The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  This dual—or riven—state, this predicament, could best be dealt with—accommodated, enjoyed—by singing. Singing, Rilke said, is unique to humans. To sing as a human is not to sing as a bird; as birds sing, so humans talk. “Music [in a song] weaves a line through the discontinuous present . . . lyric unites the time-based events of our words by recalling them back into the presence of one another through the repetition of their sounds. By continually returning us to the previous moment, the lyre cheats that time which carries us to our deaths. . . . The endless river rolls on, but through song we can row against the current and arrest, for a little while, our own progress.”14

  For Rilke, singing has another meaning too. Singing is what the earth itself does and this meant that “saying” and “singing” overlapped. A good example here is the Tenth Elegy with its concept of “Pain City,” in which a young man follows a beckoning girl across the meadows. She is not just a girl, though, but an allegory—she is a young Lament, who soon passes him on to an older one, who explains: “We were once a great race, we Laments.” She leads the man across a “landscape of mourning,” in which emotions have coalesced into geological and biological phenomena—here there is a “polished lump of primeval pain,” there a “petrified slag of anger,” elsewhere “fields of sadness in bloom” and “herds of grief.” These are attempts to reconfigure the earth, to wonder at it and enjoy it in new ways, to surround ourselves with new experiences, new metaphors for expressing emotions, to realize “unconceived spaces.”

  In wonder we have to wrest from the earth its ways of singing; Rilke’s way was by naming new ways of seeing, new concepts, new juxtapositions, to suggest new ways of being. It was also a way to overcome what he felt was the illusory idea of a unitary self; he was convinced that the way to understand “being” was “as a flow,” rather than something static and unchanging.15

  SHORTCUTS TO LIFE

  He was also forever on the lookout for metaphors that provided shortcuts, as in his poem about a fig tree. Significantly, this tree goes straight to the fruit state without blossoming. Rilke is asking here whether we have to accept the familiar botanical metaphor in our own lives: blossoming may be a beautiful process and a lovely word, but isn’t it at root an unproductive, ephemeral waiting period and in that sense a waste of time, the very opposite of a shortcut? Elsewhere he asks whether some people are “Ganze geborne,” “born into the whole,” born with the knowledge of the total unity of experience. Is that where poetry comes from?

  And all this led Rilke to argue that death ought to be the logical culmination of life, “not something invading it with hostile step.”16 Here he introduced his powerful image of a glass that shatters while it is ringing, that destroys itself by and in its own intensity, a poetic journey to nothingness.17 To this he added his concept of death as “uniquely one’s own.”

  For we are only leaf and skin,

  The mighty death which each one bears within,

  That is the core around which all revolves.

  A “mighty death,” an individual death (not just a slinking-away in what he called a “ready-made” death), after a lifetime’s singing about the earth in new ways, approximates the rules of existence that Rilke sought. Aspire to make your death an event of consequence.

  He died as a poet, Leppmann says, because “even in the face of death his own imagination was more important and more real to him than reality. . . . Just as he had closed himself off from whole areas of life—career, wealth, marriage—for the sake of the inner world that informed his poetry, so too did he refuse to acknowledge his imminent end.” According to his doctor, although he was in considerable pain he chose to get by without resorting to painkillers, and he never asked about the disease that he suffered from.18 A mighty death indeed.I

  “TWO WAYS OF BEING IN THE WORLD”

  Despite its length, Robert Musil’s three-volume unfinished The Man without Qualities does not take such a radical form as some other modernist novels, such as Kafka’s The Castle, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; but it did have, like some of those other works, a direct relationship with the author’s life.

  Musil was born in Klagenfurt in Austria in 1880. His father was an engineer from an old aristocratic family and he was himself ennobled in 1917, barely a year before the Austrian nobility was abolished. His family had hoped that Robert would embrace a military career, but despite serving with distinction in the war he chose to attend various technical universities, where he did a doctoral thesis on philosophy, natural science and mathematics, and wrote a treatise on the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. Early on he had a fascination with science, with what he called the “sacred aura of exactness,” the “sobriety” of its techniques and the lack of illusion in scientific inquiry. But this enthusiasm passed: the routine nature of much experimentation, and the difference he observed between the professional and personal lives of the engineers and technicians—the way they failed to uphold at home the standards they employed at work—disillusioned him, and he turned to writing. At various times he was editor of the literary magazine Die Neue Rundschau and a theatre critic, and he won both the Kleist Prize and the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize for his play Die Schwärmer, about a professor of psychology who becomes disillusioned with both his marriage and his scientific study.

  During the 1920s, Musil began The Man without Qualities, and worked on it almost daily. Like George Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Virginia Woolf, he believed that the novel was the mode appropriate to the philosophical situation of his generation and that it embodied “that terrible wonder in the face of an irrational world.” Novels—his novel, anyway—were a kind of thought experiment, on par with Einstein’s or Picasso’s, where a figure might be seen in profile and in full face at the same time. J. M. Coetzee has described The Man without Qualities “as a book overtaken by history during its writing.” This is surely true in one sense, at least: after the first three parts were published, in 1930 and 1933, Musil, whose wife, Martha, was Jewish, was forced into exile in Switzerland. He memorably described Hitler as “the living unknown soldier.”

