Mach, Musil, and Modernism

Abstract

IBy comparison with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann, their near contemporary, Robert Musil (1880-1942) remains largely unread outside Austria and Germany. Insofar as excellent translations into English have been available since the 1950s, neglect of Musil's major works, which include the three-volume novel, The Man Without Qualities, the novella, Young Torless, and the story collections, Unions and Three Women, is perhaps explained by two factors. One is the unexpected combination of mystical aestheticism with quirky sociopolitical humour in the trilogy; the other is the lesser enthusiasm for things Austrian or German on the part of the Anglo-American reading public during and after the Second World War.1 Musil deserves better, and for philosophers he ought to have a special attraction, for he was rigorously trained in natural science and philosophy, and his opinions on these subjects are witty, sophisticated, and sometimes perturbing. Any specialist can identify with the musings of the hero of The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich von_, an applied mathematician (though in an indolent phase of his life), who specialises in the behaviour of and who seems in his own indeterminacy to resemble his subject matter. And there now was water, Ulrich reflects,a colourless liquid, blue only in dense layers, odourless and tasteless (as one had repeated in school so often one could never forget it again), although physiologically it also included bacteria, vegetable matter, air, iron, calcium sulphate and calcium bicarbonate, this archetype of all liquids was, physically speaking, fundamentally not a liquid at all but, according to circumstances, a solid body, a liquid, or a gas. Ultimately the whole thing dissolved into of formulae were all somehow with each other, and in the whole wide world there were only a few dozen people who thought alike about even as simple a thing as water; all the rest talked about it in languages were at home somewhere between today and several thousands of years ago. (MWQ 1:28, 130)2Musil's Ph.D. examinations, taken at the age of 28, encompassed a range few candidates in the twenty-first century could even think to emulate. In physics, he was examined on the theories of electricity and optics, in mathematics, on integrals and applied maths; in psychology, on the theory of memory of Ebbinghaus and on Condillac and Herbart. In philosophy, he was examined on the history of empiricism, on Descartes and Leibniz and the foundations of physics; on Kant's theory of mathematical knowledge, and on the analytical method in Plato and Galileo.3 In addition, Musil enjoyed a deep familiarity with German poetry, fiction and belles lettres, with Novalis and Maeterlinck, and with Romanticism via the prolific intellectual historian Ricarda Huch.4 He was well read in comparative religion, the writings of Christian saints and mystics, and, amongst his contemporaries, the writings of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and Walter Rathenau, industrialist, novelist, and futurist (1867-1922) were of special significance to him.5 Musil's major philosophical influences appear to have been the antimoralist Friedrich Nietzsche, the American transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the physicist Emst Mach. Nietzsche is one of the sources of Musil's preoccupation with actions are 'beyond good and evil;' Emerson contributed his sense of what Musil termed that breath of antipathy. . . the painful, nihilistic secret of individuality even in friendship and love keeps every being distant from others.6 The reference to systems of formulae were all somehow connected in the passage quoted recalls Mach, with whom the present essay is especially concerned.Musil's Ph.D. thesis, A Contribution to the Assessment of the Theory of Mach, presented in 1908 to the philosophical faculty of the FriedrichWilhelms-University in Berlin, constituted a critique of Mach's philosophy of science. …