But Musil read deeply in mystical literature as well as in the psychology of primitive ritual practices and in the psychology of altered consciousness states. (You can read my general summary of all of this in a chapter called "The Other Musil," in A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil https://boydellandbrewer.com/a-companion-to-the-works-of-robert-musil.html, which also contains many other helpful essays on Musil's life and works, in English! But the central book, from which come many quotations and ideas discussed by Ulrich and Agathe, is Martin Buber's very popular anthology, Ecstatic Confessions, a collection of mystical writings from different traditions that influenced many Modernist writers. The passage, "Throw everything you have into the fire, up to your shoes," for example, comes from this anthology. It is from the Sufi, Farid Attar's Conference of the Birds. Musil also read widely in contemporary mystical writings, such as Ludwig Klages's Von Kosmigonischer Eros, and despite the fact that he based the absurd character of Meingast on Klages, he took Klages's writing serious enough to explore his ideas in his notebooks and use some of them to develop his idea of 'the other condition" of experiencing. In the collection, Precision and Soul, translated and edited by David Luft and Burton Pike, Luft and Pike introduce Musil's 1914 essay, "Commentary on a Metaphysics," a review of Walter Rathenau's "On the Mechanics of Spirit," explaining that while Musil satires Rathenau (the model for Arnheim!) and his narrow view of ethics in the essay, Musil also "appreciates his attempts to describe the condition of mystical awakening that Musil would later refer to as "the other condition"". This other condition is described in detail in Musil's essay, "The German as Symptom," but Ulrich and Agathe's experiments, out beyond the border-line of what is natural, beyond good and evil, beyond the self and beyond objective rationality, are all explorations of Musil's realm of alternative experience.
I came to see, as I continued to explore the sources of Musil's brand of mysticism, that what interested him most about these models was not their religious or even metaphysical nature. He was not interested in transcending physical reality or materiality, and certainly not interested in breaking down reason, science, or clear thinking. In accordance with contemporary science and his experience as mathematician and student of physics and psychology, he wanted instead to expand the boundaries of what we consider real and true, by paying attention to moments of heightened clarity and to the role played by perception, parsing, Nietzschean perspectivism, psychic states, conceptualizing in ordering our communal reality. What this all led to, in my reading, was a fascination in mysticism as one of many models of alternative consciousness--he was also fascinated with madness!
But the central model of alternative consciousness that impelled Musil was Art. Art as the ultimate altered consciousness state, art as the impetus to heightened experience and new seeing, art as the means to make and remake and unmake our visions of the world. And, within Art, Metaphor was for Musil the ultimate powerful agent of alchemical action and reaction. (Thus the title of my book: The World as Metaphor). Within this context, the incestuous relationship of the siblings, Ulrich and Agathe, is explained by Musil, in a letter to a disapproving reader, as the expression of a man who loves metaphors. Like and almost like, merging temporarily into one, a dissolution of boundaries, a fleeting Dionysian union of opposites.
So, Ulrich, having met his forgotten sister, his twin, his "self-love," his metaphoric other, begins to dream of the coming of the millennium, or of a golden age of paradisiacal ecstasy, wherein they could live the "motivated life," the life of literature, the heightened ethical and ecstatic state of the other condition wherein one cannot do wrong, wherein everything is flooded with meaning. The vision is of a union of two people eventually spreading out to the whole world. He seems sometimes to dream about such an ecstatic state being lasting and permanent. But he also tells Agathe that "Belief cannot be an hour old". What are we to make of this? I write a lot about this paradox in my book and in essays I wrote leading up to the book (you can get the gist of it here: Metaphor as Extratemporal Moment in Robert Musil and ...numerocinqmagazine.com › 2014/02/06 › metaphor-as-extratemporal... So I will not elaborate here. But basically, the extratemporal moment, induced by the crime of metaphor (the union of like and unlike) is a timeless experience that enriches and renews normal life.
Many critics contend that Musil did not take seriously the utopia of the millennium or the other utopias he discusses in the drafts or his notes for the ending of the book. They contend that he would have shown them to be as absurd as the Parallel Campaign, which of course would end in the coming of the War. But I feel that they are judging Musil's other condition by standards which Musil, as sophisticated philosophical and scientific thinker, had long abandoned: standards of linear and limited time and space. Because the conditions of ecstasy cannot last (cannot be an hour old); because love fades, because we cannot live in a constant state of ecstatic motivation and meaning, they contend that these states are discredited and void. For Musil this was not so. These states represent the highest experiences of humankind--the experiences he denotes as art, literature, essayism, philosophical explorations of the conduct of life, of meaning, of aliveness.That they do not last is essential to their efficacy.
Their very fleetingness is part of what keeps them fresh, keeps them and us from ossifying into habit, pre-judgments, deadly acceptance of status quo. Because of their fleetingness, because of the oscillation between ecstasy and normalcy, such experiences serve to mediate between ideal and real life, between what is and what could be, between what must be and what might be. Since, as Musil knew, the utopian was the first person to be thrown out of any Utopia, because he is always imagining what could be different, the ecstatic adventurers, the criminals, the sibling-metaphoric-lover are bound to always be questioning any frozen condition of their own lives and their society's mores as a vital antidote to the soporific carelessness of what Nietzsche called "wretched contentment". The mystics, remember, often end up excommunicated by the orthodox churches or on the funeral pyre. They are criminals, artists, visionaries, utopians, vivifying sparks to light the sleeping world awake, over and over again.
