On IDEALISM and REALITY
"Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposite when one tries to live up to them". Diotima here speaks for Musil. Compare also the Napoleonic dictum, "principles are fine--they don't commit you to anything,"qtd in The Ruin of Kash. Relationship between abstract ideas, reified ideals and action taken seriously & ridiculed. Ulrich, like Diotima, like the reader is struggling with & against "eternal verities," a reevaluation of all values.
I find the Parallel Campaign business a bit boring, probably because, compared to the rest it is so one-dimensional as satire, but when looked at from this dimension (as idea seeking action) it gains importance as analogy of more serious quests.
A sort of clown show or comic parallel of the drama, a la Shakespeare.
Leinsdorf and Diotima are forced by the farce of the Campaign to face complex philosophical problems. Their simple idealism is dissolved into melancholy confusion.
A little thinking is a dangerous thing. Reminds me of Mann' s Buddenbrooks where the successful man reads Schopenhauer & has an existential crisis(short lived). "Now, while His Grace had an extraordinart knack for keeping apart two ideas that might contradict each other so that they never came together in his consciousness, he shld have firmly rejected this particular idea[that one cannot go back in history], wh was inimical to all his principles." & "Diotima thought, can mankind even have roast chicken without violence?"
UTOPIAS:
In response to Kirkdale Bookshop's question about Chapters 61 and 62: Are these Musil's thoughts, Ulrich's, Moosbrugger's, None of theirs?
Page 265, utopia of precision sounds alot like Musil's own "Utopia of the motivated life". Yet he wld qualify that one probably can't live always in this heightened state.
P.266: "...a human being full of the paradoxical interplay if exactitude and indefiniteness". Compare to Musil's "precision and soul," elsewhere championed ( & later by Ulrich as Parallel Campaign idea) as fundamental union of opposites, like his "mathematics and mysticism". These unions if opposites are correctives to cognitive dissonance of rigid moral "eternal verities". More soul in matters of science and more science in matters of soul! This is all Musil philosophy here.
All of which makes me wonder how readers of M can call him a cynic.
Utopia of Essayism also description of Musil's ideas, with Ulrich as representative. This is, intellectually, allegorically, a very autobiographical novel.
"He seeks to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or intellectually taboo....And when he thinks he has found the right idea, he perceives that a drop of indescribable incandescence has fallen into the world, with a glow that makes the whole earth look different". World filled with meaning; world drained with meaning. Consider also Nietzsche's dictum: whatever makes me fruitful is good.
Essayism conects to N's Perspectivism too.
And later utopia of the next step, where actions are judged by what they engender.
"..all moral events take place in a field of energy whose constellation charges them with meaning.They contain good and evil the way an atom contains the possibilities of certain chemical combinations. They are what they will become...". Thus Clarisse's suggestion on p.233 that if Ulrich were to set Moosbrugger free, he would be transformed, takes on new weight. She will continue to think in this way...an extreme form of Ulrich' s idea. Almost, in her case, magical thinking.
WHY THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN is Less interesting to me than the rest:
Trying to understand why I take umbrage at the way most of the Musil that gets quoted in newspapers is from the Parallel Campaign sections. As if the only point of Musil were his ironic critique of the old Empire.
1st reason why it bugs me:
these sections often lack the complexity of other parts, i.e., they ridicule without sympathy, are 1-dimensional. The target is almost too easy.
2nd reason: those who revel in them take them out of context. Yes, Musil was generally left-leaning, especially in his younger years, but he was also an enthusiastic soldier in WWI (part of a mass intoxication he wonders at later), and an upholder of many old values. Also, he would have criticized a democratic bureaucracy with as much scathing wit.
3rd reason: we also see Ulrich admiring some of the forms of the old aristocracy, even as he ridicules them. Ulrich makes fun of everything, all values and all beliefs, but he does so, as he later admits, partly because he loves them.
4th Reason: it is extremely un-Musilian to take any simple critique of something as if it were a one-sided defense of the simple other side. His thinking is distinctly mult-valent, and the only value that holds steady is that something is good or bad inasmuch as it supports the life of the mind, creativity, and free thinking. Which is why, when invited to speak at the Paris conference in defense of culture, he scandalized the communist organizers by suggesting that the Soviet regime might be just as dangerous for culture as the Nazis.
Finally, people who only get their Musil from these snippets quoted in the newspaper, think of him merely as a witty social critic, and thus have no idea what a profound trove of literary, poetic, philosophical riches are within these pages.
