I. IntroductionIt has often been seen as a crucial feature of modernity that the old chains of necessity-religious, political, social, or otherwise-have been shaken off and human beings have been released into a radical form of freedom. This kind of freedom has both a positive and a negative side: on the one hand, it may seem to allow us to make a kind of individual decision and to act according to our own will. On the other hand, it also brings with it the dire difficulty of dealing with what we can call the problem of contingency: how to decide what to do if it is equally open to us to perform a certain action as well as its opposite, if there is no necessity, no sufficient reason that tells us to do the one but not the other? In this paper, I argue that this problem of contingency has a prominent place in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I do not claim that Musil's novel suggests any definite answers, but rather that it presents and explores different strategies for dealing with contingency.Given the limits of this paper, I will not be able to give an exhaustive account of this problem in Musil's novel; a lot of the important ethical implications will have to be left out, as, for example, the relation of this problem to any form of violence. The paper will start by clarifying the notion of contingency as it is taken up in the novel and its connection to what Musil calls the of possibility. Subsequently, I will show how Kakania, the servants and citizens of this state, deal with contingency. The Parallel Campaign will be argued to be one big attempt to ground this state in some kind of necessity. We will then move on to Ulrich's way of dealing with contingency: with Ulrich, Musil introduces the thought experiment of assuming a person who is fully aware of the challenges that contingency raises for human agency and who attempts to face up to them. Finally, I will contrast Ulrich's way of dealing with contingency with the way of some of the other characters in the novel.II. CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATIONS: CONTINGENCY AND THE SENSE OF POSSIBILITYLet me first clarify the notion of contingency at work in this paper somewhat further, which will help us in our analysis of the different contingent phenomena sketched in the novel. I want to understand contingency here as the opposite of necessity1-so as a first pass we can understand it positively with the help of notions like chance, indeterminacy, or possibility.In The Man Without Qualities, necessity can be found in three different spheres:2 there is (1) logical necessity-Ulrich's ideas for new ways of living our lives are based on his attempts to follow only logical necessity; (2) causal necessity-referred to in the discussions of the laws of nature;3 and, most importantly for the great majority of citizens, (3) necessity within the sphere of politics or society. The rules and regularities of society are explicitly understood as a form of necessity by certain figures of this novel; for example, Bonadea considers the changes of fashion as following a form of necessity,4 and initially the regulations of the military have the same status for Stumm von Bordwehr.This last form of necessity-political or social-is put into doubt by what Musil calls the sense of possibility, which takes this alleged necessity as just one possibility among others. We get a famous account of this right at the start of the book. Chapter 4, entitled there is a of reality, there must also be a of possibility, introduces the of possibility in the second paragraph:Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. …