Robert Musil and Life as Experiment

Ray Briggs
What would it mean to live without fixed principles?

Josh Landy
Do your qualities make you who you are?

Ray Briggs
How can you prevent the triumph of evil if you won’t pick a side?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything….

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of Ka LW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosopher’s Corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about Robert Musil and Life as an Experiment.

Josh Landy
Musil was an amazing Austrian novelist writing in the 1920s and 30s, most famous for book called “The Man Without qualities,” and Ray this is hands down, one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read, and also one of the most philosophical.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, in that book, the characters are running around planning this big anniversary celebration for the German Kaiser and the Austrian emperor. But the novel takes place in 1913 so by the time the anniversary rolls around, World War One is already going to be underway. So the whole thing is pointless.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s right, and it makes the novel hilariously funny. Plus, we also get to spend time with a fascinating character called Ulrich, who has tons to say about reason value and the self.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, he doesn’t believe in any of those things. He thinks reason is reductive. Values keep changing, and the unified self is an illusion.

Josh Landy
I mean, these are cool and exciting thoughts and everything, but surely it’s no way to live.

Ray Briggs
Why not?

Josh Landy
Well, if you don’t believe in reason, presumably you’re just gonna act at random, which will probably lead to you doing things you regret, and if you don’t believe in stable values, what’s to stop you from becoming a murderer?

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on, Josh, Musil isn’t writing a treatise, he’s writing a novel, and so he’s constantly raising questions rather than giving you answers. But here’s my answer, you can just decide not to murder people, and that’s probably even a good thing to do. Maybe it would be better if you chose virtue for yourself rather than just following somebody else’s rules.

Josh Landy
But what are you gonna decide with if you don’t have any principles and yet don’t believe in reason?

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on, Josh, it’s not like reason is gonna help you anyway. It’s not gonna stop you from committing murder. Musil writes, “The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism.” So if we’re thinking purely rationally, nothing is good or bad. It’s all just economics and statistics.

Josh Landy
If that’s true, I’m gonna need my principles more than ever. They’re what’s gonna make sure that I treat other people with kindness and respect, rather than, you know, running them over with my cyber-truck.

Ray Briggs
Oh, you just borrowed those principles from your culture.

Josh Landy
So what? Maybe my culture’s right? Child labor bad, sharing ice cream good,

Ray Briggs
Yeah, what makes you so sure that you have it all right and other cultures have it all wrong? Musil says, in the long run, mankind revokes everything it has done to replace it with something else, what it used to regard as a crime, it regards as a virtue, and vice versa. So like a few 100 years ago, it was good to send your kids down to the mines to labor. In another few 100 years, maybe kids will be mining minerals on Mars. How can you possibly trust your culture to know the enduring moral truths.

Josh Landy
All right, smarty pants. What’s your solution if I can’t trust my culture and reason doesn’t reliably tell me what to do. How should I live?

Ray Briggs
Well, why don’t you just try things out? In the novel, Ulrich talks about living life as an experiment for trying out the best ways of being a human being and discovering new ones. You’re not just following society’s rhythm, and you’re not even dancing to the beat of your own drum. You don’t even have a drum Exactly. You’re not doing your own thing. You’re not doing society’s thing, but you’re looking around to see what hasn’t been tried so far. And when you spot a gap, you say, Ooh, I’ll do that. That it’s never been done.

Josh Landy
I mean, that’s thrilling and everything, but isn’t it a bit risky? I mean, if we’re all just wondering about trying new things, how will we join forces to defeat evil? It’s really important to pick a side.

Ray Briggs
Oh, life isn’t just about picking a side. There are other ways to help humanity, including opening up some new experience of life. Succeed or fail, you’ll have given the rest of us an interesting example to either follow or avoid. Sounds like an absolute nightmare. Well, maybe our guest will convince you otherwise. It’s Bence Nanay from the University of Antwerp, who’s got a book coming out on Musil.

Josh Landy
In the meantime, we sent our rubbing philosophical reporter, Holly J. McDede, to hear from people musing about uncertainty, the Robert Musil way. She files this report.

Holly McDede
Unpredictability and uncertainty are scary for a lot of people. Every metaphorical button we press or decision we make could set off a chain reaction we can’t anticipate. That’s why in the TV show “The Rehearsal” the protagonist, Nathan fielder, helps people rehearse tough moments over and over again.

The Rehearsal
If you plan for every variable, a happy outcome doesn’t have to be left to chance.

Holly McDede
For example, in one episode, a trivia enthusiast plans to tell his friend he lied about having a master’s degree. So Nathan hires an actor to play the friend, and builds a full scale replica of the bar for the confession.

The Rehearsal
Oh my gosh… This spice rack, it’s the exact spices they have—the garlic, yeah, the basil.

Holly McDede
To ensure nothing goes wrong, Nathan hires actors to discreetly share the answers to trivia questions.

