The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “If I look around further, I discover that this doctrine that carefully weighs pleasure and the absence of pleasure understands by ‘mixed feelings’ the connection of the elements of pleasure and lack of pleasure with the other elements of consciousness, meaning by these grief, composure, anger, and other things upon which lay people place such high value that they would gladly find out more about them beyond the mere name. ‘General states of feeling’ such as liveliness or depression, in which mixed feelings of the same kind predominate, are called unity of an emotional situation.’ ‘Affect’ is what this connection calls an emotional situation that occurs ‘suddenly and violendy,’ and such a situation that is, moreover, ‘chronic’ it calls ‘passion.’ Were theories to have a moral, the moral of this doctrine would be more or less contained in the words: If you take small steps at the beginning, you can take big leaps later on!”

  “But in distinctions such as these, whether there is just one pleasure and lack of pleasure or perhaps several; whether beside pleasure and the absence of pleasure there are not also other basic oppositions, for instance whether relaxation and tension are not such (this bears the majestic title of singularistic and pluralistic theory); whether an emotion might change and whether, if it changes, it then becomes a different emotion; whether an emotion, should it consist of a sequence of feelings, stands in relation to these the way genus stands in relation to species, or the caused to its causes; whether the stages an emotion passes through, assuming it is itself a state, are conditions of a single state or different states, and therefore different emotions; whether an emotion can bring about a change in itself through the actions and thoughts it produces, or whether in this talk about the ‘effect’ of an emotion something as figurative and barely real is meant as if one were to say that the rolling out of a sheet of steel ‘effects’ its thinning, or a spreading out of clouds the overcasting of the sky: in such distinctions traditional psychology has achieved much that ought not to be underestimated. Of course one might then ask whether love is a ‘substance’ or a ‘quality’ and what is involved with regard to love in terms of ‘haeccity and ‘quiddity’; but is one ever certain of not having to raise this question yet again?”

  “All such questions contain a highly useful sense of ordering, although considering the unconstrained nature of emotions, this seems slightly ridiculous and is not able to help us much with regard to how emotions determine our actions. This logical-grammatical sense of order, like a pharmacy equipped with its hundred little drawers and labels, is a remnant of the medieval, Aristotelian-scholastic observation of nature, whose magnificent logic came to grief not so much on account of the experiences people had with it as on account of those they had without it. It is particularly the fault of the developing natural sciences and their new kind of understanding, which placed the question of what is real ahead of the question of what is logical; yet no less, too, the misfortune that nature appears to have been waiting for just such a lack of philosophy in order to let itself be discovered, and responded with an alacrity that is by no means yet exhausted. Nevertheless, so long as this development has not brought forth the new cosmic philosophical egg, it is still useful even today to feed it occasionally from the old bowl, as one does with laying hens. And this is especially true for the psychology of the emotions. For in its buttoned-up logical investiture it was, ultimately, completely unproductive, but the opposite is only too true for the psychologists of emotion who came after; for in regard to this relation between logical raiment and productivity, they have been, at least in the fine years of their youth, well-nigh sans-culottes!”

  “What should I call to mind from these beginnings for more general advantage? Above all that this more recent psychology began with the beneficent sympathy that the medical faculty has always had for the philosophical faculty, and it cleared away the older psychology of emotion by totally ceasing to speak of emotions and beginning to talk instead about ‘instincts’, ‘instinctive acts,’ and ‘affects.’ (Not that talk of man as a being ruled by his instincts and affects was new; it became the new medicine because from then on man was exclusively to be so regarded.)

  “The advantage consisted in the prospect of reducing the higher human attitude of inspiration to the general invigorated attitude constructed on the basis of the powerful natural constraints of hunger, sex, persecution, and other fundamental conditions of life to which the soul is adapted. The sequences of actions these determine are called ‘instinctive drives’ and these arise without thinking or purpose whenever a stimulus brings the relevant group of stimuli into play, and these are similarly activated in all animals of the same species; often, too, in both animal and man. The individual but almost invariable hereditary dispositions for this are called ‘drives’; and the term ‘affect’ is usually associated in this connection with a rather vague notion according to which the ‘affect’ is supposed to be the experience or the experienced aspect of the instinctive action and of drives stimulated to action.

  “This also mostly assumes, either emphatically or discreetly, that all human actions are instinctive actions, or combinations from among such actions, and that all our emotions are affects or parts or combinations of affects. Today I leafed through several textbooks of medical psychology in order to refresh my memory, but not one of their thematic indexes had a mention of the word ‘emotion,’ and it is really no mean accomplishment for a psychology of the emotions not to contain any emotions!”

  “This is the extent to which, even now, a more or less emphatic intention dominates in many circles to substitute scientific concepts meant to be as concrete as possible for the useless spiritual observation of the soul. And however one would originally have liked emotions to be nothing more than sensations in the bowels or wrists (which led to such assertions as that fear consists of an accelerated heartbeat and shallow breathing, or that thinking is an inner speaking and thus really a stimulation of the larynx), what is honored and esteemed today is the purified concept that reduces all inner life to chains of reflexes and the like, and this serves a large and successful school by way of example as the only permissible task of explaining the soul.

