The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  “No,” Ulrich said.

  “But look,” Stumm implored. “You’re just trying to make things difficult for me because you don’t feel involved, or because you have a feeling for justice, or for some such reason, and you won’t admit that this is something a lot more serious! But really you remember quite well, because when you were in the army, people said to you all the time that an officer must be able to think logically! In our eyes, logic is what distinguishes the military from the civilian mind. But does logic mean reason? No. Reason is what the army rabbi or chaplain or the fellow from the military archives has. But logic is not reason. Logic means acting honorably in all circumstances, but consistently, ruthlessly, and without emotion; and don’t let anything confuse you! Because the world isn’t ruled by reason but must be dominated by iron logic, even if the world has been full of idle chatter since it began! That’s what the Minister of War was giving me to understand. You will object that in me it didn’t fall upon the most barren ground, because it’s nothing more than the old tried-and-true mentality of the military mind. Since then I’ve got more of that back, and you can’t deny it: we must be prepared to strike before we all start talking about eternal peace; we must first repair our omissions and weaknesses so as not to be at a disadvantage when we join the universal brotherhood. And our spirit is not ready to strike! It’s never ready! The civilian mind is a highly significant back-and-forth, an up-and-down, and you once called it the millennial war of faith: but we can’t let that destroy us! Somebody has to be there who, as we say in the military, has initiative and takes over the leadership, and that’s the vocation of one’s superior. I see that now myself, and I’m not entirely certain whether before, in my sympathy for every spiritual endeavor, I wasn’t sometimes carried away.”

  Ulrich asked: “And what would have happened if you hadn’t realized that? Would you have been discharged?”

  “No, that wouldn’t have happened,” Stumm corrected him. “Presuming, of course, that I still showed no deficiency in military feeling toward power relationships. But they would have given me an infantry brigade in Wladisschmirschowitz or Knobljoluka, instead of letting me continue at the crossroads of military power and civilian enlightenment and still be of some use to the culture we all share!”

  They had now gone back and forth several times on the path between the house and the gate, near which the carriage was waiting, and this time, too, the General turned around before they reached the gate. “You mistrust me,” he complained. “You haven’t even asked me what actually happened when the Peace Congress suddenly materialized!”

  “Well, what did happen? The Minister of War called you in again, and what did he say?”

  “No! He didn’t say anything! I waited a week, but he said nothing more,” Stumm replied. And after a moment of silence he couldn’t restrain himself any longer and proclaimed: “But they took ‘Report D’ away from me!”

  “What is ‘Report D’?” Ulrich asked, although he had some idea.

  “ ‘Report Diotima,’ of course,” Stumm responded with pained pleasure. “In a ministry, a report is prepared for every important question, and that had to be done when Diotima began to use the gatherings at her house for a patriotic notion and after we found out about Arnheim’s active involvement. This report was assigned to me, as you will doubtless have noticed, and so I was asked what name it should be given, because you can’t just stick such a thing in a row like something in medical supplies or when you do a commissary course, and the name Tuzzi couldn’t be mentioned for interministerial reasons. But I couldn’t think of anything appropriate either, so finally, in order not to say either too much or too little, I proposed calling it ‘Report D’: for me, ‘D’ was Diotima, but no one knew that, and for the others it sounded really terrific, like the name of a directory, or maybe even like a secret to which only the General Staff has access. It was one of my best ideas,” Stumm concluded, adding with a sigh: “At that time I was still allowed to have ideas.”

  But he did not seem entirely cheered up, and when Ulrich— whose mood of falling back into the world was almost used up, or at least its oral supply of talkativeness was pretty well consumed—now fell into silence after an appreciative smile, Stumm began to complain anew. “You don’t trust me. After what I’ve said, you think I’m a militarist. But on my honor, I fight against it, and I don’t want to simply drop all those things I believed in for so long. It’s these magnificent ideas that really make people out of soldiers. I tell you, my friend, when I think about it I feel like a widower whose better half has died first!” He warmed up again. “The Republic of Minds is of course just as disorderly as any other republic; but what a blessing is the superb idea that no person is in sole possession of the truth and that there are a host of ideas that haven’t yet even been discovered, perhaps because of the very lack of order that prevails among them! This makes me an innovator in the military. Of course, in the General Staff they called me and my ‘Report D’ the ‘mobile searchlight battery,’ on account of the variety of my suggestions, but they really liked the cornucopia I was emptying!”

  “And all that’s over?”

  “Not unconditionally; but I’ve lost a lot of my confidence in the mind,” Stumm grumbled, seeking consolation.

  “You’re right about that,” Ulrich said dryly.

  “Now you’re saying that too?”

  “I’ve always said it. I always warned you, even before the Minister did. Mind is only moderately suited to governing.”

  Stumm wanted to avoid a lecture, so he said: “That’s what I’ve always thought too.”

  Ulrich went on: “The mind is geared into life like a wheel, which it drives and by which it is also driven.”

