something like an unsuccess- ful proposal of love, or some similar exposure, the moment one does not unreservedly participate in it.
"Along our way we find ourselves walking through the narrow vio- let-blue streets of the city, which above, where they open to the light, bum like fire. Or we step out of this tactile blue into a square over which the sun freely pours its light; then the houses around the square stand there looking taken back and, as it were, placed against the wall, but no less expressively, and as if someone had scratched them with the fine lines of an engraving tool, lines that make every- thing too distinct. And at such a moment we do not know whether all this self-fulfilled beauty excites us profoundly or has nothing at all to do with us. Both are the case. This beauty stands on a razor's edge between desire and grief.
"But does not the sight of beauty always have this effect of bright- ening the griefofordinary life and darkening its gaiety? It seems that
1226 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
beauty belongs to a world whose depths hold neither grief nor gaiety. Perhaps in that world even beauty itself does not exist, but merely some kind of almost indescribable, cheerful gra~ty, and its name arises only through the refraction of its nameless splendor in our or- dinary atmosphere. We are both seeking this world, Agathe and I, without yet being able to make up our minds; we move along its bor- ders and cautiously enjoy the profound emanation at those points where it is still mingled with the powerful lights of every day and is almost invisible! "
It seemed as if Ulrich, through his sudden idea of speaking of an Eternal Artist, had been led to bring the question of beauty into his observations, especially since, for its part, beauty also expressed the oversensitivity that had arisen between brother and sister. But at the same time he had changed his manner of thinking. In this new se- quence ofentries he proceeded no longer from his dominant ideas as they faded down to the vanishing point of his experiences, but from the foreground, which was clearer but, in a few places that he noted, really too clear, and again almost permeable by the background.
Thus Ulrich went on. "I said to Agathe: 'Apparently beauty is nothing other than having been loved. ' For to love something and beautify it is one and the same. And to propagate its love and make others see its beauty is also one and the same. That's why everything can appear beautiful, and everything beautiful, ugly; in both cases it will depend on us no less than it compels us from outside, because love has no causality and knows no fixed sequence. I'm not certain how much I've said about that, but it also explains this other impres- sion that we have so vividly on our walks: We look at people and want to share in the joy that is in their faces; but these faces also radiate a discomfiture and an almost uncanny repulsion. It emanates, too, from the houses, clothes, and everything that they have created for themselves. When I considered what the explanation for this might be, I was led to a further group of ideas, and through that back to my first notes, which were apparently so fantastic.
"A city such as ours, lovely and old, with its superb architectural stamp, which over the course of ages has arisen from changing taste, is a single great witness to the capacity for loving and the incapacity for loving long. The proud sequence of this city's structures repre- sents not only a great history but also a constant change in the direc-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 2 7
tion ofthought. Looked at in this manner, the city is a mutability that has become a chain of stone and that surveys itself differently every quarter century in order to be right, in the end, for eternal ages. Its mute eloquence is that of dead lips, and the more enchantingly se- ductive it is, the more violently it must evoke, in its most profound moment of pleasing and of expropriation, blind resistance and horror. "
"It's ridiculous, but tempting," Agathe responded to that. "In that case the swallowtail coats of these dawdlers, or the funny caps offi- cers wear on their heads like pots, would have to be beautiful, for they are most decidedly loved by their owners and displayed for love, and enjoy the favor ofwomen! "
'We made a game of it too. In a kind of merry bad temper we enjoyed it to the utmost and for a while asked ourselves at every step, in opposition to life: What, for example, does the red on that dress over there mean by oeing so red? Or what are these blues and yel- lows and whites really doing on the collars of those uniforms? And why in God's name are the ladies' parasols round and not square? We asked ourselves what the Greek pediment ofthe Parliament building was after, with its legs astraddle? Either 'doing a split,' as only a dancer or a pair of compasses can, or disseminating classical beauty? If you put yourself back that way into a preliminary state in which you are not touched by feelings, and where you do not infuse things with the emotions that they complacently expect, you destroy the faith and loyalty of existence. It's like watching someone eat silently, without sharing his appetite: You suddenly perceive only swallowing movements, which look in no way enviable.
"I call that cutting oneselfofffrom the 'meaning' oflife. To clarify this, I might begin with how we unquestionably seek the firm and solid in life as urgently as a land animal that has fallen into the water. This makes us overestimate the significance of knowledge, justice, and reason, as well as the necessity of compulsion and violence. Per- haps I shouldn't say overestimate; but in any case, by far the greatest number of manifestations of our life rest on the mind's insecurity. Faith, supposition, assumption, intimation, wish, doubt, inclination, demand, prejudice, persuasion, exemplification, personal views, and other conditions of semi-certainty predominate among them. And because meaning, on this scale, lies roughly halfway between reason-
1228 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
ing and capriciousness, I am applying its name to the whole. If what we express with words, no matter how magnificent they are, is mostly just a meaning, an opinion, then what we express without words is always one.
"Therefore I say: Our reality, as far as it is dependent on us, is for the most part only an expression of opinion, although we ascribe every imaginable kind of importance to it. We may give our lives a specific manifestation in the stones of buildings: it is always done for the sake of a meaning we impute to it. We may kill or sacrifice our- selves: we are acting only on the basis of a supposition. I might even say that all our passions are mere suppositions; how often we err in them; we can fall into them merely out of a longing for decisiveness! And also, doing something out of 'free' will really assumes that it is merely being done at the instigation of an opinion. For some time Agathe and I have been sensitive to a certain hauntedness in the em- pirical world. Every detail in which our surroundings manifest them- selves 'speaks to us. ' It means something. It shows that it has come into being with a purpose that is by no means fleeting. It is, to be sure, only an opinion, but it appears as a conviction. It is merely a sudden idea, but acts as ifit were an unshakable will. Ages and centu- ries stand upright with legs firmly planted, but behind them a voice whispers: Rubbish! Never has the Hour Struck, never has the Time Come!