The Rehearsal
Building’s looking pretty tall. It is tall, but it’s not tallest building in the world. That would be the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Holly McDede
The Rehearsal is an elaborate scheme to control every outcome, but maybe leaving events to chance doesn’t have to be so agonizing. Unlike the rehearsal, Robert musil’s novel “The Man Without Qualities” shows how uncertainty can actually open up a whole universe of possibility. If life isn’t set in stone, we can revise it along the way.

Robert Musil
Anyone possessing it does not say, for instance, here, this or that has happened, will happen, must happen. He uses his imagination and says, Here, such and such might, should or ought to happen. And if he is told that something is the way it is, then he thinks, well, it could probably just as easily be some other way.

Sophie Atkinson
It was just this exceptional book about not being sure about anything.

Holly McDede
When Sophie Atkinson started reading “The Man Without Qualities,” she was on the cusp of 30 and also not feeling particularly sure about anything she was living in Germany, unsure about returning to Britain, and also unsure about her relationship and her job. Then she met Ulrich, the protagonist in “The Man Without Qualities,” a man not defined by his character or anything really

Sophie Atkinson
In his previous lives, he had been a soldier, an engineer, a mathematician, fields that sort of reward precision and certainty. And despite all of that, throughout the book, he makes a real virtue of uncertainty, and is really emphatic about questioning yourself of being a mark of, I don’t know, intellectual strength,

Holly McDede
No matter how much we try to control it, the world actually is uncertain and chaotic and fluid. Sophie wrote about the experience reading the novel in an essay for Astro magazine titled, “I’m certain about the man without qualities.” At one point, she even tried reading a version of the text with only adjectives and adverbs. It’s called “The qualities without man.”

Sophie Atkinson
When you actually read all of these adjectives in a row, you get a sense of the novel as something that’s infinitely soft or gauzy and there’s almost no firm ground.

Holly McDede
“The Man Without Qualities” also shows us how our jobs don’t have to define who we are. Job titles can change, and we’re still mysteriously the same people. But in fields like the arts or theater, it can be difficult for who we are not to be defined by our occupation.

Sarah Augusta
It is like a capitalist intentional loop that keeps us prioritizing our jobs as our primary identifiers.

Holly McDede
That’s Sarah Augusta. Ever since elementary school, she was a theater kid. As an adult theater became her professional identity, but over time, she burned out.

Sarah Augusta
We were always working second jobs. We were always juggling and I got like, really sick, and I was like, I gotta pull the plug.

Holly McDede
Leaving that job was both really hard and liberating. The exit opened up options and possibilities.

Sarah Augusta
It was like a kind of an explosion, where it felt like I don’t ever have I don’t I don’t have to do any of this. I can be free.

Holly McDede
Sarah later pivoted to a job in public radio after taking a buyout. She’s now starting a bookstore, the perfect setting for people looking to explore endless possibilities.

Sarah Augusta
If I had to pick a second identity as a kid, as myself, it would be as a reader. It would just be like a love of books.

Holly McDede
Robert Musil says good librarians must never read anything more than the title and table of contents. He says a lot of funny things, and this idea of not having qualities is a funny one too. Refusing to commit to any fixed identity can make it difficult to act at all like for Sophie Atkinson, she realized she had to start making decisions eventually.

Sophie Atkinson
So I broke up with my boyfriend. I decided to move back to my hometown in the UK, and I decided to be a full time journalist.

Holly McDede
But she also didn’t have to stick to that decision forever. Now she’s working on a novel about work.

Sophie Atkinson
It feels a bit like driving at night along a country lane, and you kind of can’t see much further than the headlights, but you just keep going.

Holly McDede
For now she might prefer unpredictability over knowing, but who knows? As Musil says, it could probably just as easily be some other way for Philosophy Talk. I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that wonderful report, Holly. You know it’s really inspiring to know that you can take the leap into a whole new vocation and land safely on the other side. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Robert Musil and life as an experiment.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Bence Nanay. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp and author of several books on psychology and esthetics, but He’s also author of a forthcoming book, “Philosophy Without Qualities: Robert Musil, the Thinker.” Bence, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Bence Nanay
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Josh Landy
So Bence, you and I are big fans of The Man Without qualities. What is it in that novel that appeals to you?

Bence Nanay
Well, one of the many annoying things about being a philosopher is that if you go to parties and stuff, they’re going to ask you. So who’s your favorite philosopher? And for a long time now, I’ve always said, Well, my I have two favorite philosophers, Marcel Proust and Robert musell. Part of the reason why I said this is just to be, I don’t know, obnoxious, but it’s also because it’s true. I really think that I learned more about philosophy from these two writers, novelists, than from any other philosophers and and I will also say that if you just compare these two, then, with apologies to Josh Mosul, is just by far the more fun to read. It has laugh out loud moments. It has extremely colorful characters, and it’s really chock a book full of extremely original and interesting philosophical ideas.