  But Stumm let him go no further. “If you should suspect,” he interrupted, “that such external circumstances were decisive for me, you would be humiliating me! It’s also a matter of a spiritual purification! ‘Report D’ was, moreover, taken from me with great respect. The Minister called me in to tell me himself that it was necessary because the Chief of the General Staff wanted a personal report on the Congress for World Peace, and so they immediately took the whole business out of the Office for Military Development and attached it to the Information Offices of the Evidenzbüro—”

  “The Espionage Department?” Ulrich interjected, suddenly animated again.

  “Who else? Whoever doesn’t know what he wants himself at least has to know what everyone else wants! And I ask you, what business does the General Staff have at a Congress for World Peace? To interfere with it would be barbarous, and to encourage it in a pacifist way would be unmilitary! So they observe it. Who was it who said ‘Readiness is all’? Well, whoever it was knew something about the military.” Stumm had forgotten his sorrow. He twisted his legs from side to side, trying to cut off a flower with the scabbard of his sword. “I’m just afraid it will be too hard for them and they’ll beg me on their knees to come back and take over my report,” he said. “After all, you and I know from having been at it for nearly a year how such a congress of ideas splits up into proofs and counterproofs! Do you really believe—disregarding for the moment the special difficulties of governing—that it’s only the mind that can produce order, so to speak?”

  He had now given up his preoccupation with the flower and, frowning and holding the scabbard in his hand, gazed urgently into his friend’s face.

  Ulrich smiled at him and said nothing.

  Stumm let the saber drop because he needed the fingertips of both white-gloved hands for the delicate determination of an idea. “You must understand what I mean when I make a distinction between mind and logic. Logic is order. And there must be order! That is the officer’s basic principle, and I bow down to it! But on what basis order is established doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference: that’s mind—or, as the Minister of War put it in a rather old-fashioned way, reason—and that’s not the officer’s business. But the officer mistrusts the ability of civilian life to become reaso
nable by itself, no matter what the ideas are by which it’s always trying to do so. Because whatever mind there has ever been at any time, in the end it’s always led to war!”

  Thus Stumm explained his new insights and scruples, and Ulrich summarized them involuntarily in an allusion to a well-known saying when he asked: “So you really mean to say that war is an element of God’s ordained ordering of the world?”

  “That’s talking on too high a plane!” Stumm agreed, with some reservation. “I ask myself straight out whether mind isn’t simply dispensable. For if I’m to handle a person with spurs and bridle, like an animal, then I also have to have a part of the animal in me, because a really good rider stands closer to his steed than he does, for example, to the philosophy of law! The Prussians call this the scoundrel everyone carries inside himself, and constrain it with a Spartan spirit. But speaking as an Austrian general, I’d rather put it that the better, finer, and more ordered a nation is, the less it needs the mind, and in a perfect state it wouldn’t be needed at all! I take this to be a really tough paradox! And by the way, who said what you just said? Who’s it from?”

  “Moltke. He said that man’s noblest virtues—courage, renunciation, conscientiousness, and readiness to sacrifice—really develop only in war, and that without war the world would bog down in apathetic materialism.”

  “Well!” Stumm exclaimed. “That’s interesting too! He’s said something I sometimes think myself!”

  “But Moltke says in another letter to the same person, and therefore almost in the same breath, that even a victorious war is a misfortune for the nation,” Ulrich offered for consideration.

  “You see, mind pinched him!” Stumm replied, convinced. “I’ve never read a line of him; he always seemed much too militaristic for me. And you can really take my word for it that I’ve always been an antimilitarist. All my life I’ve believed that today no one believes in war anymore, you only make yourself look ridiculous if you say you do. And I don’t want you to think I’ve changed because I’m different now!” He had motioned the carriage over and already set his foot on the running board, but hesitated and looked at Ulrich entreatingly. “I have remained true to myself,” he went on. “But if before I loved the civilian mind with the feelings of a young girl, I now love it, if I may put it this way, more like a mature woman: it’s not ideal, it won’t even let itself be made coherent, all of a piece. That’s why I’ve told you, and not just today but for a long time, that one has to treat people with kindness as well as with a firm hand, one has to both love them and treat them shabbily, in order for things to come out properly. And that’s ultimately no more than the military state of mind that rises above parties and is supposed to distinguish the soldier. I’m not claiming any personal merit here, but I want to show you that this conviction was what was speaking out of me before.”

  “Now you’re going to repeat that the civil war of ‘66 came about because all Germans declared themselves brothers,” Ulrich said, smiling.

  “Yes, of course!” Stumm confirmed. “And now on top of that everybody is declaring themselves brothers! That makes me ask, what’s going to come of it? What really comes happens so unexpectedly. Here we brooded for almost a whole year, and then it turned out quite differently. And so it seems to be my fate that while I was busily investigating the mind, the mind led me back to the military. Still, if you consider everything I’ve said, you’ll find that I don’t identify myself with anything but find something true in everything; that’s the essence, more or less, of what we’ve been talking about.”

  After looking at his watch, Stumm started to give the sign to leave, for his pleasure at having unburdened himself was so intense that he had forgotten everything else. But Ulrich amicably laid his hand on him and said: “You still haven’t told me what your newest ‘little job’ is.”