"It seems to be willfulness, but it enables me to understand what I see if I note in addition: This opposition between the self-obsession that puffs out the chest ofeverything we have created in all its splen- dor, and the secret trait of being given up and abandoned, which likewise begins with the first minute, is wholly and completely in agreement with my calling everything merely an opinion. By this means we recognize that we are in a peculiar situation. For every attribution of meaning shows the same double peculiarity: as long as it is new it makes us impatient with every opposing meaning (when red parasols are having their day, blue ones are 'impossible'-but something similar is also true of our convictions); yet it is the second peculiarity of every meaning that it is nevertheless given up with time, entirely ofits own accord and just as surely, when it is no longer new. I once said that reality does away with itself. It could now be put like this: I f man is for the most part only proclaiming meanings, he is
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 2 9
never entirely and enduringly proclaiming himself; but even ifhe can never completely express himself, he will try it in the most various ways, and in doing so acquires a history. So he has a history only out ofweakness, it seems to me, although the historians understandably enough consider the ability to make history a particular badge of distinction! "
Here Ulrich seemed to have embarked on a digression, but he continued in this direction: "And this is apparently the reason why I have to take note of this today: History happens, events happen- even art happens-from a lack ofhappiness. But such a lack does not lie in circumstances-in other words, in their not allowing happiness to reach us-but in our emotions. Our feeling bears the cross ofthis double aspect: it suffers no other beside itself and itself does not en- dure. By this means everything connected with it acquires the aspect of being valid for eternity, but we all nonetheless strive to abandon the creations of our feelings and change the meanings that are ex- pressed in them. For a feeling changes in the instant of its existence; it has no duration or identity; it must be consummated anew. Emo- tions are not only changeable and inconstant-as they are well taken to b e - b u t the instant they weren't, they would become so. They are not genuine when they last. They must always arise anew if they are to endure, and even in doing this they become different emotions. An anger that lasted five days would no longer be anger but be a mental disorder; it transforms itself into either forgiveness or pre- parations for revenge, and something similar goes on with all the emotions.
"Our emotions always seek a foothold in what they form and shape, and always find it for a while. But Agathe and I feel an impris- oned ghostliness in our surroundings, the reverse magnetism of two connected poles, the recall in the call, the mobility of supposedly fixed walls; we see and hear it suddenly. To have stumbled 'into a time' seems to us like an adventure, and dubious company. We find ourselves in the enchanted forest. And although we cannot encom- pass 'our own,' differently constituted feeling, indeed hardly know what it is, we suffer anxiety about it and would like to hold it fast. But how do you hold a feeling fast? How could one linger at the highest stage of rapture, if indeed there were any way of getting there at all? Basically this is the only question that preoccupies us. We have inti-
1230 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
mations of an emotion removed from the entropy of the other emo- tions. It stands like a miraculous, motionless shadow in the flow before us. But would it not have to arrest the world in its course in order to exist? I arrive at the conclusion that it cannot be a feeling in the same sense as the other feelings. "
And suddenly Ulrich concluded: "So I come back to the question: Is love an emotion? I think not. Love is an ecstasy. And God Himself, in order to be able to lastingly love the world and, with the love of God-the-Artist, also embrace what has already happened, must be in a constant state of ecstasy. This is the only form in which he may be imagined-"
Here he had broken off this entry.
GREA T CHANGES
Ulrich had personally escorted the General out with the intention of discovering what he might have to say in confidence. As he accompa- nied him down the stairs, he sought at first to offer a harmless expla- nation for having distanced himself from Diotima and the others, so that the real reason would remain unstated. But Stumm was not sat- isfied, and asked: 'W ere you insulted? "
"Not in the least. "
"Then you had no right to! " Stumm replied firmly.
But the changes in the Parallel Campaign, about which in his with-
drawal from the world Ulrich had not had the least inkling, now had an invigorating effect on him, as if a window had suddenly been thrown open in a stuffy hall, and he continued: "I would still like to find out what's really going on. Since you've decided to open my eyes halfway, please finish the job! "
Stumm stopped, supporting his sword on the stone of the step, and raised his glance to his friend's face; a broad gesture, which
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 3 1
lasted the longer in that Ulrich was standing one step higher: "Noth- ing I'd like better," he said. "That's the reason I came. "
Ulrich calmly began to interrogate him. "Who's working against Leinsdorf? Tuzzi and Diotima? Or the Ministry ofWar with you and Arnheim-? "
"My dear friend, you're stumbling through abysses! " Stumm inter- rupted him. "And blindly walking past the simple truth, the way all intellectuals seem to do! Above all, I beg you to be convinced that I have passed on Leinsdorf's wish to have you visit him and Diotima only as the most selfless favor-"
"Your officer's word of honor? "
The General's mood turned sunny. "Ifyou're going to remind me of the spartan honor of my profession, you conjure up the danger that I really will start lying to you; for there might be an order from above that would obligate me to do so. So I'd rather give you my private word of honor," he said with dignity, and continued by way of explanation: "I was even intending to confide to you that recently I have seen myself at times compelled to reflect upon such difficulties; I find myself lying often these days, with the ease of a hog wallowing in garbage. " Suddenly he turned completely toward his more ele- vated friend and added the question: "How does it happen that lying is so agreeable, assuming you have an excuse? Just speaking the truth seems absolutely unproductive and frivolous by comparison! If you could tell me that, it would be, straight out, one ofthe reasons I came to hunt you up. "
"Then tell me honestly what's going on," Ulrich asked, unyielding.