Ray Briggs
So we talked a little bit about mussels, most famous novel, The Man Without qualities. What does that mean, “the man without qualities?”

Bence Nanay
Well, on the face of it, it’s just nonsense, right? It says a man without quality. The Man Without quality in this novel is this guy called Ulrich, who is the main character, and whom his friend calls The Man Without qualities, who blatantly has a lot of qualities. He’s 32 years old, he’s independently wealthy, he’s sporty, he’s a bit of a womanizer, he likes to make fun of people. And so these are all qualities, right? So how in the hell is he a man without qualities? The novel does a lot of like, very weird kind of philosophical musings about what this might mean, and what I think museum means by this is that you’re a man without qualities if you don’t take your qualities too seriously, if you don’t think that your qualities define you. Ulrich is a mathematician, but he doesn’t take his being a mathematician to define it. That does not sum up who we did.

Ray Briggs
So why shouldn’t I take my qualities too seriously, if indeed I shouldn’t?

Bence Nanay
Well, I think the main reason for this is because if you do take your qualities too seriously, that’s gonna seriously limit your freedom. And freedom is very important for Musil.

Josh Landy
Okay, but what couldn’t somebody say that there are two different kinds of freedom at play here, right? So one is a kind of freedom where nothing is constraining you, even your own qualities, right? And that’s the one that you’re referring to. But somebody else might say, I want the freedom to do what I want to do to live out my values, right? A more of a kind of autonomy picture of freedom. Why would I feel that that’s restrictive if I’m doing the things that I care about, if I’m let’s say I care about justice, and I go out and I try to increase the amount of justice in the world. Why is that limiting my freedom?

Bence Nanay
The main reason for this, for why museve feels that kind of freedom limiting is because it takes, it takes something very seriously that you jostle for people, as the Proust scholar should know, and it takes it very seriously that the self changes all the time. So if I came up with ironclad principles five years ago about how I should live my life, that. Going to limit my freedom now, because the self that made up those principles is different from the self that I have now.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Robert Musil and life as an experiment with Bence Nanay from the University of Antwerp.

Ray Briggs
Have you ever changed your core values? Are you frustrated when the people around you change their minds. Do you ever try things out just to see what will happen?

Josh Landy
Experiments with experience—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Toyah
I’m gonn be free, I’m gonna be free.

Josh Landy
If you really want to be free, why not turn your life into an experiment? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the Austrian writer Robert musel with Benson Nene from the University of Antwerp.

Josh Landy
Got a quality question about living the musel life. Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org or you can comment on our completely revamped website, and while you’re there, you can subscribe for free and live the experiment in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Bence, before the break, we were talking about how freedom is important to Mosul and mosul’s protagonist, Ulrich, because you don’t want your past self who is totally different from you to be constraining your present self, who has their own desires and preferences. But a lot of other philosophers have thought that there’s something useful about being able to constrain yourself. Because what if your present self has desires and preferences that are foolish, like, what if you think, Oh, I’d like to do a lot of drugs right now, because that sounds fun, but you’d really regret it later. Isn’t there some value to constraint?

Bence Nanay
There is. And Musil is very clear about this, and he has a lot of very long winded musings about about how you need both freedom and constraint. I should emphasize that this is not a philosophical treatise. It’s not systematic laws, it’s a novel. So you don’t get, you know, premise, premise, premise, conclusion, kind of structure. You get characters who live their lives in certain ways, and most of them live their lives in ways that are just terrible. They’re really not fun. So if musell is teaching us anything, he’s teaching us by example, and, and, but I mean when I say by example, I mean by negative example. By example is not to follow.

Josh Landy
So are all the characters. There’s many characters of this incredible novel, as you say, many of them extremely colorful, not not least the protagonist, Ulrich, very charismatic, charming, brilliant. There’s a general Sturm who decides to conquer the library and all kinds of other fascinating characters. One who seems particularly relevant to our current conversation is mosebrugger, who is a serial killer, and he sort of pops up every now and again. He seems, at least to my mind, to be a living, breathing counter example to the thought that, well, you know, just try things out, or try something hasn’t been done. So with that count, in that sort of realm that you’re talking about, another negative example, another kind of challenge for us, in case we get too excited and too carried away by Ulrich charisma, watch out if you just kind of let yourself drift and do whatever you feel like, you might end up like that.

