The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity (review)

This study of Robert Musil’s ideas on ethics begins with the image of a ring: Clarisse takes off her wedding ring and examines it, commenting that “There’s nothing inside, and yet it looks as though that were precisely what matters most” (Musil, The Man Without Qualities 3). This is the guiding image that McBride uses to explore Musil’s ethics. The structural void through which the ring is actually constituted represents the void at the core of human existence. Yet this perceived void is not the dehumanizing result of the all-encompassing logic of instrumental reason or of the loss of metaphysical certainty, but a void that productively structures the individual. It is the void of ethics, the “Other Condition” that Musil saw existing beyond language and thought, and which he viewed as the place of ethical and aesthetic experience. Its ethical significance results from the momentary meeting between ordinary experience and the Other Condition that enables a reappraisal of “formulaic modes of experience” (19) and subsequent action. This productive quality of the void is why, in McBride’s view, Musil can be seen as an exceptional modernist: he rejects the nihilism attendant upon the loss of absolute meaning and the contemporary emphasis on cultural degeneration and welcomes the opportunity to question certainty.

McBride traces the development of Musil’s ideas on ethics throughout his work, focusing predominantly on the theoretical exploration of concepts in his essays and diaries. She comprehensively discusses Musil’s response to the scientific, artistic, philosophical and psychological discourses of the time, showing his consistent rejection of ideas “aimed at surreptitiously filling this void with yet another absolute vision of the good life” (7). She situates The Confusions of the Young Törless within the debates concerning language and the self, discussing Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, Fritz Mauthner, Ernst Mach, and Hermann Bahr, as well as romanticism and its reception at the turn of the century. In McBride’s view the novel demonstrates that the separate worlds of intellect and emotion cannot be reconciled, but that the gap between them “is not necessarily a matter of a skewed relationship between the two or of an unbalance that ought to be rectified” (51). Furthermore, Törless’s articulate explanation of his behavior in front of the board of schoolmasters is crucial to his final acceptance of the two worlds and therefore evidence that ordinary language can help come to terms with the ineffable, even if it cannot represent it.

The importance Musil placed on mathematics and scientific enquiry is central to his understanding of ethics. McBride discusses Musil’s interest in bringing logic and reason into the aesthetic realm, manifested not least in his emphasis on reason and the centrality of the intellect even when exploring ineffable states of being. In his essay “The Mathematical Man” of 1913, Musil describes the way in which mathematicians had built an edifice that “was standing in midair. But the machines worked!” (qtd. in McBride 54). In other words, the fact that math is based on contingent foundations does no harm to its function and to the science and civilization that it both supports and is sustained by. As McBride argues, in Musil’s view, this insight can be applied to the ethical sphere through literature: “applying the rigor and precision of scientific thinking to the realm of ethics entails precisely the opposite of seeking to establish regularities and rules for moral conduct. It involves acknowledging the singular and utterly contingent character of ethical events” (69). Musil’s views were confirmed rather than challenged by the events of the First World War, and McBride analyzes Musil’s response to what he saw as a repeat of pre-war mistakes: metaphysical and social uncertainty was again being met with generalization and idealization. To make clear his criticism of an age in which thinking was not underpinned by the standards of critical methodology demanded by the sciences, Musil in...