"In total honesty, and also quite simply: I don't know! " Stumm protested.
"But you have a mission! " Ulrich probed.
The General answered: "In spite of your truly unfriendly dis- appearance, I have stepped over the corpse of my self-respect to confide this mission to you. But it is a partial mission. A teeny com- mission. I am now a little wheel. A tiny thread. A little Cupid who has been left with only a single arrow in his quiver! " Ulrich observed the portly figure with the gold buttons. Stumm had definitely become more self-reliant; he did not wait for Ulrich's response but set him- self in motion toward the door, his sword clanking on every step. And as the entry hall, whose noble furnishings would otherwise have in-
1232 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
stilled in him a reverence for the master ofthe house, arched up over the two of them as they came down, he said over his shoulder to this master: "It's clear you still have not quite grasped that the Parallel Campaign is now no longer a private or family undertaking but a po- litical process of international stature! "
"So now it's being run by the Foreign Minister? " Ulrich volleyed. "Apparently. "
"And consequently Tuzzi? ''
"Presumably; but I don't know," Stumm quickly added. "And of
course he acts as if he knows nothing at all! You know what he's like: these diplomats pretend to be ignorant even when they really are! "
They walked through the front door, and the carriage drove up. Suddenly Stumm turned, confidingly and comically pleading, to Ul- rich: "But that's why you should really start frequenting the house again, so that we have a quasi-confidant there! "
Ulrich smiled at this scheming, and laid his arm around the Gen- eral's shoulder; he felt reminded of Diotima. "What is she up to? '' he asked. "Does she now recognize the man in Tuzzi? ''
"What she's up to? " the General responded, vexed. "She gives the impression of being irritated. " And he added good-naturedly: "To the discriminating glance, perhaps even a moving impression. The Ministry of Education gives her hardly any other assignments than deciding whether the patriotic association Wiener Schnitzel should be allowed to march in the parade, or a group called Roast Beefwith Dumplings as well-"
Ulrich interrupted him suspiciously. "Now you're talking about the Ministry of Education? Weren't you just saying that the Foreign Ministry had appropriated the campaign? ''
"But look, maybe the Schnitzels are really the affair of the Interior Ministry. Or the Ministry of Trade. Who can predict? " Stumm in- structed him. "But in any case, the Congress for World Peace as a whole belongs to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the extent that it's not already owned by the two Ministerial Presidiums. "
Ulrich interrupted him again. "And the War Ministry is nowhere in your thoughts at all? "
"Don't be so suspicious! " Stumm said calmly. "Ofcourse the War Ministry takes the most active interest in a congress for world peace; I would say no less an interest than police headquarters would take in
From the Posthumous Papers · 1233
an international congress of anarchists. But you know what these ci- vilian ministries are like: they won't grant even a toehold to the likes ofus! "
"And-? " Ulrich asked, for Stumm's innocence still made him suspicious.
"There's no 'and'! " Stumm assured him. "You're rushing things! If a dangerous business involves several ministries, then one of them wants to either shove it off on, or take it away from, one of the others; in both cases the result of these efforts is the creation of an inter- ministerial commission. You only need to remind yourself how many committees and subcommittees the Parallel Campaign had to create at the beginning, when Diotima was still in full command of its ener- gies; and I can assure you that our blessed council was a still life com- pared with what's being worked up today! " The carriage was waiting, the coachman sitting bolt upright on his coach box, but Stumm gazed irresolutely through the open vehicle into the bright-green garden that opened beyond. "Perhaps you can give me a little-known word with 'inter' in it? " he asked, and toted up with prompting nods of his head: "Interesting, interministerial, international, intercurrent, in- termediate, interpellation, interdicted, internal, and a few more; be- cause now you hear them at the General Staff mess more often than the word 'sausage. ' But if I were to come up with an entirely new word, I could create a sensation! "
Ulrich steered the General's thoughts back to Diotima. It made sense to him that the highest mandate came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from which it in all probability followed that the reins were in Tuzzi's hands: but then, how could another ministry offend this powerful man's wife? At this question Stumm disconso- lately shrugged his shoulders. "You still haven't got it through your head that the Parallel Campaign is an affair of state! " he responded, adding spontaneously: "Tuzzi is slyer than we thought. He himself would never have been able to ascribe such a thing to it, but inter- ministerial technology has allowed him to hand over his wife to an- other ministry! "
Ulrich began to laugh softly. From the message clothed in these rather odd words he could vividly imagine both people: magnificent Diotima-the power station, as Agathe called her-and the smaller, spare Section Chief, for whom he had an absolutely inexplicable
1234 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
sympathy, although he knew Tuzzi looked down on him. It was fear of the moon-nights of the soul that drew him to this man's rational feelings, which were as dryly masculine as an empty cigarette case. And yet, when they had broken over the head of this diplomat, the sufferings ofthe soul had brought him to the point of seeing in every- one and everything only pacifist intrigues; for pacifism was for Tuzzi the most intelligible representation of soulful tenderness! Ulrich re- called that Tuzzi had finally come to regard Arnheim's increasingly open efforts concerning the Galician oil fields-indeed, his efforts concerning his own wife-as merely a divertissement whose purpose was to deflect attention from a secret enterprise of a pacifistic nature: so greatly had the events in his house confused Tuzzi! He must have suffered unbearably, and it was understandable: the spiritual passion that he found himself unexpectedly confronting not only offended his concept of honor, just as physical adultery would have done, but struck directly and contemptuously at his very ability to fonn con- cepts, which in older men is the true retirement home of manly dignity.
