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

The ethical void of Patrizia McBride's title refers to the theme, common in literary modernism, of the absence of objective principles upon which one could organize practical life. Typically, perception of the void triggers either an effort to reinstate some lost traditional content or an effort to formulate new content. In The Void of Ethics, McBride presents the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880-1942) as opting for a third, less popular response grounded in the observation that the void is not the kind of thing that could be filled. Starting with this divergence from standard responses to modernity, McBride's book seeks "to trace the development of Musil's thinking on ethics as it relates to literature and to the realm of purposive action" (25-6). This is no easy task because Musil's thinking about ethics and aesthetics is spread across his diaries, published and unpublished essays, and his massive, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, including the multiple versions of incomplete chapters contained in his literary remains. McBride draws broadly and synthetically on this diverse material, avoiding the common tendency to focus only on Musil's magnum opus.

McBride offers Musil's first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless, as exploring "the disorientation of the individual who must confront the split between a disjointed and meaningless ordinary experience . . . and the intimation of moments of mystical illumination, whose bliss is however not translatable into the categories of ordinary life" (35). Perceiving the split between ordinary experience and what Musil later terms "the Other Condition," Törless searches for some passage between the two states, finding, however, that language and conceptual thought are incapable of representing this other domain which is the source of the truly ethical life.

Aesthetic experience holds for Musil the possibility of making a passage between the two domains, for he believed "that the aesthetic balance of intellect and feeling is . . . the depository of an immanent, nongeneralizable principle of purposive human conduct" (19). The most valuable part of McBride's book is her treatment of Musil's appropriation of tropes and images from Kantian aesthetics in the effort to explore connections between the two realms of experience. Discussions of Kant in Musil criticism are typically confined to Törless, and I know of no book in English which engages the Kantian connection so directly, clearly, and productively as McBride's.

According to McBride, the parallels to Kant involve two main tropes: "the idea of art as a bridge spanning two incommensurable realms of experience" and "the issue of the exemplarity of the artwork" (99). She contends that "Musil's idea of the artwork as suspended in an interim space between intellect and feeling contains an unmistakable reference to Kant's free play of the intellect and the imagination in the judgment of taste" (112). The aesthetic bridge joining the faculties of sensibility and intellect in the third Critique, she argues, is reconfigured by Musil "as the momentary contact of two incompatible states of mind in the individual, namely, that of ordinary experience and that of its inaccessible foil, an ethical Other Condition" (106-7).

Regarding the other parallel to Kant, that of the exemplary character of artworks, McBride argues that Musil's conception of the ethical dimension of the aesthetic is derived from Kant's notion that aesthetic experiences exhibit the paradoxical property of demanding universal recognition despite their singular character. For Kant, specific aesthetic judgments can solicit general approval because of the artwork's ability to point to the source from which it was originally created (i.e., by making supersensible divine teleology sensible). This experience is "taste": the capacity of the understanding and the imagination to enter into a free play not productive of knowledge. Where this happens, a feeling of purposiveness results which serves as a self-referential means of orientation unsupported by concepts (115). Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard's reading of Kant, McBride explains that taste becomes...