The problem of how ideas do or do not influence reality, history, our lives becomes more explicitly central in these chapters, especially in the trio of chapters 82-85. The question of ideas is, of course, related to where ideas come from and whether they are, to begin with, a reasonable response to what is real or mere random constructs that, in their self-contradictory nature, cancel each other out.
The conceit of the suggestions proffered by the people to the Parallel Campaign is an object lesson in the complexity of human values and ideas. That so many people want so many opposing things, with some people seeing something as the solution, while others see the solution in the elimination of that thing, may seem to suggest that truth is utterly impossible to arrive at or that nothing at all is real or true. But such a conclusion is too easy. And unethical, according to Musil's imperatives.
Nietzsche's early posthumous essay, "On Truth & Lying in a Supramoral Sense" floats behind these chapters--although it is improbable that M had read it since it was unpublished--. Still, Musil would have gotten some of the ideas from N's other writings and probably also came to its conclusions by himself. The idea is that Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, that we construct edifices out of these images, which eventually become ossified into habits and cliches, dead ideas.
This is not to say, in a nihilistic sense, that there is no relationship at all between what is and what we call it, but that there is a problem when we forget that we ourselves are the creators of value, our varying perspectives naming and categorizing things according to our own (at best, changing and alive and new) needs, uses, tastes, desires. While some contemporary readings see this choosing and naming as a treacherous and deceitful social construction of meaning, which only serves those in power, for N (and for Musil) this naming and renaming is the work of what N calls "the creative subject," i.e., any aware and conscious human being in contact with the world, not just artists and philosophers, but any person with the capacity and energy --and ethical honesty--to see anew and name anew, create new metaphors, new ways of describing the world, breaking open, again and again, any ossified constructs that are calling for enlivening. Not for the sake of destroying values, but for the creative generative sake of creating ever new ones--values that are intensely connected to our own real lives, to the physical, natural, affirmative embrace of what is (N's amor fati....love of fate, an embrace of the REAL). Thus, language is not a flight from the REAL and TRUE, but an every expanding creative attempt to braid the world with the living word, as metaphor, image (remembering that most metaphors are images of the material world, thus they are bridges between abstraction and concrete things, between ideas and action).
Thus, when Clarisse suggests a Nietzsche Year as crowning idea for the Parallel Campaign, Ulrich at first objects that "you cannot turn great ideas into reality," he is really struggling with the question of how one actually could or how one does, in fact, always do that to some extent, or maybe--in some utopian sense--could do that, despite the seeming muddling, self-contradictory "armed truce of ideas," which always keeps any one idea from coming to prominence as a sort of safety measure.
In discussing the Nietzsche Year, Ulrich asks Clarisse (twice) WHAT DID NIETZSCHE WANT? A question I think he partially answers when he returns later to answer the question she posed him (why don't you act), an answer that is practically a paraphrase of the On Truth and Lying essay!
When Clarisse suggests that Walter should kill Ulrich (or that she should kill him), Ulrich at first concedes that it is fine to THINK anything, as if thinking were different than doing. But Clarisse (always taking everything to extremes...that is her role) insists that "if you can think something, you should be able to do it too". She accuses Ulrich of being as passive as Walter. (the women in the book, Clarisse and Agathe primarily, are the active principles, the ones who take risks, while the men think too much. Clarisse bases her action principle on Nietzsche's idea that one needs to be able to act without knowing what will come next....which is connected to Musil's utopia of the next step, whereby one never can judge anything except by what it engenders). After which, Ulrich develops his idea of the 2 kinds of passivity, one of which is an active passivity...., which is later explained by the utopian principle of motivated action, whereby one should not do anything without intensity or passion....and in between should do nothing. But here Clarisse notes something that Agathe will pick up later, i.e., the danger of not doing...For in some cases, not doing can be as fateful as doing. Letting things happen, not choosing, not taking a stand. This also relates to the oft-mentioned problem of why people get concerned about some events and issues, while ignoring other just as egregious problems. Our crimes of neglect.
Ulrich had been about to answer Clarisse's question about why he did not act with the word "God". And he continues in his mind, saying, "God does not really mean the world literally; it is a metaphor, an analogy". And, invoking N.'s Creative Subject, he continues: "We are not supposed to take Him at His word, it is more we ourselves who must come up with the answer for the riddle He sets us".
When he returns to Walter and Clarisse's house to answer the question, his explanation suggests that creative metaphors do in fact influence action, insofar as we justify and inspire what we do based on our perceptions of life, which is why it is so very important that our ideas are not routine or just accepted on faith--or on bad faith (Sartre's idea of mauvais fois is everywhere in Musil, when people justify what they are doing by lying to themselves about their real purposes)--. While mostly history proceeds as a result of unexamined ideas, accidents, trifling causes, this is because people do not take responsibility for our roles as creative subjects, from our indifference to ideas. Reality, thus, becomes a reflection of a lack of new ideas, of conformity and ethical aesthetic laziness. Also a sort of personal myopia, whereby we only judge things based on how they affect our own lives, rather than philosophically, abstractly.
Thus Ulrich suggests a utopian mode of action whereby we concentrate on "the opening up of some new experience of life" instead of just "the pattern of what we already know". We should, he says, using the metaphor of making wine, concentrate "the spiritual juices" by reevaluating all values:
"so that those who seek to acquire a mind of their own must first of all realize that they have none as yet. An entirely open mind, poetically creative and morally experimental"--in other words, like a man without qualities.
Which brings Ulrich to the idea of existing like literature, which includes all art and even religious philosophy (really the whole realm Musil elsewhere calls essayistic). Walter accuses Ulrich of valuing "an experience only to the degree that it generates spiritual energy," which is a good paraphrase of N's "Bizet makes me fruitful...." and the whole complex of whatever makes me fruitful is good.
Ulrich then rhapsodizes on the dynamic of what Walter sees as a negation by art of life, but which Ulrich sees as a refutation that includes love, that is, a refutation and affirmation at once. This paradox can be explained by referring back to N's idea of smashing some idols in order to create new ones; while art refutes the status quo of ossified reality and its conventions, it is in order to create new metaphors and new ways of seeing the world that we love, in order to re-enliven our relationship with the beauty of the world which has been dulled and dimmed by conventional perspectives, some of which are even anti-life in themselves. Thus, Ulrich says:
"Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete [of] all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was".
Thus we see that ideas--in the form of art, in the form of beauty (which, he says, "works by intensification and contrast")--do, in fact, radically alter reality.
Something to think about: how does this relate to the Emersonian paradox of self reliance--and that of the Kantian categorical imperative--whereby acting according to what is true for you is actually the same thing as acting in the interest of the all? How is the individual act connected to the universal? New ideas are related to old ideas because humans have made them out of the same raw materials of reality, seen and perceived from different perspectives. Important: perspectives are not random constructs, but, rather, different aspects of the Real.
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