  “So if the scientific goal may be said to be a broad and wherever possible ironclad anchoring in the realm of nature, there is still blended with it a peculiar exuberance, which can be roughly expressed in the proposition: What stands low stands firm. In the overcoming of a theological philosophy of nature, this was once an exuberance of denial, a ‘bearish speculation in human values.’ Man preferred to see himself as a thread in the weave of the world’s carpet rather than as someone standing on this carpet; and it is easy to understand how a devilish, degrading desire for soullessness also rubbed off on the emptiness of the soul when it straggled noisily into its materialistic adolescence. This was later held against it in religiously straitlaced fashion by all the pious enemies of scientific thinking, but its innermost essence was nothing more than a good-natured gloomy romanticism, an offended child’s love for God, and therefore also for his image, a love that in the abuse of this image still has unconscious aftereffects today.”

  “But it is always dangerous when a source of ideas is forgotten without this being noticed, and thus many things that had merely derived their unabashed certainty from it were preserved in just as unabashed a state in medical psychology. This gave rise in places to a condition of neglect involving precisely the basic concepts, and not least the concepts of instinct, affect, and instinctive action. Even the question of what a drive is, and which or how many there are, is answered not only quite disparately but without any kind of trepidation. I had an exposition before me that distinguished among the ‘drive groups’ of taking in food, sexuality, and protection against danger; another, which I compared with it, adduced a life drive, an assertion drive, and five more. For a long time psychoanalysis, which incidentally is also a psychology of drives, seemed to recognize only a single drive. And so it continues: Even the relationship between instinctive action and affect ha
s been determined with equally great disparities: everybody does seem to be in agreement that affect is the ‘experience’ of instinctive action, but as to whether in this process the entire instinctive action is experienced as affect, including external behavior, or only the internal event, or parts of it, or parts of the external and internal process in a particular combination: sometimes one of these claims is advanced, sometimes the other, and sometimes both simultaneously. Not even what I wrote before from memory without protest, that an instinctive action happens ‘without intention or reflection,’ is correct all the time.”

  “Is it then surprising if what comes to light behind the physiological explanations of our behavior is ultimately, quite often, nothing but the familiar idea that we let our behavior be steered by chain reflexes, secretions, and the mysteries of the body simply because we were seeking pleasure and avoiding its opposite? And not only in psychology, also in biology and even in political economy—in short, wherever a basis is sought for an attitude or a behavior—pleasure and its lack are still playing this role; in other words, two feelings so paltry that it is hard to think of anything more simpleminded. The far more diversified idea of satisfying a drive would indeed be capable of offering a more colorful picture, but the old habit is so strong that one can sometimes even read that the drives strive for satisfaction because this fulfillment is pleasure, which is about the same as considering the exhaust pipe the operative part of a motor!”

  And so at the end Ulrich had also come to mention the problem of simplicity, although it was doubtless a digression.

  “What is so attractive, so specially tempting to the mind, that it finds it necessary to reduce the world of emotions to pleasure and its lack, or to the simplest psychological processes? Why does it grant a higher explanatory value to something psychological, the simpler it is? Why a greater value to something physiological-chemical than to something psychological, and finally, why does it assign the highest value of all to reducing things to the movement of physical atoms? This seldom happens for logical reasons, rather it happens half consciously, but in some way or other this prejudice is usually operating. Upon what, in other words, rests this faith that nature’s mystery has to be simple?

  “There are, first, two distinctions to be made. The splitting up of the complex into the simple and the minuscule is a habit in everyday life justified by utilitarian experience: it teaches us to dance by imparting the steps, and it teaches that we understand a thing better after we have taken it apart and screwed it together again. Science, on the other hand, uses simplicity really only as an intermediate step; even what appears as an exception subordinates itself to this. For ultimately science does not reduce the complex to the simple but reduces the particularity of the individual case to the generally valid laws that are its goal, and which are not so much simple as they are general and summarizing. It is only through their application, that is to say at second hand, that they simplify the variety of events.

  “And so everywhere in life two simplicities contrast with each other: what it is beforehand and what it becomes afterward are simple in different senses. What it is beforehand, whatever that may be, is mostly simple because it lacks content and form, and therefore is generally foolish, or it has not yet been grasped. But what becomes simple, whether it be an idea or a knack or even will, both entails and participates in the power of truth and capability that compel what is confusingly varied. These simplicities are usually confused with each other: it happens in the pious talk of the simplicity and innocence of nature; it happens in the belief that a simple morality is closer in all circumstances to the eternal than a complicated one; it happens, too, in the confusion between raw will and a strong will.”

  When Agathe had read this far she thought she heard Ulrich’s returning steps on the garden gravel and hastily shoved all the papers back into the drawer. But when she was sure that her hearing had deceived her, and ascertained that her brother was still lingering in the garden, she took the papers out again and read on a bit further.

