Introduction: Musil’s Intellectual Position

Summary

ROBERT MUSIL's great unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930; 1933) is, among other things, a novel about the impact of science on ordinary human experience. As the novel suggests in its opening chapter, science no longer inhabits the fringes of society; it is not an embroidery around human lives, a helpful, though unnecessary, contrivance. On the contrary, human lives, according to the focalizing perspective established in the novel, can no longer be imagined without science. Science has become one of the key languages that script modern life for us. At the very least, Musil's novel serves as a reminder that a set of larger historical arrangements has now come together to put science at the very center of modern life and all that we take that life to amount to.

For this reason, The Man Without Qualities, as well as most of the works that precede it in Musil's literary development, can be read as a meditation on these historical arrangements. On the one hand, these arrangements brought science out of the science laboratory and the academy and into the public eye, seemingly for the first time. On the other hand, the science on view in the opening sequences of Musil's great novel—the statistical science of probability—could only achieve such visibility after a long gestation extending over many centuries. Musil signals awareness of this gestation at several points in his diaries. For example, surveying the question of the certainty of scientific knowledge in the late 1930s, Musil notes in diary volume 10 that the facts of the physical world can never be known in any final way. At best, knowledge of the physical world can be considered only probable. By contrast, as he also observes, Cartesian method rejects probability as an acceptable goal of scientific procedure and is focused instead on statements of “certainty” (TB 1:525). These observations about the changing goals to which scientific inquiry has been directed over time indicate that the inquiry into science that Musil convenes in the major novel, as well as in earlier works, is arrived at on the basis of a deep acquaintance with the factors that had revolutionized scientific practice by the end of the nineteenth century.