And Ulrich cheerfully continued his thought aloud: "Apparently the moment his wife's patriotic campaign became the object of pub- lic teasing, Tuzzi completely regained control over his lost mental faculties, as befits a high official. It must have been then at the latest that he recognized all over again that more things are going on in the lap ofworld history than would find room in a woman's lap, and your Congress for World Peace, which turned up like a foundling, will have woken him with a start! " With coarse satisfaction, Ulrich de- picted to himself the murky, ghost-ridden state that must have come first, and then this awakening, which perhaps did not even have to be associated with a feeling of awakening; for the moment the souls of Arnheim and Diotima, wandering around in veils, started to touch down in reality, Tuzzi, freed from every haunting spirit, again found himself in that realm of necessity in which he had spent almost his entire life. "So now he's getting rid of all those friends of his wife's who are saving the world and uplifting the Fatherland? They always were a thorn in~ side! " Ulrich exclaimed with great satisfaction, and turned queryingly to his companion.
Stumm, portly and lost in thought, was still standing in the door- way. "So far as I know, he told his wife that she owed it to him and
From the Posthurrwus Papers · 1235
his position, especially under these changed conditions, to bring the Parallel Campaign to an honorable conclusion. She would get a decoration. But she had to entrust herself to the protection and in- sights of the ministry he had selected for that purpose," he reported conscientiously.
"And so he's made peace with y o u -I mean, with the Ministry of War and Arnheim? "
"It looks that way. Because of the Peace Congress, he seems to have argued with the government for support of the rapid modern- ization of our artillery, and with the Minister of War concerning the political consequences.
It is said that he wants to push the necessary laws through Parliament with the help of the German parties, and for that reason is now counseling a German line in domestic politics. Di- otima told me that herself"
'Wait a minute! " Ulrich interrupted. "German line? I've forgotten everything! "
"Quite simple! He always said that everything German was a mis- fortune for us; and now he's saying the opposite. "
Ulrich objected that Section Chief Tuzzi never expressed himself so unambiguously.
"But he does to his wife," Stumm replied. "And between her and me there's a kind of bond ordained by fate. "
'Well, how do things stand between her and Arnheim? " asked Ul- rich, who was at the moment more interested in Diotima than in the concerns of the government. "He no longer needs her; and I suppose that's making his soul suffer! "
Stumm shook his head. "That's apparently not so simple either! " he declared with a sigh.
Up to now he had answered Ulrich's questions conscientiously but without emotion, and perhaps for that very reason relatively sensibly. But since the mention of Diotima and Arnheim, he looked as if he wanted to come out with a quite different story, which seemed to him more important than Tuzzi's finding himself. "You might have long thought that Arnheim had had enough of her," he now began. "But they're Great Souls! It may be that you can understand some- thing about such souls, but they are them! You can't say, was there something between them or was there nothing between them? Today they still talk the way they used to, except that you have the
1236 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
feeling: now there definitely isn't anything between them: They're always talking in what you might call 'last words'! "
Ulrich, remembering what Bonadea, the practitioner of love, had told him about its theoretician, Diotima, held up to Stumm Stumm's own, more measured statement that Diotima was a manual of love. The General smiled thoughtfully at this. "Perhaps we aren't judging it from a broad enough perspective," he generalized discreetly. "Let me preface this by saying that before her I never heard a woman talk that way; and when she starts talking, it's like having ice bags all over me. Besides, she's doing this less often now; but when it occurs to her even today she speaks, for instance, of this World Peace Con- gress as a 'pan-erotic human experience,' and then I feel myself all of a sudden unmanned by her cleverness. But"- a n d he intensified the significance of his words by a brief pause-"there must be some- thing in it-some need, some so-called characteristic of the age- because even in the War Ministry they're beginning to talk that way now. Since this Congress has turned up, you can hear officers of the General Staff talking about love of peace and love of mankind the way they talk about the Model 7 machine gun or the Model82 medi- cal supply wagon! It's absolutely nauseating! "
"Is that why you called yourself a disappointed specialist in love just now? " Ulrich interjected.
"Yes, my friend. You have to excuse me: I couldn't stand hearing you talk so one-sidedly! But officially I derive great profit from all these things. "
"And you no longer have any enthusiasm for the Parallel Cam- paign, for the celebration of great ideas, and such things? " Ulrich probed out of curiosity.
"Even such an experienced woman as your cousin has had enough of culture," the General replied. "I mean culture for its own sake. Besides, even the greatest idea can't stop your ears from getting boxed! "
"But it can cause someone else's getting his ears boxed next time. "
"That's right," Stumm conceded. "But only ifyou use the spiritfor something, not if you serve it selflessly! " Then he looked up at Ul- rich, curious to enjoy along with him the effect ofhis next words, and lowering his voice expectantly, certain of success, he added: "But even ifI would like to, I can't anymore: I've been removed! "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1237
''I'm impressed! " Ulrich exclaimed, instinctively acknowledging the insight of the military authorities. But then he followed another sudden idea and said quickly: "Tuzzi got you into this mess! "
"Not a bit ofit! " Stumm protested, sure ofhimself.