Bence Nanay
I think that’s exactly right. So many of the characters of the novel, they are really kind of negative examples of what happens if you take yourself too seriously, if you identify with your being an aristocrat. So there’s an aristocrat character who’s just really taking his aristocratic nature very seriously. What happens if you take your romanticism too seriously, your nationalistic romanticism, or any other kinds of Romanticism? How that’s not fun either. But there’s this one character who you, who you drew our attention to, who’s a mass murderer of very humble origins called museberger, who in some ways very different from anyone else in the novel, and he shows up then every 10 chapters or so, without much explanation. It’s a little bewildering why we have him. None of the characters, none of the other characters of the novel, have ever met him, and suddenly we get this very, very close descriptions of what musebrik is doing. And I think that the reason why he’s there is to provide this kind of counterbalance. If we move away from, away from from this, not taking your qualities very seriously, if you move too far, you’re going to end up in the kind of mooseberger end of the spectrum. So we are shown one bad option with all these people who take themselves too seriously. We show another bad option. That is what happening if we don’t do that. So So again, what mooser is doing is to show us two bad options, and then we can make up our minds have to navigate between those two.

Ray Briggs
So, yeah, I want to ask about, like, another of the bad options, or maybe, maybe a version of one of these bad options, which is the character Clarissa, who is obsessed with mooseburger and thinks that he’s like, the height of romanticism, and also like cannot manage to hold her own life together or stay faithful to her husband. Is she an example of like what it is to take your principles seriously, but not be able to apply them, or to take your principles seriously, but have the wrong principles. How should I understand what’s going on with her?

Bence Nanay
With Clarissa? I think Clarissa is one of the most interesting characters in the novel. Is also one of the most lovingly depicted ones. No one is like a hero in this novel, really, everyone is an anti hero. There’s three people who musel has the most patience for, who I can have the most lovingly done. All of them are women. The men in the novel are all, let’s face it, jerks. And there’s this three women who are much better, much more relatable characters than the men who often play a very important role in the narrative. And Clarissa is one of them. And Clarissa is married to this guy called Walter, and they are childhood friends with walrug. And Walter is one of the arch examples of someone who takes themselves way too seriously, and Clarissa is really repelled by that. And Clarissa sees that there’s something in her that is really craving for freedom, that she somehow she sees it as some kind of a connection with Ulrich and also with mooseburger. And Chris is one of the many people who sees some kind of a similarity between museburger and Ulrich, and this is something that kind of freaks Ulrich out. Obviously, it’s an issue, right? If, if you see some traits in yourself that that is seemingly quite similar to to what a mass murderer is doing. So, so he’s worried about that. And the way that the fact that Clarissa sees these two people as somewhat similar is is disconcerting for him too.

Josh Landy
Okay, but before we get too down on him, because I think there’s, there’s many reasons to challenge Ulrike s way of living. There is also something appealing about it. You mentioned the freedom aspect, right? So this way of thinking about one’s relationship to one’s quality, so take a little bit of distance from them. They may change. You need to be agile. You need to be ready to change that has a certain appealing side to it. The other appealing side perhaps, has to do with uniqueness, right? There’s a lot of interest in the novel, in the unique, as opposed to the repeatable, the common, the shared. And one of the ways that Ulrich seems to talk about his qualities is, yeah, okay, I’ve got some qualities, but any quality you can point to is something that somebody else has too, right? So let’s say Ulrich is charming. Well, there are other people who are charming. Let’s say he’s smart. Well, there are other people who are smart. And so there’s this nice line every one of those qualities was no more intimately bound up with him than with anyone else who happened to possess them. So is that another kind of attractive feature of Ulric way of life that it it sort of brings out a little bit more what’s unique about each individual and about each individual situation?

Bence Nanay
Yes, I think that’s that’s a very crucial concept of the novel about the uniqueness and the maybe the most important kind of underlying idea that Ulrich is obsessed with, and I think Moselle is too, is the idea of non interchangeability. So if someone in my life is interchangeable, that means that it’s really that person is not very important for me. If I love someone, that means that that person is not interchangeable. For me, there’s got to be some kind of a uniqueness in that relation. And what I think is a much more original twist on that is that really, ideally, we would have the same relation to ourselves. And that is another way of putting this whole taking your qualities too seriously, if you define yourself by qualities. I’m a philosopher, I’m vegetarian, I’m a social justice warrior, then there’s going to be a lot of other people who are much better at all of these things than I am. So then what about how is that going to make me feel.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Robert Musil and life as an experiment with Benson Nene from the University of Antwerp. And then so we’ve got a question from listeners, Katherine on LinkedIn and Michael on Bluesky. So both of them say that the man without qualities is one of their favorite novels of all time, but a lot of people haven’t even heard of it. Why do you think that is?

Bence Nanay
Yeah, that’s an interesting thing. And I think there’s a bit of a kind of global divide here in in French speaking countries and Italian speaking countries and Spanish speaking countries, obviously German speaking countries. Muselle is a huge classic up with Proust and joy so that’s the idea. That’s those are the trinity of modernist novels, Joyce, Proust, museu, and in English speaking countries, that’s not at all the case. And there’s various conjectures about why that’s so. The novel got translated relatively late for various reasons that had to do with the war. So, so the first translation, although I quite like it myself, is not superb. So that might not be in a very good hook for people to get into it. I myself really hope that that that’s going to change eventually, and people are going to learn more about Mozelle, because, as I said, you know, with all my admiration with Joyce and Proust, Mozilla is just much more of a page turner.

