Robert Musil and the NonModern by Mark M. Freed (review)

In part because of its sustained theoretical engagement with questions of ethics and epistemology, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities has invited philosophical readings perhaps more than any other major German-language novel. Mark Freed, Professor of Literary Theory at Central Michigan University, offers the latest addition to the growing body of philosophical treatments of Musil with Robert Musil and the NonModern. Freed avoids the pitfall of treating his subject as a philosopher, remembering to always pay attention to Musil’s status as a novelist. His primary concern here is to situate Musil’s development of Essayismus en marge de la philosophie, as “an intervention into the philosophical discourse of Modernity [and] a discursive strategy of the nonmodern” (154). This last term Freed borrows from Latour in order to differentiate the philosophical implications of Essayismus from the modernity of Habermas and the Frankfurt School as well as from the postmodernity of Lyotard, both of which he claims perpetuate hard distinctions between natural (scientific) and cultural (humanistic) spheres that Essayismus seeks to dereify in order to “engag[e] the phenomena of human experience that do not lend themselves to systematic ordering” (47).

Over six chapters, Freed convincingly puts Musil’s strategy of essayistic thinking into dialogue with a number of aesthetic and philosophical problems, from the aporias plaguing both modern and postmodern conceptions of avant-garde art to the possibility of orienting ethical experiences and decision-making toward the horizon of Kantian regulative ideas. He demonstrates a great facility in explicating correspondences between Musil’s thoughts and those of a number of twentieth-century philosophers. Exemplary is the third chapter, “Disclosing concealed being,” which opens with a remarkably lucid reading of the major arguments in Being and Time (no mean feat) and proceeds to uncover a series of intriguing conceptual similarities between the project of Heidegger’s seminal work and Musil’s own attempts in The Man Without Qualities to disclose a mode of authentic existence that has been obscured by the reductive conventions of modern society. Most of Freed’s other chapters attain a similar level of quality and rigor. The chapter on Nietzsche, however, relies a bit too heavily on Nehamas’s interpretation of the philosopher rather than fully exploring Nietzsche’s own writings, and its arguments feel somewhat underdeveloped, especially considering that Nietzsche is the thinker most cited by Musil, whose work plays a significant role in the plot and structure of the latter’s major novel.

Freed’s engagement with The Man Without Qualities largely remains at the level of big-picture deliberations about the novel’s overarching structure and experimental nature, and his already compelling arguments would be more convincing were they buttressed by more detailed examinations of the text exploring how exactly Musil’s Essayismus works or doesn’t work as a strategy for writing fiction, but this is perhaps beyond the scope of the book’s project. Freed never claims to offer a close reading of Musil’s masterwork. Rather, he is interested in working out the implications of Essayismus as a discursive model for dealing with ethical and epistemological questions that modern philosophical discourses have seemed ill-equipped to fully confront. In this he largely succeeds. Scholars and graduate students working on Musil from a philosophical perspective will find much of value in Freed’s work, which both stands as an achievement in itself and provides an intellectual framework that invites future scholarship to further explore the idea and correspondences presented here. Even students not particularly interested in Musil will be well-served by Freed’s clear and concise explications of many of the most important strands of continental philosophy over the past two centuries.