  The book is set in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, in the mythical country of Kakania. Kakania is clearly Austria-Hungary, the name referring to Kaiserlich und Königlich, or K.u.K, standing for the kingdom of Hungary and the imperial-royal Austrian crown lands. Though daunting in length, it is for many the most brilliant literary response to the developments of the early twentieth century, one of a handful of works “incapable of over-interpretation.” It has been described as post-Bergson, post-Einstein, post-Rutherford, post-Bohr, post-Freud, post-Husserl, post-Picasso, post-Proust, post-Gide, post-Joyce and post-Wittgenstein. And, it goes without saying, post-Christian.

  There are three intertwined themes, which provide a loose narrative. First, there is the search by the main character, Ulrich von——, a Viennese soldier-turned-engineer-turned-mathematician-turned-intellectual who models himself on the “hard spiritual courage” of Nietzsche. His search to penetrate the meaning of modern life involves him in a project to understand the mind of one Moosbrugger, the murderer of a young prostitute. Ulrich is in his early thirties and unmarried and has recently returned to Vienna after several years abroad. Though his mind still works like that of a scientist, he is (like Musil himself) no longer inspired by the scientific approach—in fact, passion has largely left his life and he joins the pre-war Viennese world, partly social, partly intellectual. Second, there is Ulrich’s relationship (and love affair) with his sister, Agathe, with whom he had lost contact in childhood. Third, the book is a social satire of the Vienna of the time. Musil had not completed a fourth part of his massive work when he died, nearly destitute, in Switzerland, in 1942. (He never lost his acerbity: “Today they ignore us,” he told a friend. “But once we are dead they will boast that they gave us asylum.”)

  Musil researched the book in an almost sci
entific way, gaining access to a murderer in a Viennese jail. At one point he has Ulrich note that the murderer is tall, with broad shoulders, that “his chest cavity bulged like a spreading sail on a mast,” but that on occasion he feels small and soft, like a “jelly-fish floating in the water,” when he reads a book that moves him. No one description, no one characteristic or quality, fits him. It is in this sense that he is a man without qualities: “We no longer have any inner voices; reason tyrannizes our lives.” Moosbrugger, who does not believe in God, only in what he can figure out for himself, runs his life according to a deadly logic (other people are there “only to get in his way”) that leads him to murder.

  Thus, the real theme of the book is what it means to be human in a scientific age. If all we can believe in are our senses, if we can know ourselves only as scientists know us, if all generalizations and talk of values, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless, as the philosophers of the Vienna Circle were saying (see chapter 14), how are we to live? The writing is a tour de force, full of acerbic, original and witty observations: “In times to come, when more is known, the word ‘destiny’ will probably have acquired a statistical meaning.” “The difference between a normal person and an insane one is precisely that the normal person has all the diseases of the mind, while the madman has only one.” “One should love an idea like a woman; be overjoyed to get back to it.” 19

  Nevertheless, Musil never quite gave up hope that some way might one day be found to bring the advances of science and technology, and even military precision, to the realm of the spirit, though he realized how elusive this hope was. “It is not in someone’s gift anymore to interpret his or her experiences without doubt, hesitation and second-guessing—with all our knowledge now, explanations of phenomena have, as it were, the heart cut out of them: kindness is a special form of egotism; emotions are glandular secretions; eight- or nine-tenths of a human being consists of water; moral freedom is an automatic by-product of free trade; statistical graphs of births and suicides show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behavior. [Ulrich] is always right, but never productive, never happy, and never, except momentarily, engaged.”20

  Musil accepts that the old categories in which men thought—the “halfway house” ideas of racialism, or religion—are of no use anymore, but with what are we to replace them? Like Rilke, he offers the notion of submission through one of his characters, here Clarisse, married to Ulrich’s estranged childhood companion. She decides that “one is obliged to surrender oneself to an illusion if one received the grace of having one.” This would find an echo across the Atlantic in the plays of Eugene O’Neill (see the next chapter). Nothing is straightforward in The Man without Qualities, but this idea—that being able to form a stable relationship with one great overriding idea, knowing it to be only one alternative among many, amounting to a secular form of grace in the modern world—may be taken as a kind of conclusion. It echoes the “shared fictions” of Henry James.

  THE OTHER CONDITION

  Musil also used a particular—secular—definition of the soul, as “a certain state of excitement,” which arose from his view that there are two ways of being in the world—and these two ways are explored throughout The Man without Qualities and provide an idea of how we are to live in a disenchanted world. The “normal condition,” as he called it, is the world of science, business, capitalism, “the scientific attitude toward things, which amounts to seeing things without love.”21 “In contrast to facts, actions, business, the politics of force . . . stand love and poetry. These are conditions that rise above the transactions of the world.”