Josh Landy
Can I come back a little bit to something we were talking about right at the beginning. Reason. So we, you know, there’s a an awful lot of skepticism in this wonderful novel, although qualified by skepticism about the skepticism. You know, there’s no self for you to be, there’s no values to live by, and there’s no reason to help you, right? So, so can we pick up on the reason part. Ray and I were talking earlier about how in the novel, you know, it’s not that reason is completely dismissed and so on. Obviously, people are, you know, debating all the time and arguing and making logical chains of reasoning and so on. However, yeah, there’s that nice line that human beings use ideas at most in order to justify themselves. So reason is just rationalization. There’s another line. Thinking is a world of its own, and real life is another. So reason doesn’t really help you to live. And there’s the stuff that Ray was quoting about how science reduces emotion to glandular secretions and things like that. What’s really going on there? I mean, it seems like maybe that’s true, but it’s not livable. This approach to shaping life is in no way nurturing. So where should we land, given that this is a novel where it seems like reason isn’t sort of everything it’s cracked up to be. But on the other hand, what are you supposed to do? What are you supposed to do? You kind of need reason, but reason is also not. It’s not going to be the solution to all our problems.

Bence Nanay
Yes, so Musil has a very ambivalent relation to reason, and by reason, I think we mean something like rationality here, right? He is trying to question the primacy of rationality, and is very, very clear about how rationality is not is always influenced by or intertwined with our emotional life. Nothing is fully rational. It’s always emotional slash rational. But at that time, you know we’re talking about, first off to 20th century that was not that not such a novel move. I mean, the whole movement of romanticism very much rejected rationality and as a guiding ideal. What is very unique about Mozart is that he does not like rationality, but also really dislikes romanticism. So he’s trying to do something that is different, both from the kind of idolizing rationality and also going down a kind of a romantic history. You can see a pattern here, right? And he’s not very good at giving positive roots to take, but very good at kind of showing us what’s not.

Josh Landy
Yeah, this is terrible, and the opposite is terrible too. In this regard, I’m wondering about a couple of things, because the novel talks about metaphor, and talks about metaphor, a metaphor, according to the novel, combines truth and feeling. So it seems like metaphor is a place where you get a bit of both. I also wonder about the novel itself, because the novel itself combines literature and philosophy, and so the literature is probably going to give us a bunch of feelings, and the philosophy is going to give us a bunch of thoughts. Are these two things, these two very literary things, potentially a place where you could kind of have the best of both worlds, or a middle ground, or a synthesis, a compromise, something like that.

Bence Nanay
I think that’s one of the possible compromises or possible middle grounds that that Mosel is trying out, and he’s very clear about the fact that that’s the reason why he’s writing a novel. That’s why he’s not writing a philosophical treatise. That would be the domain of rationality. And also that’s the reason why he’s not doing, I don’t know, free poetry, because that would be a completely different rationality, free thing. He’s trying to combine the two things. Combine it. He writes an extremely cerebral, extremely philosophical novel, but nonetheless a novel where these two things, the emotion and the rationality, the this exactly this kind of metaphorical way they get combined.

Ray Briggs
I think one reason that it doesn’t feel quite fair to criticize him for not coming to a grand conclusion is because he didn’t finish. Finish this novel, actually, how much do we know about, like, what he would have done with it if he had had the chance to finish it?

Bence Nanay
Yeah, we know fair amount, because there’s a giant muleso scholarship and he left, he left behind literally 10s of 1000s of pages of notes that people are looking through, and you can, you can as well, because it’s all online. So that’s kind of fun. He did not finish the novel, and the general consensus in Moses scholarship is that he would not have, he could not have. That’s just not something that he could have. Could have done. One thing that she’s mentioned at the very beginning. Actually, Ray is that the novel is set in 1913 and he he thought about various ways of finishing it, and one of them, Ulrich, enlists in the in the Austrian army and goes to wage war. And another one, I don’t know, he kills himself, and so on. But what’s interesting is that, in some sense, there’s no need to finish the novel, because you the reader, know exactly what’s going to happen in a year, because it’s going to be in 1914 which is when the first world war starts.

Josh Landy
And that’s another area where it seems like the novel is potentially putting Ulrich way of living in question, right? Because on the one hand, you might think, well, there’s something very charming about the way he’s living. It’s very free. It’s very attentive to the particular he’s not causing any harm because he’s not doing very much. But on the other hand, you might think, Well, geez, you know, to borrow a phrase from from Brock, everyone’s sleepwalking into catastrophe, right? And if you’re not actually using your reason and forming principles and acting out those principles, you might just get a World War. So is the fact that the war is around the corner potentially, is that something that should be in the back of our minds and make us worry about the way Ulrich is living his life.