Up to this point the conversation had taken place in the vicinity of the door, and besides the two men there was a third participant who was waiting for them to finish, staring straight ahead so motionlessly that for him the world stopped between the ears of two pairs of horses. Only his fists in their white cotton gloves, through which the reins ran, surreptitiously moved in irregular, soothing rhythms, be- cause the horses, not quite so accessible to military discipline as peo- ple, were getting more and more bored with waiting, and were pulling impatiently at their harnesses. At last the General com- manded this man to take the carriage to the gate and exercise the horses there until he got in; he then invited Ulrich to walk through the garden on foot, so that he could fill him in properly about what had gone on, without being overheard.
But Ulrich thought he saw vividly what it was all about, and at first didn't let Stumm get a word in. "It makes no difference whether Tuzzi took you out of the game or not," he said, "for in this matter you are, ifyou will excuse me, only a minor figure. What's important is that almost at the very moment when he began to get suspicious on account of the Congress and began to face a difficult and onerous test, he simplified his political as well as his personal situation the quickest way he could. He went to work like a sea captain who hears of a big storm coming and doesn't let himself be influenced by the still-dreaming ocean. Tuzzi has now allied himselfwith what repelled him before--Arnheim, your military policies, the German line-and he would also have allied himselfwith. the efforts ofhis wife if, in the circumstances, it had not been more useful to wreck them. I don't know how I should put it. Is it that life becomes easy if one doesn't bother with emotions but merely keeps to one's goal; or is it a mur- derous enjoyment to calculate with the emotions instead of suffering from them? It seems to me I know what the devil felt when he threw a fistful of salt into life's ambrosia! "
The General was all fired up. "But that's what I told you at the beginning! " he exclaimed. "I only happened to be talking about lies, but genuine malice is, in all its forms, an extraordinarily exciting
1238 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
thing! Even Leinsdorf, for instance, has rediscovered a predilection for realpolitik and says: Realpolitik is the opposite ofwhat you would like to do! "
Ulrich went on: "What makes the difference is that before, Tuzzi was always confused by what Diotima and Arnheim were talking about together; but now it can only make him happy, because the loquacity of people who aren't able to seal off their feelings always gives a third person all sorts of footholds. He no longer needs to lis- ten to it with his inner ear, which he was never good at, but only with the outer, and that's roughly the difference between swallowing a disgusting snake or beating it to death! "
"What? " Stumm asked.
"Swallowing it or beating it to death! "
"No, that bit about the ears! "
"I meant to say: it was fortunate for him that he retreated from the
inward side of feeling to the outward side. But perhaps that might still not make sense to you; it's just an idea I have. "
"No, you put it very well! " Stumm protested. "But why are we using others as examples? Diotima and Arnheim are Great Souls, and for that reason alone it'll never work right! " They were strolling along a path but had not got very far; the General stopped. "And what happened to me isn't just an army story! " he informed his ad- mired friend.
Ulrich realized he hadn't given him a chance to speak, and apolo- gized. "So you didn't fall on account ofTuzzi? " he asked politely.
"A general may perhaps stumble over a civilian minister, but not over a civilian section chief," Stumm reported proudly and matter- of-factly. "I believe I stumbled over an idea! " And he began to tell his story.
To HER DISPLEASURE, AGA THE IS CONFRONTED WITH A HISTORICAL SYNOPSIS OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS
Agathe, meanwhile, had come upon a new group of pages, in which her brother's notes continued in a quite different manner. It ap- peared that he had suddenly made up his mind to ascertain what an emotion was, and to do this conceptually and in a dry fashion. He also must have called up all manner of things from his memory, or read them specifically for this purpose, for the papers were covered with notes relating in part to the history and in part to the analysis of the concept of the emotions; altogether, it formed a collection of fragments whose inner coherence was not immediately apparent.
Agathe first found a hint about what had moved him to do this in the phrase "a matter of emotion! " which was written in the margin at the beginning; for she now remembered the conversation, with its profound oscillations that bared the foundations of the soul, which she and her brother had had on this subject in their cousin's house. And she could see that if one wanted to find out what a matter of emotions was, one had to ask oneself, whether one liked it or not, what emotion was.
This served her as a guide, for the entries began by saying that everything that happens among people has its origin either in feel- ings or in the privation of feelings; but without regard to that, an an- swer to the question of what an emotion was could not be gained with certainty from the entire immense literature that had grappled with the issue, for even the most recent accomplishments, which Ul- rich really did think were advances, called for an act of trust of no small degree. As far as Agathe could see, he had not taken psycho- analysis into account, and this surprised her at first, for like all people stimulated by literature, she had heard it spoken of more than other kinds of psychology. Ulrich said he was leaving it out not because he
1239
I240 • THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
didn't recognize the considerable merits of this significant theory, which was full of new concepts and had been the first to teach how many things could be brought together that in all earlier periods had been anarchic private experience, but because its method was not really appropriate to his present purpose in a way that would be wor- thy of its quite demanding self-awareness. He laid out as his task, first, to compare the existing major answers to the question of what emotion is, and went on to note that on the whole, only three answers could be ascertained, none ofwhich stood out so clearly as to entirely negate the others.
Then followed sketches that were meant to work this out: "The oldest but today still quite prevalent way of representing feeling pro- ceeds from the conviction that clear distinctions can be made among the state of feeling, its causes, and its effects. This method under- stands by the emotions a variety of inner experiences that are funda- mentally distinct from other kinds-and these are, according to this view, sensation, thinking, and willing. This view is popular and has long been traditional, and it is natural for it to regard emotion as a state. This is not necessary, but it comes about under the vague im- pression of the perception that at every moment of an emotion, and in the middle ofits dynamic changes, we can not only distinguish that we are feeling but also experience, as something apparently static, that we are persisting in a state of feeling.