  David Luft tells us that, for Musil, Eros is like art “because it focuses attention; it abstracts, hypnotizes, and changes states of being in an attempt to affect the world in magical ways.” Musil was convinced that an age of science and capitalism had lost track of this suppressed side of the self. “The normal condition is keyed to what is useful, the other condition to what is enhancing.” His point was not that the everyday reality we know is unimportant but that it is enclosed in clichés and not “imaginatively challenged.”22 He argued that the lack of understanding in the realm of the soul was the source of contemporary suffering, although for him, as noted, the soul was a form of excitement, and the “religious” and “ethical” task of the artist was to free the human being from the rigidity of tradition, whether intellectual or emotional, so as to use experience to engender—and enhance—more motivation.23

  The real challenge for Musil was for mankind to work out ways of maximizing the amount of time an individual could spend in the other condition (he called it “the other condition” because it was so undefined he did not think it right to use a more specific term). The real goal of a novel, for him, was not to take part in philosophical debate but to help “the founding of the realm of the spirit.” The language of feelings had not kept pace with modern developments.24 He thought that the average person in the 1920s was “a far more involved metaphysician than he is usually willing to concede. . . . A dull, persistent feeling of his strange cosmic situation seldom leaves him. Death, the tininess of the earth, the dubious illusion of the self, the senselessness of existence, which become more pressing with the years: these are questions at which the average person scoffs, but which he nonetheless feels surrounding him all his life like the walls of a dark room.”25

  Musil believed that all the great religions were born of the “other condition,” but they had become clichéd, “rigid, hard and corrupt” like skeletons, and it was the job of literature—of all art—to regain this other condition. This is what part three of The Man without Qualities faces up to, the “condition” of love between Ulrich and Agathe.26 Musil thought there was a need for more femininity in modern culture, that women were more open to the other condition, which he described as “a condition of the undisturbed insideness of life. . . . [Ulrich] wants to live in something rather than for something, insideness often being ‘a world without words.’”27 In their intense love relationship, Ulrich and Agathe become sensitive to the other way of relating to the world, “they experience a spiritual union. In this dissolution of the borderline between ego and non-ego . . . [they] experience a sense of participation in the world, a supra-heightening. . . . This holiday experience, beyond the tyranny of churches and moralists, provides the sense of insideness that has been missing from their lives.”28

  Musil was at pains to say that this state of grace, the other condition, can never be made into a norm, and we shouldn’t try. “The normal human pattern is to take a vacation from one condition of being into the other.” We will know when we are in this state of grace, he says, because we experience it as a rising feeling, rather than the normal condition, one of sinking. When it occurs, this makes us “not so much Godless as much more God-free.”29

  Each of the individuals in this chain—Heidegger, Rilke, Musil—was much more imaginative than Weber. Re-enchanting the world is a much more positive activity than merely mourning its disenchantment.

  * * *

  I. Rilke had leukemia.

  12

  The Imperfect Paradise

  I

  t was the age of the flapper, of bathtub gin and raucous jazz bands, of the Charleston. It was the age of the silent-screen movie star, no graduated income tax and some of the longest, sleekest automobiles ever built. Speaking of the few short years between the end of the First World War and the stock market crash of 1929, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “The Jazz Age now raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations of money.” Here is Amory Blaine, the young autobiographical hero of Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise: “I’m rather pagan at present. It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to have the slightest bearing on life at my age.” And the novel concludes: “Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty, gray turmoil
to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” Fitzgerald’s capture of the mood of the era was so accurate that Gertrude Stein labeled This Side of Paradise the bible for the younger generation.1

  MONEY REPLACES GOD

  Henry Idema, the author of several of the above sentences, argues that secularization, in America certainly, accelerated in the 1920s. In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the novelist Sherwood Anderson wrote to a friend: “You know, my dear, it is not only the hunger and destitution—it’s something gone out of America—an old faith lost and no new one got.” Van Wyck Brooks, the critic and historian, said that the post-war generation found themselves “born into a race that has drained away all its spiritual resources in the struggle to survive and that continues to struggle in the midst of plenty because life itself no longer possesses any meaning.” Idema found three things happening simultaneously during that time: an increase in neurosis, due to the absence of the comfort people had traditionally enjoyed from the established churches; the “privatization” of religion; and a shift away from religious traditions toward affluence and materialism.2

  Idema, an ordained Episcopalian clergyman with a PhD in religion and psychological studies from the University of Chicago (see chapter 18), thought that secularization had psychological roots. For him traditional religion derived its power, as Freud had said, from the family—the young child in its pre-oedipal state finding protection in the mother and later deriving discipline and respect for authority from the father. The two-parent family, in Idema’s words, was a Freudian love triangle that the child learned to negotiate to achieve emotional maturity, and where many of the basic familial psychological functions, of protection and authority, were taken over by the churches. In the modern world, however, where, increasingly, mothers went out to work and were absent for long periods, and fathers might be even more absent, working unsocial hours in an often distant factory, the young child no longer interiorized parental values in the traditional way, and so no longer looked to the church.