Bence Nanay
Maybe, I think it should make us worry about the main target of Moses, and then we’re taking your your principles or your qualities too seriously, because that’s, I mean, arguably, that’s the reason why the First World War broke out, and definitely the Second World War. Maybe this is an important place to mention that there’s a very funny and but at the same time extremely scary criticism of the Nazi movement in the novel, which was very new at that time. You know, he wrote these things in the 20s that was not, not as strong as they later became, and how that’s all rooted in romanticism and this kind of taking your qualities too seriously attitude.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about the Austrian writer Robert Musil with Bence Nanay from the University of Antwerp.

Ray Briggs
Do you ever get frustrated that you can’t predict how things will turn out? How do you know what to plan for. Is it possible to just go with the flow?

Josh Landy
Floating from frustration to freedom—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues

Barenaked Ladies
It’s all be done before

Josh Landy
Is the future truly unpredictable, or has it all been done before? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Bence Nanay from the University of Antwerp, and we’re thinking about Robert Musil and life as an experiment.

Josh Landy
So Bence, we’ve been talking about the various forms of skepticism in the novel. You know, shouldn’t shouldn’t be too enthusiastic about your qualities. Shouldn’t be too enthusiastic about reason. Shouldn’t be too enthusiastic about whatever value set your society currently holds, because, you know, could change tomorrow. Where does that leave us? I mean, what? How does Musil think that we should live?

Bence Nanay
So one thing I should say at the very beginning of this is that Musil did not write a self help book, so it’s not gonna—and also, the book that I’m writing about Musil is not about how Musil can change your life. So I don’t, I don’t think Musil—I mean, I don’t think there’s an easy recipe about how Musil can change your life. I do think that some of the things that Moses says are very perceptive, and if you look closely, there could be some kind of a positive angle, in spite of the fact that he’s really only talking about like. He’s really kind of presenting negative examples. But if you put all of that together, then. You can see what has a chance of succeeding. Let’s just say that.

Ray Briggs
So maybe a better way to ask this question is, what are some options, rather than what should we do?

Bence Nanay
Exactly, yeah. So one option, so it seems like one of the main issues in life for museu in general, is that we take ourselves too seriously, or that we have these very fixed principles or fixed values or fixed narratives about ourselves. This is not something we talked about, just a huge topic in the novel, he’s very against fixed self narratives that I have, narratives about narrative about myself, about, you know, how my life all makes a kind of a nice, coherent whole as a narrative. He’s very against that, because it’s a lie, because it’s by necessity, a lie. On the other hand, the opposite of this is also not an option. To have absolutely no values, to be completely nihilistic is not good either. To have absolutely no coherence whatsoever about myself, about what I did yesterday and what I do today, that’s not the way to live, either. So what you need is some kind of a combination of the two and one. Way in which mozil talks about this is exactly in the terms that you guys framed this episode. Is life as an experiment, something like he calls it hypothetical living. So we try out a certain hypothesis about these are going to be my values for this week. These are going to be my this is the way I’m going to think about myself. This is going to be the way I think about the world. Now let’s see how that feels. Let’s see how that helps me get around in the world. And then if it doesn’t work, I’m going to revise.

Ray Briggs
So one kind of metaphor that is helpful here from Musil is life as an essay. He says, at some point, wouldn’t it be more original to try to live not as a definite person in a definite world, but as someone born to change Exactly?

Josh Landy
Let me just throw this, because I think this is also very clarifying. One probably had to tackle everything one wanted to do effectively with the utmost seriousness, even when one knew that in 50 years, every experiment would turn out not to have been worthwhile. So this essayism, this punctured seriousness, as it’s sometimes called In the novel, that seems very interesting, right? This idea that you do actually have a kind of commitment to something, right? You’re not just free in the sense of capricious, floating about all over the place at a moment’s whim. You are, you are driven by a set of, I guess, principles or something, but they’re provisional ones. They’re ones you’re willing to surrender if things go awry, or you change your mind, something like that, that seem about right.

Bence Nanay
That seems exactly right, and that maybe this is a good place to bring in that. Musa started out as a scientist. He did a philosophy degree in a PhD, he got a job offer for an assistant professor job in Manong department. So he had a full philosophical career, but he was also a which he gave up to write novels, but he also had very strong scientific credentials. And I think the reason why he liked science is because that’s exactly the way science works. You take a certain, certain value, certain hypotheses extremely seriously, as long as they work and but if they don’t work, you just ditch them and you get some some new ones. So it does not mean that you somehow live your life in a half hearted way. You live your life to the full, but not in a rigid or inflexible way.

Ray Briggs
Maybe this is actually a difference between musul and Ulrich, who is kind of a rich ne’er-do-well, who I don’t think anybody would describe as a serious scientist. Maybe a reason not to think of Ulrich as a mouthpiece for the author here.

