In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity
  • Tim Mehigan
Patrizia C. McBride . The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2006. 231 pp. US$ 75.95 (Cloth). ISBN 0-8101-2108-5. US$ 26.95 (Paperback). ISBN 0-8101-2109-3.

Robert Musil (1880–1942), an engineer by initial training, turned to writing as a result of two early career decisions. The first of these followed his insight that the technical professions were conducted without reversion to the daily needs of human beings: you worked in one "technical" way, you lived in another "nontechnical" way. The technical way cultivated a type of free-floating ideal of reason in the manner laid down by Bacon and Descartes: one reached an understanding of a proposition about the natural world through a rational process of eliminative induction. The non-technical way was the way one lived outside the laboratory: one lived by feeling, intuition, by analogy, metaphor, and unclear emotion. Already as a young man Musil felt the depth of the chasm separating these two ways of thinking and the sense of being that followed them. Musil's second career decision related to his subsequent study of psychology in Berlin – already a first attempt to find a solution to the problem of the discrepancy between the "ratioïd" and the "nichtratioïd" and the incompatible demands they made.

In Berlin he was directed to the philosophy of Ernst Mach, an advocate of this new technical approach to understanding the natural world. Mach was controversial because he ascribed little credence to the older view that had maintained the Cartesian division between mind and physical extension for scientific understanding and, in matters of self and society, an accommodation with these dualistic precepts held to be preeminent. This had been the beginning of the emergence of two ways of referencing the world, two different "cultures" of understanding now dominant in what we call modernity. Mach, however, advocated the abandonment of this dualism and instead proposed a scientific monism that would look only at the data of experience, even in regard to humanistic concerns. This approach only accelerated the incursion of the natural sciences into all walks of life at the turn to the twentieth century. It entirely overlooked the aspiration of human beings to base life on different concerns. Digesting this philosophy of the new science, Hermann Bahr, Musil's fellow writer and compatriot, pointed out that this monist orientation diminished the human being and made the ego, the "I," in a certain sense "unsalvageable."

Already the author of a successful and critically acclaimed novel, the Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), Musil, for his part, held out for an answer to the divide between the technical and nontechnical areas of life in the promise of academic psychology. That psychology, however, was already being taken in new directions by Freud's psychoanalysis, which Musil held to be reductive and [End Page 375] therefore largely unusable. The Gestalt theory being discussed in Berlin was more promising, but by this time the die was cast, and Musil had already decided to return to Vienna and commit to a career as a writer. For Musil, writing thus took on the task of exploring an alternative to the problem of these two divergent cultures of understanding. His writing, which is sustained by an open quality suggestive of a vast scientific experiment, provided many insights in the quest to illuminate this basic problem of technical modernity, most notably under the heading of the "anderer Zustand" in the intellectually profound, and profoundly unfinished, novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Patrizia McBride's study not only engages with the problem of the two cultures, as conceived in Musil works, but also offers a solution. Her argument runs like this: The problem of the incommensurability of the two cultures was an ethical issue for Musil, a problem of how to live. Since modernity provided no answer to this problem, there was (and still is) "an ethical black hole" (26) at the heart of modern experience. As Musil's writing progressed, in stuttering fashion after the early success of Törleß, then building...

pdf

Share