Musil’s Metaphilosophical View

Abstract

The proper philosophy of our time is that we have no philosophy.-Robert Musil(1990, 156).Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities (henceforth MWQ) is appreciated by many philosophers as an astute piece of philosophical literature. It contains a lot of interesting ideas on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and, last but not least, ethics. However, as I want to argue in this article, philosophers have reason to be wary about this work and its author. He issues a thoroughgoing challenge to philosophy as a science (at least as it was traditionally conceived). Musil's claim is that the right way to deal with philosophical problems is not traditional academic philosophy, but a way of thinking and writing that is distinctly literary in nature, although informed by the philosophical tradition. Musil's project, therefore, stands in competition with academic philosophy.In the following, I will examine how Musil develops this metaphilosophical view in his essays and in MWQ. Although the term 'metaphilosophical' is not uncontroversial, I am using it as a convenient way to refer to the reflection about the nature and purpose of philosophy. The first section of the paper describes the space of metaphilosophical views as stretching in between three vertices: the traditional conception of philosophy, philosophical naturalism, and the view that philosophy is a kind of literary genre. I will abbreviate the latter view as 'philosophy as literature.' In the second section, I will show that Musil's approach occupies a peculiar position in metaphilosophical space thus conceived which brings together elements of philosophy as literature and philosophical naturalism in a unique way. In the third section, I am going to scrutinize Musil's strategies to support this view in his literary work.1. Positions in Metaphilosophical SpaceWhen approaching the nature of philosophy one can look at its institutional status, its historical provenance, its canons of texts, its domain of study, and its methodology. An institutional approach amounts to saying that whatever is taught and studied in philosophy departments qualifies as philosophy. On the historical or canonical understanding, philosophy is defined by a historical tradition or a canon of texts.Many philosophers however would not be happy with a merely institutional, historical, or canonical characterization of their discipline. The reason is that, ultimately, philosophy departments, historical traditions, and canons of texts have evolved in historically contingent ways. Philosophers in general (and perhaps analytic philosophers in particular) tend, therefore, to be more comfortable characterizing philosophy by referring to its proper object of study and methodology.According to an influential western tradition, philosophy is concerned with abstract, general, and necessary truths which characterize the world in the most fundamental way. Its methodology is considered as a priori, i.e., independent of experience. As a consequence, philosophical inquiry can be pursued from the armchair. Most defenders of this view agree that philosophy is (at least) concerned with analytic, conceptual, or linguistic truths. Correspondingly, the proper methodology of philosophy consists (at least in part) in linguistic or conceptual analysis. Divergence arises as to the question whether philosophical inquiry is restricted to linguistic or conceptual analysis alone, or whether there is more to it than that.Notably Kant and his followers held that the most important part of philosophy is not the investigation of analytic truths, but rather the inquiry of what he calls 'synthetic a priori truths', i.e., strictly general, necessary truths beyond the reach of science that are nevertheless not merely analytic. In this way, philosophy is supposed to provide the epistemic foundations of the sciences. This is not to say that philosophy is something outside of science, instead, it claims scientific status for itself. …