Bence Nanay
There’s a difference between Musil and Ulrich, and that’s similar in the literature. There’s as much, almost as much discussion about this as the difference between Proust and the narrator of the of the Proust novel. So they’re definitely not the same people. And maybe this is also a good time to mention that that’s not the only book that not the only writing that Moselle has done. He’s written other shorter pieces. He’s written a lot of essays that he was actually proudly calling them essays, and they are kind of essays in the sense that we just talked about before, where he gives philosophical arguments about certain things. So it’s not all what Musil thinks is not to be not to be identified, but what Warwick thinks. So it’s very important.

Josh Landy
That makes sense. Before we move on to other potential candidates for, you know, less awful ways of life. I want to get to something that I find kind of delightful in the notion of this scientific hypothesis, way of living, this essayistic way of living, which is the armed truce of ideas. So there’s this lovely line that the protagonist has, Ulrich. I don’t know if he’s speaking for mol or not here, but he says, We can’t live without ideas, but we have to aim at an equilibrium among them, a balance of power, an armed truce of ideas, so that none of the contending parties could get too much done, which I love, and it’s sort of a. Reminds me of the way that some people talk about the founding of the United States, where there’s this, these checks and balances that are designed to make sure that nothing much gets done right, that nothing too radical happens. What do you think is that something sort of promising, or is it sort of limiting? Because, after all, we do want to get some things done.

Bence Nanay
I think that’s a very good analogy to think about the checks and balances. What mus has a big problem with is grand ideas, right? Ideas that are so grand that it’s really unclear what they’re really about, or the opposite could also be true. So he’s all in all for small ideas. But that doesn’t mean that he does not want any ideas, right? He’s an extremely intelligent and intellectual and very cerebral person. He lives on ideas, but when ideas get too big or too grand, that’s where things get all messed up.

Ray Briggs
Bence, I want to ask about the state that Musill calls the other condition, and how it relates to sort of big and small ideas. So the other condition is something that whereas the ordinary self masters the world, in the other condition, the world flows into the self, or mingles with it or bears what does that mean?

Bence Nanay
Yeah, that’s a very mysterious concept. So the way I understand the other condition is that it’s really moselle’s way of talking about something like an esthetic experience, which is a very different way of experiencing the world. Is our usual way of, I don’t know, rushing through traffic, where we are a little more detached from what we’re observing, but at the same time, we don’t kind of experience the world as this kind of hostile thing that stands against us. But there’s this more comfortable relation to the world. He uses a lot of water based metaphors like ebbing and flowing, and then the boundary between the world and the self disappears. And I’m sure that we can really, or at least some of us, can, relate to this, this way of of perceiving the world that is kind of special and and it’s a very positive feeling. So Musil is really interested in this. There’s some essays of his from decades before the novel where he already talks about these ideas. And that is, I take that to be a different kind of alternative to all the bad options.

Josh Landy
So that then the ones that we talked about. So there’s something extremely appealing about this other way of living, this this other condition, right? So forget about the foolish excessive seriousness of the businessman. Forget about the excessive seriousness of these nations that are so serious they’ll go to war. But forget even about Ulrich, scientific hypothetical living, his essayism, his punctured seriousness. And how about we go for the other condition? How about we try to put ourselves in the running for as many of these special moments as possible, as many of these moments of Epiphany, where we really get in touch with the uniqueness of every experience, of every flower, of every person that we meet, that seems extremely appealing. Is it? I mean, is that a way? Do you think that’s a way that musel thinks that a human being could and should live?

Bence Nanay
I think that is his most serious and most heartfelt attempt to carve out something positive. But I want to say that I don’t think it’s a completely different angle from everything else that we talked about before. So one way in which maybe the other condition makes some kind of sense is to think about it as some form of an openness to the world, that I let myself be open to whatever is happening in the world without any kind of prejudices, without having some kind of preconceptions of how I should see what I’m seeing, let the world dictate what’s going to happen, which is a very similar to the general attitude of not taking my, you know, my values too seriously, or my properties too seriously, or my self narrative too seriously. So I think it’s, it’s all kind of connected, as in museum kind of everything is all connected together. In some ways it whether it’s a feasible job to do that, is it? And in the very end of the volume, much of it is not published during during mosul’s life. It seems like there’s some kind of an attempt to make this some kind of a permanent condition. Is that possible? Probably not. But that was also not your question. Your question was whether it’s possible to somehow set up your life in a way that maximizes these moments, which is, which is, probably is a feasible way to live. I find it important to emphasize that that does not mean that there’s some kind of an aestheticism, or that does not mean that you thereby are an amoral person who does not take other people’s suffering seriously at all. You’re just somehow admiring this little uniqueness of this little flower for moose. Or the other condition is a deeply ethical state that’s kind of the pinnacle of ethics is the other condition. So it’s very much intertwined with. That with ethics and with the other person, he thinks of love as a form of the other condition, for example.

