The Dethroning of Ideocracy

Abstract

Robert Musil was not a professional philosopher. He was a novelist-and according to the widely accepted canon, his contribution to the twentieth-century novel is only matched by very few.Why then should there be a special issue on him in The Monist? The reason is that Musil was a philosopher-just a different kind of philosopher. He was trained in philosophy (he wrote his Ph.D. on Ernst Mach) and gave up a promising career in academia, turning down a job offer in Meinong's department because he thought it better to express his philosophical ideas by means of writing novels.While Musil is often considered to be the 'philosophical novelist'par excellence, his attitude towards the 'philosophical novel', that is, a novel expressing philosophical views, is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, he did believe that philosophy, science, and literature all do the same thing, just by different means (Notebook 5, 1911, October 14 [Musil 1976]). And his explicit reason for giving up academic philosophy was that philosophizing by means of writing novels was more efficient. At the same time, he warned against the obvious pitfalls of philosophical novels. As he said, usually it is not a pleasant experience when writers philosophize and formulate their thoughts directly (Musil 1999, 409). This is very similar to Proust's famous dictum in Time Regained, according to which work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. Is this a contradiction then? Was Musil for or against the philosophical novels he later became so closely associated with? I don't think there is a contradiction here. Musil was committed to philosophizing by writing novels, but he didn't do it directly. He did so, to use a distinction from Philip Kitcher's framework of talking about the philosophical content of novels, by showing and not by saying (Kitcher 2013, Chapter 1 as well as Kitcher's paper here; see also Nanay [2013b]).Musil does not give us explicit philosophical theories. He simply shows us characters in various situations. But if we manage to put together these situations in the right way, we encounter philosophical ideas as clearly as if they were explicitly explained. A quick example. The protagonist of The Man Without Qualities is Ulrich and one of the least likable characters in the book is Amheim. But their general outlook is very similar in many respects. Most importantly, they are both against taking the human mind to be fully and entirely rational and they both emphasize the nonrational elements in human behavior and life. But the similarity of their views highlights the very few but nonetheless even more important differences-that the denial of rationality can lead to a pan-romantic attitude and also to a cheerfully skeptical antiromantic attitude. Musil doesn't explain this as if he were writing a carefully argued philosophy paper about the way the mind works, but by showing us two examples that have so much overlap that we immediately focus on the differences and the reasons for these differences.In this introduction, I would like to focus on what I take to be the main focus of Musil's philosophy, his account of the way the human mind works. I will largely ignore his extremely complex and sophisticated accounts of free will, moral responsibility, emotions, aesthetics, ethics, nominalism and naturalism. Many of these ideas foreshadow some important debates in contemporary analytic and continental philosophy. To mention just a few, he gives early formulations of the idea of moral luck, the narrative conception of the self, a neoformalist account of aesthetic experience, a fairly strong version of the embodiment of the mind, a similarly strong version of philosophical naturalism, and an outright radical account of human freedom (see Wilson's paper on some of these). But what I take to be the underlying theme of most of these ideas is Musil's insistence on, or maybe we should say obsession with, thinking of the human mind in a way that does not consider the functioning of the mind to be fully and completely rational. …