"Ideals have curious properties, and one of them is that they turn into their opposite when one tries to live up to them". Diotima here speaks for Musil. Compare also the Napoleonic dictum, "principles are fine--they don't commit you to anything,"qtd in The Ruin of Kash. Relationship between abstract ideas, reified ideals and action taken seriously & ridiculed. Ulrich, like Diotima, like the reader is struggling with & against "eternal verities," a reevaluation of all values.
I find the Parallel Campaign business a bit boring, probably because, compared to the rest it is so one-dimensional as satire, but when looked at from this dimension (as idea seeking action) it gains importance as analogy of more serious quests.
A sort of clown show or comic parallel of the drama, a la Shakespeare.
Leinsdorf and Diotima are forced by the farce of the Campaign to face complex philosophical problems. Their simple idealism is dissolved into melancholy confusion.
A little thinking is a dangerous thing. Reminds me of Mann' s Buddenbrooks where the successful man reads Schopenhauer & has an existential crisis(short lived). "Now, while His Grace had an extraordinart knack for keeping apart two ideas that might contradict each other so that they never came together in his consciousness, he shld have firmly rejected this particular idea[that one cannot go back in history], wh was inimical to all his principles." & "Diotima thought, can mankind even have roast chicken without violence?"
UTOPIAS:
In response to Kirkdale Bookshop's question about Chapters 61 and 62: Are these Musil's thoughts, Ulrich's, Moosbrugger's, None of theirs?
Page 265, utopia of precision sounds alot like Musil's own "Utopia of the motivated life". Yet he wld qualify that one probably can't live always in this heightened state.
P.266: "...a human being full of the paradoxical interplay if exactitude and indefiniteness". Compare to Musil's "precision and soul," elsewhere championed ( & later by Ulrich as Parallel Campaign idea) as fundamental union of opposites, like his "mathematics and mysticism". These unions if opposites are correctives to cognitive dissonance of rigid moral "eternal verities". More soul in matters of science and more science in matters of soul! This is all Musil philosophy here.
All of which makes me wonder how readers of M can call him a cynic.
Utopia of Essayism also description of Musil's ideas, with Ulrich as representative. This is, intellectually, allegorically, a very autobiographical novel.
"He seeks to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or intellectually taboo....And when he thinks he has found the right idea, he perceives that a drop of indescribable incandescence has fallen into the world, with a glow that makes the whole earth look different". World filled with meaning; world drained with meaning. Consider also Nietzsche's dictum: whatever makes me fruitful is good.
Essayism conects to N's Perspectivism too.
And later utopia of the next step, where actions are judged by what they engender.
"..all moral events take place in a field of energy whose constellation charges them with meaning.They contain good and evil the way an atom contains the possibilities of certain chemical combinations. They are what they will become...". Thus Clarisse's suggestion on p.233 that if Ulrich were to set Moosbrugger free, he would be transformed, takes on new weight. She will continue to think in this way...an extreme form of Ulrich' s idea. Almost, in her case, magical thinking.
WHY THE PARALLEL CAMPAIGN is Less interesting to me than the rest:
Trying to understand why I take umbrage at the way most of the Musil that gets quoted in newspapers is from the Parallel Campaign sections. As if the only point of Musil were his ironic critique of the old Empire.
1st reason why it bugs me:
these sections often lack the complexity of other parts, i.e., they ridicule without sympathy, are 1-dimensional. The target is almost too easy.
2nd reason: those who revel in them take them out of context. Yes, Musil was generally left-leaning, especially in his younger years, but he was also an enthusiastic soldier in WWI (part of a mass intoxication he wonders at later), and an upholder of many old values. Also, he would have criticized a democratic bureaucracy with as much scathing wit.
3rd reason: we also see Ulrich admiring some of the forms of the old aristocracy, even as he ridicules them. Ulrich makes fun of everything, all values and all beliefs, but he does so, as he later admits, partly because he loves them.
4th Reason: it is extremely un-Musilian to take any simple critique of something as if it were a one-sided defense of the simple other side. His thinking is distinctly mult-valent, and the only value that holds steady is that something is good or bad inasmuch as it supports the life of the mind, creativity, and free thinking. Which is why, when invited to speak at the Paris conference in defense of culture, he scandalized the communist organizers by suggesting that the Soviet regime might be just as dangerous for culture as the Nazis.
Finally, people who only get their Musil from these snippets quoted in the newspaper, think of him merely as a witty social critic, and thus have no idea what a profound trove of literary, poetic, philosophical riches are within these pages.
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