Josh Landy
Well Bence, I declare today’s experiment a great success. That was an absolutely wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Bence Nanay
Thanks a lot for having me. It was glorious fun.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Bence Nanay, professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp, and author of the forthcoming book, “Philosophy Without Qualities: Robert Musil, the Thinker.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking I want to read more things by Musil. There’s a lot of the men without qualities. The only other thing I’ve read is young tourless, which is basically about isn’t Boys School awful? And so I’m going to go read some of his essays, I think.

Josh Landy
They’re really fantastic, and oh my god, is The Man Without qualities hilarious and brilliant. At the same time, we’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, which is completely revamped, but still at the same URL, philosophytalk.org, and while you’re there, you can subscribe to our feed for free.

Ray Briggs
Or you can support the program with a premium subscription and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
Now a man whose lack of principles won’t slow him down—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… So the great unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, about the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is close to 1500 pages long. If I ever finish the Rock ‘n Roll novel resting in my sock drawer, it may well exceed that, because it will inevitably deal with the fall of this particular empire. Particular empire. But you know even if I finish it, will they may be left to read it. And why would they read me? We even make it a survival manual. The Man Without Qualities centers around Ulrich, a former mathematician and soldier in 1918 Vienna, he’s been enlisted—or tapped, as they say—to be on the collateral campaign a planning commission for a huge celebration of the 70th year of Franz Josef’s reign. The novel pays a lot of attention to this committee as they discuss how to capture the hearts and minds of the Emperor’s subjects, as well as the people of the world. The committee has an industrialist, a conservative who can’t make decisions, a grifter trying to figure out who to bribe, a general who wants to impose military values on the civilians, also various servants who serve as spies for their masters. It also delves into the citizens of the nation itself, who were Austrians, Hungarians lick-spittles to royals, louts, spermers, people whose dreams contradict each other, people who want to change, people who won’t ever change. There’s much space devoted to a man named Moosbrugger who doesn’t really appear in the novel, but is in the news. He’s a notorious criminal on trial for murdering a prostitute, but he looks nice from the photographs. He’s not a sex killer, though. So is he sane or not? How guilty is he? Are we all guilty? What does Moosbrugger Tell us about us? Does he need to be factored into the Jubilee? He’s part of the empire, isn’t he? The novel gathers competing visions as to what exactly this Jubilee will deliver. What’s the takeaway? Is this just a one off indoor, outdoor? How long do we book the orchestra for? You’ve heard of Twilight of the Gods. This is Twilight of the event planners. The book keeps expanding towards a resolution that never arrives. A little thing called World War One happened to come along, and there went your Austro-Hungarian empire, Moosbrugger and all. Musil started his novel in 1930 and was still working on it when he died in 1942. I can’t help thinking the US of A is kind of in the same boat as the Austro-Hungarian empire. So many opinions in this here land make us weird and ungovernable. Now, momentary leadership by a fellow who managed to unite half the you disunited in their hatred of the other half has been breaking commands non stop without regard for what the other half says, or even what his half says. He’s been giving our nation some pretty weird directions, like changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, or that Canada and Greenland might be our next state. Why not Cuba? That would make more sense. Also, the planning commission in Musil’s novel failed at making a celebration we can all get behind. We had one that actually took place, by which I mean our president’s birthday parade in DC, which left a sour taste in the nation’s gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft too, I believe, threw up a little in his mouth. But at least it happened. We should be grateful we even have tanks. Does Greenland have tanks? I doubt it. So we are momentarily unified, 35% approval anyway, mainly because voices that don’t belong to the president are ignored, and we’re a swarming bag of nagging voices really can’t keep us in there forever. Speaking of Moosbrugger, in The Man Without Qualities, he’s merely discussed in that book. America’s Moosbruggers are part of the census. We have thousands of Moosbruggers, also like a true crime, adulterous poisoners, stepchild shotgun killings, black widows, black widowers, killers for hire, killers for fun, citizens, all, many of them men, all without quality. We don’t have taste. We don’t even have dress codes. If we can just find the right catchphrase, it is believed, we could all come together under its banner. Could be we may be men and women without quality, but we are nothing without our algorithms. Robert Musil ended his days in Switzerland in 1942 with Nazis swarming just outside the border, still working on his novel about the vanishing of the Austro-Hungarian empire. So yeah, it’s not rocket science, really. What happened to the Austro-Hungarian empire was eventually… Nazis. They took their event planning pretty seriously. Remember the Anschluss? Rhat put quite a crimp on Austria’s gemeinschaft, I’ll tell you that. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is James Kass. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is the Director of Research and advancement.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Kiran Ajluni, Steve Choi, and Linda Fagan.

Ray Briggs
Special thanks to Emma Lozman-Plumb, Michael Aparicio, Tom Lockard, Matt Porter, and John Lehman.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk omes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or misexpressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Philomena Cunk
Why did they call World War One “World War One?” It’s quite pessimistic numbering, isn’t it? Or did they just know it was the start of a franchise