  Stumm held back. “Today there’s no more time. I have to go.”

  But Ulrich held him by one of the gold buttons gleaming on his stomach, and wouldn’t let go until Stumm gave in. Stumm fished for Ulrich’s head and pulled his ear to his mouth. “Well, in strictest confidence,” he whispered, “Leinsdorf.”

  “I take it he’s to be done away with, you political assassin!” Ulrich whispered back, but so openly that Stumm, offended, pointed to the coachman. They decided to speak aloud but avoid naming names. “Let me think about it,” Ulrich proposed, “and see for myself whether I still know something about the world you move in. He brought down the last Minister of Culture, and after the recent insult he received, one has to assume that he will bring down the current one as well. But that would be, momentarily, an unpleasant disturbance, and this has to be precluded. And, for whatever reason, he still clings firmly to the conviction that the Germans are the biggest threat to the nation, that Baron Wisnieczky, whom the Germans can’t stand, is the man best suited to beat the drum among them that the government ought not to have changed course, and so on.…”

  Stumm could have interrupted Ulrich but had been content to listen, only now intervening. “But it was under him in the campaign that the slogan ‘Action!’ came about; while everyone else was just saying It’s a new spirit,’ he was saying to everyone who didn’t like to hear it: ‘Something must be done!’ “

  “And he can’t be brought down, he’s not in the government. And the Parallel Campaign has been, so to speak, shot out from under him,” Ulrich said.

  “So now the danger is that he’ll start something else,” the General went on.

  “But what can you do about it?” Ulrich asked, curious.

  “Well! I’ve been assigned the mission of diverting him a little and, if you like, also watching over him a bit—”

  “Ah! A ‘Report L,’ you coy deceiver!”

  “That’s what you can call it between us, but of course it doesn’t have an official name. My mission is simply to sit on Leinsdorf’s neck”—this time Stumm wanted to enjoy the name too, but again he whispered it—”like a tick. Those were the Minister’s own gracious words.”

  “But he must have also given you a goal to aim for?”

  The General laughed. “Talk! I’m to talk with him! Go along with everything he’s thinking, and talk so much about it that he will, we hope, wear himself out and not do anything rash. ‘Suck him dry,’ the Minister told me, and called it an honorable mission and a demonstration of his confidence. And if you were to ask me whether that’s all, I can only respond: it’s a lot! Our old Excellency is a person of enormous culture, and tremendously interesting!” He had given the coachman the sign to start, and called back: “The rest next time. I’m counting on you!”

  It was only as the coach was rolling away that the idea occurred to Ulrich that Stumm might also have had the intention of rendering him innocuous, since he had once been suspected of being able to lead Count Leinsdorf’s mind off on some quite extravagant fancy.

  54

  NAIVE DESCRIPTION OF HOW AN EMOTION ORIGINATES

  Agathe had gone on to read a large part of the pages that followed.

  They did not, at first, contain anything of the promised exposition of the current development of the concept of emotion, for before Ulrich gave a summary of these views, from which he hoped to derive the greatest benefit, he had, in his own words, sought to “present the origin and growth of an emotion as naively, clumsily spelling it out with his finger, as it might appear to a layman not unpracticed in matters of the intellect.”

  This entry went on: “We are accustomed to regard emotion as something that has causes and consequences, and I want to limit myself to saying that the cause is an external stimulus. But of course appropriate circumstances are part of this stimulus as well, which is to say appropriate external, but also internal, circumstances, an inner readiness, and it is this trinity that actually decides whether and how this stimulus will be responded to. For whether an emotion occurs all at once or protractedly, how it expands and runs its course, what ideas it entails, and indeed what emotion it is, ordinarily depend no l
ess on the previous state of the person experiencing the emotion and his environment than they do on the stimulus. This is no doubt self-evident in the case of the condition of the person experiencing the emotion: in other words, his temperament, character, age, education, predispositions, principles, prior experience, and present tensions, although these states have no definite boundaries and lose themselves in the person’s being and destiny. But the external environment too, indeed simply knowing about it or implicitly assuming it, can also suppress or favor an emotion. Social life offers innumerable examples of this, for in every situation there are appropriate and inappropriate emotions, and emotions also change with time and region, with what groups of emotions predominate in public and in private life, or at least which ones are favored and which suppressed; it is even the case that periods rich in emotion and poor in emotion have succeeded one another.

  “Add to all this that external and internal circumstances, along with the stimulus—this can easily be measured—are not independent of each other. For the internal state has been adapted to the external state and its emotional stimuli, and is therefore dependent on them as well; and the external state must have been assimilated in some fashion or other, in such a way that its manifestation depends on the inner state before a disturbance of this equilibrium evokes a new emotion, and this new emotion either paves the way for a new equalization or is one itself. But in the same way, the ‘stimulus’ too, does not ordinarily work directly but works only by virtue of being assimilated, and the inner state again only carries out this assimilation on the basis of perceptions with which the beginnings of the excitation must already have been associated.