Even if you haven’t read Robert Musil’s unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, you probably agree that it has a great title.

The torture of an unphilosophical life The mind deserves a task worthy of its powers

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2024-12-28 00:30:09

Even if you haven’t read Robert Musil’s unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, you probably agree that it has a great title. If you have read it, I’m sure you agree, because the novel returns obsessively to the theme of how its main character, Ulrich, can’t quite get his act, or, more fundamentally, his personality, together. But I’ve come up with an even better title. I think Musil should have called his novel The Man Without Philosophy.

I acknowledge, in offering this improvement, that over the course of the novel Ulrich explicitly espouses a life-philosophy; moreover, he even fashions his own name for this philosophy, “essayism”. Essayism is a mode of living whose characteristic expression is a stretch of novel and insightful reflection, “explor[ing] a thing from many sides without encompassing it”. The essayist lives a life of thoughtful observations. Ulrich lives that life, and so does Musil, who is much more interested in filling his novel with thoughtful observations than with any of the usual contrivances of plot or character development. Ulrich recoils against being “a definite person in a definite world”, and instead leverages his mind’s bottomless capacity for re-evaluation to emulate the infinite changeability of “a drop of water inside a cloud”. Ulrich describes his relationship to ideas: “they always provoked me to overthrow them and put others in their place.”

For Ulrich, as for Musil, “there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live.” Isn’t that, in its very essence, a philosophical project? Yes. But there is good reason, nonetheless, to insist that Ulrich is a man without philosophy, namely, the fact that both Musil and Ulrich insist on it, over and over again. Ulrich acknowledges that in his predicament, “he could have turned only to philosophy” but the problem was that philosophy “held no attraction for him”. Again and again: “he was no philosopher.” He took a “somewhat ironic view of philosophy”, because, decades before the novel opens, he had already given up hope of actually finding the right way to live: “our thoughts cannot be expected to stand at attention indefinitely any more than soldiers on parade in summer; standing too long, they will simply fall down in a faint.” The result is that “he was always being provoked to think about what he was observing, and yet at the same time was burdened with a certain shyness about thinking too hard”.

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