"The more modem way of representing emotion, on the other hand, proceeds from the obseiVation that it is most intimately as- sociated with action and expression; and it follows both that this view is inclined to consider emotion as a process and that it does not direct its attention to emotion alone but sees it as a whole, together with its origin and forms of expression. This approach originated in physiol- ogy and biology, and its efforts were first directed at a physiological explanation of spiritual processes or, more emphatically, at the physi- cal totality in which spiritual manifestations are also involved. The results of this can be summarized as the second main answer to the problem of the nature of emotion.
"But directing the thirst for knowledge toward the whole instead of its constituent elements, and toward reality instead of a precon- ceived notion, also distinguishes the more recent psychological investigations of emotion from the older kinds, except that its aims
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 4 1
and leading ideas are naturally derived from its own discipline. This leads these recent investigations to yield a third answer to the prob- lem ofwhat emotion is, an answer that builds on the others as well as standing on its own. This third answer, however, is no longer in any way part of a retrospective view, because it marks the beginning of insight into the concept formation currently under way or regarded as possible.
"I wish to add, since I mentioned earlier the question of whether emotion is a state or a process, that this question actually plays just about no role at all in the developments I have outlined, unless it be that of a weakness common to all views, which is perhaps not entirely unfounded. If I imagine an emotion, as seems natural in the older manner, as something constant that has an effect both inwardly and outwardly, and also receives input from both directions, then I am obviously faced with not just one emotion but an indeterminate number of alternating emotions. For these subcategories of emotion, language rarely has a plural at its disposal: it knows no envies, angers, or spites. For language these are internal variations of an emotion, or emotion in various stages of development; but without question a se- quence of stages points just as much toward a process as does a se- quence ofemotions. If, on the other hand-which would accord with this and also seem to be closer to the contemporary view-one be- lieves that one is looking at a process, then the doubt as to what emo- tion 'really' is, and where something stops belonging to itself and becomes part of its causes, consequences, or accompanying circum- stances, is not to be solved so easily. In a later place I shall come back to this, for such a divided answer customarily indicates a fault in the way the question is put; and it will, I think, become clear that the question of whether emotion is a state or a process is really an illu- sory one, behind which another question is lurking. For the sake of this possibility, about which I can't make up my mind, I will let this question stand. "
"I will now continue following the original doctrine of emotion, which distinguishes four major actions or basic states of the soul. It goes back to classical antiquity and is presumably a dignified rem- nant of antiquity's belief that the world consists of the four elements
1242 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
earth, air, fire, and water. In any event, one often hears mention even today offour particular classes ofelements ofconsciousness that can- not be reduced to each other, and in the class of 'emotion' the two feelings 'pleasure' and 'lack of pleasure' usually occupy a privileged position; for they are supposed to be either the only ones, or at least the only ones involving emotions that are not in any way alloyed with anything else. In truth they are perhaps not emotions at all but only a coloration and shading of feelings in which have been preserved the original distinction between attraction and flight, and probably also the opposition between succeeding and failing, and other contrasts of the originally so symmetrical conduct of life as well. Life, when it succeeds, is pleasurable: Aristotle said it long before Nietzsche and our time. Kant, too, said that 'pleasure is the feeling of furthering life, pain that of hindering it. ' And Spinoza called pleasure the 'tran- sition in man from lesser to greater perfection. ' Pleasure has always had this somewhat exaggerated reputation of being an ultimate ex- planation (not least on the part of those who have suspected it of deception! ).
"But it can really arouse laughter in the case of thinkers who are not quite major and yet are suspiciously passionate. Here let me cite from a contemporary manual a lovely passage of which I would not like to lose a single word: 'What appears to be more different in kind than, for example, joy over an elegant solution to a mathematical problem and joy over a good lunch! And yet both are, as pure emo- tion, one. and the same, namely pleasure! ' Also let me add a passage from a court decision that was actually handed down just a few days ago: 'The purpose of compensation is to bestow upon the injured party the possibility of acquiring the feelings of pleasure correspond- ing to his usual circumstances, which balance the absence of plea- sure caused by the injury and its consequences. Applied to the present case, it already follows from the limited choice of feelings of pleasure that correspond to the age of two and a quarter years, and the ease of providing means for them, that the compensation sought is too high. ' The penetrating clarity expressed in both these examples permits the respectful observation that pleasure and the absence of pleasure will long remain as the hee and the haw of the doctrine of feeling. "
From the Posthumous Papers · 1243
"If I look around further, I discover that this doctrine that care- fully weighs pleasure and the absence of pleasure understands by 'mixed feelings' the 'connection of the elements of pleasure and lack of pleasure with the other elements of consciousness,' meaning by these grief, composure, anger, and other things upon which lay peo- ple place such high value that they would gladly find out more about them beyond the mere name. 'General states offeeling' such as live- liness or depression, in which mixed feelings of the same kind pre- dominate, are called 'unity of an emotional situation. ' 'Affect' is what this connection calls an emotional situation that occurs 'suddenly and violently,' and such a situation that is, moreover, 'chronic' it calls 'passion. ' Were theories to have a moral, the moral of this doctrine would be more or less contained in the words: Ifyou take small steps at the beginning, you can take big leaps later on! "
"But in distinctions such as these, whether there is just one plea- sure and lack ofpleasure or perhaps several; whether beside pleasure and the absence of pleasure there are not also other basic opposi- tions, for instance whether relaxation and tension are not such (this bears the majestic title of singularistic and pluralistic theory); whether an emotion might change and whether, if it changes, it then becomes a different emotion; whether an emotion, should it consist of a sequence of feelings, stands in relation to these the way genus stands in relation to species, or the caused to its causes; whether the stages an emotion passes through, assuming it is itself a state, are conditions of a single state or different states, and therefore different emotions; whether an emotion can bring about a change in itself through the actions and thoughts it produces, or whether in this talk about the 'effect' of an emotion something as figurative and barely real is meant as if one were to say that the rolling out of a sheet of steel 'effects' its thinning, or a spreading out of clouds the overcast- ing of the sky: in such distinctions traditional psychology has achieved much that ought not to be underestimated. Of course one might then ask whether love is a 'substance' or a 'quality,' and what is
1244 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES involved with regard to love in terms of'haeccity' and 'quiddity'; but