  53

  THE D AND L REPORTS

  When General Stumm von Bordwehr began expounding in the garden why he thought he had stumbled over an idea, it soon became evident that he was talking with the joy that a well-rehearsed subject provides. It began, he reported, with his receiving the expected rebuke on account of the hasty resolution that had forced the Minister of War to flee Diotima’s house. “I predicted the whole thing!” Stumm protested confidently, adding more modestly: “except for what came afterward.” For in spite of all countermeasures, a whiff of the distressing incident had got through to the newspapers, and had surfaced again during the riots of which Leinsdorf became the sacrificial lamb. But on Count Leinsdorf’s way back from his Bohemian landholdings, in a city where he was trying to catch the train— Stumm now spelled out what he had already indicated in Agathe’s presence—his carriage had happened to get caught between the two fronts of a political encounter, and Stumm described what happened next in the following manner: “Of course their demonstrations were about something entirely different: some regulation or other concerning the use of local national languages in the state agencies, or an issue like that, something people have got so upset about so often that it’s hard to get excited about it anymore. So all that was going on was that the German-speaking inhabitants were standing on one side of the street shouting “Shame!” at those across the way, who wanted other languages and were shouting “Disgrace!” at the Germans, and nothing further might have happened. But Leinsdorf is famous as a peacemaker; he wants the national minorities living under the Monarchy to be a national people, as he’s always saying. And you know, too, if I may say so here where no one can hear us, that two dogs often growl around each other in a general way, but the moment someone tries to calm them they jump at each other’s throats. So as soon as Leinsdorf was recognized, it gave a tremendous impetus to everyone’s emotions. They began asking in chorus, in two languages: What’s going on with the Commission to Establish the Desires of the Concerned Sections of the Populace, Your Excellency?’ And then they shouted: ‘You fake peace abroad, and in your own house you’re a murderer!’ Do you remember the story that’s told about him that once, a hundred years ago, when he was much younger, a coquette he was with died during the night? This was what they were alluding to, people are saying now. And all this happened on account of that stupid resolution that you should let yourself be killed for your own ideas but not for other people’s, a stupid resolution that doesn’t even exist because I kept it out of the minutes! But obviously word got around, and because we had refused to allow it, now all of us are suspected of being murderers of the people! It’s totally irrational, but ultimately logical!”

  Ulrich was struck by this distinction.

  The General shrugged his shoulders. “It originated with the Minister of War himself. Because when he had me called in after the row at Tuzzi’s, he said to me: ‘My dear Stumm, you shouldn’t have let it get so far!’ I responded as well as I could about the spirit of the times, and that this spirit needs a form of expression and, on the other hand, a footing too: in a word, I tried to prove to him how important it is to look for an idea in the times and get excited about it, even if just now it happens to be two ideas that contradict each other and give each other apoplexy, so that at any given moment it’s impossible to know what’s going to develop. But he said to me: ‘My dear Stumm, you’re a philosopher! But it’s a general’s job to know! If you lead a brigade into a skirmish, the enemy doesn’t confide in you what his intentions are and how strong he is!’ Whereupon he ordered me once and for all to keep my mouth shut.” Stumm interrupted his tale to draw breath, and went on: “That’s why, as soon as the Leinsdorf business came up on top of that, I immediately asked to speak to the Minister; because I could see that the Parallel Campaign would be blamed again, and I wanted to forestall it. Tour Excellency!’ I began. *What the populace did was irrational, but that might have been expected, because it always is. That�
��s why in such cases I never regard it as reason, but as passion, fantasies, slogans, and the like. But aside from this, even that wouldn’t have helped, because Count Leinsdorf is a stubborn old fellow who won’t listen to anything!’ This is more or less what I said, and the Minister of War listened the whole time, nodding but not saying anything. But then he either forgot what he had just been chewing me out about or must have been in a really bad temper, because he suddenly said: ‘You are indeed a philosopher, Stumm! I’m not in the least interested in either His Excellency or the people; but you say reason here and logic there as if they were one and the same, and I must point out to you that they are not one and the same! Reason is something a civilian can have but can get along without. But what you have to confront reason with—which I must demand from my generals—is logic. Ordinary people have no logic, but they have to be made to feel it over them!’ And that was the end of the discussion,” Stumm von Bordwehr concluded.

  “I can’t say I understand that at all,” Ulrich remarked, “but it seems to me that on the whole, your Second-Highest Generalissimo was treating you not ungraciously.”

  They were strolling up and down the garden paths, and Stumm now walked a few paces without replying, but then stopped so violently that the gravel crunched beneath his boots. “You don’t understand?” he exclaimed, and added: “At first I didn’t understand either. But little by little the whole range of just how right His Excellency the Minister of War was dawned on me! And why is he right? Because the Minister of War is always right! If there should be a scandal at Diotima’s, I can’t leave before he does, and I can’t divine the future of Mars either; it’s an unreasonable thing to ask of me. Nor can I fall into disgrace, as in Leinsdorf’s case, for something with which I have as little connection as I do with the birth of my blessed grandmother! But still, the Minister of War is right when he imputes all that to me, because one’s superior is always right: that both is and isn’t a banality! Now do you understand?”