7 - Moosbrugger – a study in applied subjectivity

Summary

Musil was rather wary of Moosbrugger, the psychopath and murderer; he preferred not to give public readings from the sections dealing with this character. To have done so would have been to risk pandering to the public's taste for scandal and so to have given completely the wrong impression of his work as a whole. In The Man without Qualities, the study of sickness, affecting both individuals and society as a whole, is not an end in itself, but part of the search to heal civilisation. In civilised people, Musil argues, a layer of psychic processes responds to the demands of social life – this is the realm of self-images, of shared illusions and routine deceptions, of conventions of behaviour which Musil portrays critically in his studies of ‘das Seinesgleichen’. In Moosbrugger, this layer is virtually absent and much deeper levels of feeling are constantly exposed to casual contact with the outer world. In this examination of psychopathic behaviour, Musil is following established practice among psychiatrists – he studies a mentally sick individual as a means to understanding mental processes which, though present in normal people, are much more difficult to detect there. Karl Jaspers, who was a psychiatrist before he turned to philosophy, points to the extraordinary immediacy of perception found both in the young and in some of the insane:

The very root of philosophising is seen in children and in the mentally ill. Sometimes it is […] as if the fetters of general illusions were loosed and the individual were seized by truth. […]