is one ever certain of not having to raise this question yet again? "
"All such questions contain a highly useful sense of ordering, al- though considering the unconstrained nature of emotions, this seems slightly ridiculous and is not able to help us much with regard to how emotions determine our actions. This logical-grammatical sense of order, like a pharmacy equipped with its hundred little drawers and labels, is a remnant of the medieval, Aristotelian-scho- lastic observation of nature, whose magnificent logic came to grief not so much on account of the experiences people had with it as on account ofthose they had without it. It is particularly the fault ofthe developing natural sciences and their ~ew kind of understanding, which placed the question of what is real ahead of the question of what is logical; yet no less, too, the misfortune that nature appears to have been waiting for just such a lack of philosophy in order to let itself be discovered, and responded with an alacrity that is by no means yet exhausted. Nevertheless, so long as this development has not brought forth the new cosmic philosophical egg, it is still useful even today to feed it occasionally from the old bowl, as one does with laying hens. And this is especially true for the psychology of the emo- tions. For in its buttoned-up logical investiture it was, ultimately, completely unproductive, but the opposite is only too true for the psychologists of emotion who came after; for in regard to this rela- tion between logical raiment and productivity, they have been, at least in the fine years oftheir youth, well-nigh sans-culottes! "
"What should I call to mind from these beginnings for more gen- eral advantage? Above all that this more recent psychology began with the beneficent sympathy that the medical faculty has always had for the philosophical faculty, and it cleared away the older psychol- ogy ofemotion by totally ceasing to speak ofemotions and beginning to talk instead about 'instincts,' 'instinctive acts,' and 'affects. ' (Not that talk of man as a being ruled by his instincts and affects was new; it became the new medicine because from then on man was exclu- sively to be so regarded. )
From the Posthumous Papers · 1245
"The advantage consisted in the prospect of reducing the higher human attitude ofinspiration to the general invigorated attitude con- structed on the basis of the powerful natural constraints of hunger, sex, persecution, and other fundamental conditions of life to which the soul is adapted. The sequences of actions these determine are called 'instinctive drives,' and these arise without thinking or purpose whenever a stimulus brings the relevant group of stimuli into play, and these are similarly activated in all animals of the same species; often, too, in both animal and man. The individual but almost invari- able hereditary dispositions for this are called 'drives'; and the term 'affect' is usually associated in this connection with a rather vague notion according to which the 'affect' is supposed to be the experi- ence or the experienced aspect of the instinctive action and of drives stimulated to action.
"This also mostly assumes, either emphatically or discreetly, that all human actions are instinctive actions, or combinations from among such actions, and that all our emotions are affects or parts or combinations of affects. Today I leafed through several textbooks of medical psychology in order to refresh my memory, but not one of their thematic indexes had a mention of the word 'emotion,' and it is really no mean accomplishment for a psychology of the emotions not to contain any emotions! "
"This is the extent to which, even now, a more or less emphatic intention dominates in many circles to substitute scientific concepts meant to be as concrete as possible for the useless spiritual observa- tion of the soul. And however one would originally have liked emo- tions to be nothing more than sensations in the bowels or wrists (which led to such assertions as that fear consists of an accelerated heartbeat and shallow breathing, or that thinking is an inner speaking and thus really a stimulation of the larynx), what is honored and es- teemed today is the purified concept that reduces all inner life to chains of reflexes and the like, and this serves a large and successful school by way of example as the only permissible task of explaining the soul.
"So if the scientific goal may be said to be a broad and wherever possible ironclad anchoring in the realm of nature, there is still
1246 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
blended with it a peculiar exuberance, which can be roughly ex- pressed in the proposition: What stands low stands firm. In the over- coming of a theological philosophy of nature, this was once an exuberance of denial, a 'bearish speculation in human values. ' Man preferred to see himself as a thread in the weave of the world's car- pet rather than as someone standing on this carpet; and it is easy to understand how a devilish, degrading desire for soullessness also rubbed off on the emptiness of the soul when it straggled noisily into its materialistic adolescence. This was later held against it in reli- giously straitlaced fashion by all the pious enemies of scientific think- ing, but its innermost essence was nothing more than a good-natured gloomy romanticism, an offended child's love for God, and therefore also for his image, a love that in the abuse of this image still has un- conscious aftereffects today. "
"But it is always dangerous when a source of ideas is forgotten without this being noticed, and thus many things that had merely derived their unabashed certainty from it were preserved in just as unabashed a state in medical psychology. This gave rise in places to a condition of neglect involving precisely the basic concepts, and not least the concepts of instinct, affect, and instinctive action. Even the question of what a drive is, and which or how many there are, is an- swered not only quite disparately but without any kind of trepida- tion. I had an exposition before me that distinguished among the 'drive groups' of taking in food, sexuality, and protection against dan- ger; another, which I compared with it, adduced a life drive, an asser- tion drive, and five more. For a long time psychoanalysis, which incidentally is also a psychology of drives, seemed to recognize only a single drive. And so it continues: Even the relationship between in- stinctive action and affect has been determined with equally great disparities: everybody does seem to be in agreement that affect is the 'experience' of instinctive action, but as to whether in this process the entire instinctive action is experienced as affect, including exter- nal behavior, or only the internal event, or parts of it, or parts of the external and internal process in a particular combination: sometimes one of these claims is advanced, sometimes the other, and sometimes both simultaneously. Not even what I wrote before from memory
From the Posthumous Papers · 1247 without protest, that an instinctive action happens 'without intention
or reflection,' is correct all the time. "
"Is it then surprising ifwhat comes to light behind the physiologi- cal explanations of our behavior is ultimately, quite often, nothing but the familiar idea that we let our behavior be steered by chain reflexes, secretions, and the mysteries ofthe body simply because we were seeking pleasure and avoiding its opposite? And not only in psy- chology, also in biology and even in political economy-in short, wherever a basis is sought for an attitude or a behavior-pleasure and its lack are still playing this role; in other words, two feelings so paltry that it is hard to think ofanything more simpleminded. The far more diversified idea ofsatisfying a drive would indeed be capable of offering a more colorful picture, but the old habit is so strong that one can sometimes even read that the drives strive for satisfaction because this fulfillment is pleasure, which is about the same as con- sidering the exhaust pipe the operative part of a motor! "
And so at the end Ulrich had also come to mention the problem of simplicity, although it was doubtless a digression.
"What is so attractive, so specially tempting to the mind, that it finds it necessary to reduce the world ofemotions to pleasure and its lack, or to the simplest psychological processes? Why does it grant a higher explanatory value to something psychological, the simpler it is? Why a greater value to something physiological-chemical than to something psychological, and finally, why does it assign the highest value of all to reducing things to the movement of physical atoms? This seldom happens for logical reasons, rather it happens half con- sciously, but in some way or other this prejudice is usually operating. Upon what, in other words, rests this faith that nature's mystery has to be simple?
"There are, first, two distinctions to be made. The splitting up of the complex into the simple and the minuscule is a habit in everyday life justified by utilitarian experience: it teaches us to dance by im- parting the steps, and it teaches that we understand a thing better after we have taken it apart and screwed it together again. Science,
1248 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
on the other hand, uses simplicity really only as an intermediate step; even what appears as an exception subordinates itself to this. For ul- timately science does not reduce the complex to the simple but reduces the particularity of the individual case to the generally valid laws that are its goal, and which are not so much simple as they are general and summarizing. It is only through their application, that is to say at second hand, that they simplify the variety of events.
"And so everywhere in life two simplicities contrast with each other: what it is beforehand and what it becomes afterward are sim- ple in different senses. What it is beforehand, whatever that may be, is mostly simple because it lacks content and form, and therefore is generally foolish, or it has not yet been grasped. But what becomes simple, whether it be an idea or a knack or even will, both entails and participates in the power of truth and capability that compel what is confusingly varied. These simplicities are usually confused with each other: it happens in the pious talk of the simplicity and innocence of nature; it happens in the belief that a simple morality is closer in all circumstances to the eternal than a complicated one; it happens, too, in the confusion between raw will and a strong will. "
When Agathe had read this far she thought she heard Ulrich's re- turning steps on the garden gravel and hastily shoved all the papers back into the drawer. But when she was sure that her hearing had deceived her, and ascertained that her brother was still lingering in the garden, she took the papers out again and read on a bit further.
53
THE D AND L REPORTS
When General Stumm von Bordwehr began expounding in the gar- den why he thought he had stumbled over an idea, it soon became evident that he was talking with the joy that a well-rehearsed subject provides. It began, he reported, with his receiving the expected re-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1249
buke on account of the hasty resolution that had forced the Minister of War to flee Diotima's house. "I predicted the whole thing! " Stumm protested confidently, adding more modestly: "except for what came afterward. " For in spite of all countermeasures, a whiff of the distressing incident had got through to the newspapers, and had surfaced again during the riots of which Leinsdorf became the sac- rificial lamb. But on Count Leinsdorf's way back from his Bohemian landholdings, in a city where he was trying to catch the train- Stumm now spelled out what he had already indicated in Agathe's presence-his carriage had happened to get caught between the two fronts ofa political encounter, and Stumm described what happened next in the following manner: "Of course their demonstrations were about something entirely different: some regulation or other con- cerning the use oflocal national languages in the state agencies, or an issue like that, something people have got so upset about so often that it's hard to get excited about it anymore. So all that was going on was that the German-speaking inhabitants were standing on one side of the street shouting "Shame! " at those across the way, who wanted other languages and were shouting "Disgrace! " at the Germans, and nothing further might have happened. But Leinsdorf is famous as a peacemaker; he wants the national minorities living under the Mon- archy to be a national people, as he's always saying. And you know, too, if I may say so here where no one can hear us, that two dogs often growl around each other in a general way, but the moment someone tries to calm them they jump at each other's throats. So as soon as Leinsdorf was recognized, it gave a tremendous impetus to everyone's emotions. They began asking in chorus, in two languages: 'What's going on with the Commission to Establish the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Populace, Your Excellency? ' And then they shouted: 'You fake peace abroad, and in your own house you're a murderer! ' Do you remember the story that's told about him that once, a hundred years ago, when he was much younger, a co- quette he was with died during the night? This was what they were alluding to, people are saying now. And all this happened on account of that stupid resolution that you should let yourself be killed for your own ideas but not for other people's, a stupid resolution that doesn't even exist because I kept it out of the minutes!
