Young Musil flippantly noted in his journal that he had given up on reading Kant, but was doing just fine nevertheless. Is it really necessary to think about how we think? To question the very foundations of knowledge and the mind's relationship with reality? To question whether reality (the thing in itself) can be known at all by the perceiving mind? Nietzsche, with a reference to current physiological science, had provocatively asked this question in aphorism 354 of The Gay Science: "The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror". And his answer here was that we need consciousness in order to communicate with each other. Consciousness had developed, he conjectured, as a connecting network between man and man, for one must know oneself in order to communicate:
"The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness - at least a part of them - is the result of a terrible, prolonged "must" ruling man’s destiny: as the most endangered animal he needed help and protection; he needed his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood - and for all this he needed 'consciousness' first of all: he had to "know" himself what he lacked, to 'know' how he felt, and to 'know' what he thought."
This need, utilitarian in Nietzsche's narrative, cannot help but threaten to undermine the independent uniqueness of each human's personal, untranslatable world. Consciousness is a reflex of the social, gregarious, communal, so that no matter how much each person strives to understand his or herself as individual, communication,
"will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his 'averageness'; - that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness - by the imperious 'genus of the species' therein - and is translated back into the perspective of the herd."
But for Musil, who declared that he became a writer precisely to "find another human being," the challenge of communicating some trace of the individual self to a possible Other was of paramount importance, no matter how practically impossible it might seem for one human being ("Is not every brain a lonely thing," he writes in "The Completion of Love") to cross the bridge from his own mind to another's without losing too much of his unique self.
Perhaps this is why, a few years after giving up on Kant, he took him up again, in earnest, as a student at the University in Berlin studying philosophy, physics, and psychology, under Carl Stumpf and the neo-Kantian Alois Riehl. For the questions raised by Kant—if not always his answers—were foundational for the development of thinking about how we think that, according to Nietzsche were a requisite for communication.
I had read and repeated for years that Musil studied physics and "behavioral psychology" at the University, but only recently have I begun to really understand what that entailed. He certainly was not studying Freudian psychology (which he critiqued), nor was he really studying physics in the sense of exploring directly the properties of light, sound, or energy, but rather he was studying the measurement of the perception of such properties within the human mind, i.e., the science of sense perception, which naturally had everything to do with the Kantian questions of the relationship between the brain's structures and the phenomenal or real world. What he was studying, in essence, were the limits and possibilities of measuring, by scientific means (both experimentation in labs and some form of intuitive reasoning), how the brain and body respond to sensory stimuli—Psychophysics, in other words, which came eventually to be known as experimental psychology, and is sometimes referred to as behavioral psychology, even though it has little to do with what we usually think of when we hear that term today. He was also studying the history of science (Wissenschaft, in German, which means knowledge), i.e., the history of epistemology: how do we know what we know? What constitutes evidence? What is real, what a delusion? How are concepts formed? And, in keeping with the concerns of his literary contemporaries, how may a shared language communicate knowledge from person to person without diminishing the edge of individual seeing?
According to Thomas Sebastian in his The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-87), the founder of Psychophysics, had conducted experiments that “satisfied criteria for empirical research,” proving the identity of body and mind and had “developed a method by which to infer psychic sensation by measuring psychological stimuli.” According to Fechner, the body and the mind were “two different images of the same entity, which Fechner compared to a circle that can be viewed from standing inside it, where its curve appears concave, or from standing outside it, where its curve appears convex. Both sides belong together as indivisibly as do the mental and material sides of man and can be looked upon as analogous to his inner and outer sides…’"(12). Fechner influenced many other thinkers, including Ernst Mach whose Analysis of Sensations was the subject of our Musil's (1908) doctoral dissertation. In 1902, before deciding to abandon engineering for the study of psychophysics, Musil had read Mach's popular lectures on science. He had been struggling with his perennial battle between reason and the emotions, between a realm of scientific rationalism and literary, spiritual irrationalism, and he wrote in his notebook that he had read Mach just in time to save him from abandoning reason altogether.
What can he have meant by this? I believe that he thought that he had found a kind of science that took into consideration the existence of seemingly irrational processes in the human brain, or, as David Luft put it (in a recent draft of a book-in-progress), thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Musil were interested in "irrationalism" not as an "advocacy of the irrational but [in] the effort to come to terms with the presence of the irrational in ourselves and in the world."
Mach's exploration of perception as a process whereby the brain adapts itself to the world by creating analogies, categories, and conceptions that are subject to distortion, illusion, and a continual transformation would have appealed to Musil's own experience of the shifting, unstable world. Some sections discussing this process of conceptualization in Mach are strikingly similar to Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying,” and to his argument from aphorism 354, quoted above, that to communicate we must translate private idiolects into generalizations. Science is, in other words, a very refined accumulation of generalizations—abstractions from the infinite variegation of the world, where no two things are ever exactly alike. Without abandoning the realm of science—indeed, Mach asserted that experimental empirical methods would somehow provide evidence that a shifting experience of the objects of the world was perfectly natural and traceable to physiological responses—he seemed to expand for Musil what science and reality were. (And for many, many others: Einstein said, “I even believe that the people who consider themselves opponents of Mach, scarcely know how much of Mach’s way of thinking they have absorbed, so to say, with their mother’s milk.”)
Not only did Mach insist, like Fechner, upon a non-dualistic conception of body and mind, but he also strove to overcome the gap between the disciplines of science (including biology, evolution, physics, mathematics), philosophy, psychology—and, since his suppositions and findings had a direct bearing on aesthetic experience, he was also building a sort of bridge for Musil between these academic disciplines and the realm of art. Thus, even if Musil subsequently came to question some of Mach's ideas and methods in his dissertation, Mach was an important role model for him of radical interdisciplinarity and of the sort of skepticism that does not lead to nihilism or despair of finding provisional approximate bridges to understanding and conduct of life.
At the university of Berlin, Musil studied, as noted above, under Carl Stumpf, who had been a student of Franz Brentano, a critic of Mach (although, they had all "absorbed him with their mother's milk"). Stumpf followed Fechner in championing the consilience of philosophy and science, but leaned more heavily upon hands-on experimental procedures and what he came to call "descriptive psychology," a combination of laboratory testing and the self-reporting of subjects under examination. He developed a sophisticated experimental lab in Berlin and, along with his student (Musil’s friend), Erich von Hornbostel, undertook innovative studies of sound and musicology. Musil’s was apparently one of the only dissertations under Stumpf that dealt with a philosophical theme rather than an experimental one—another sign that Stumpf himself favored the lab over the thought experiment. Yet, Stumpf’s influence can be seen in Musil’s criticism of what he called Mach’s “neutral” or “skeptical” vision of science as a process that seemed more concerned with the way that the brain (neutrally or skeptically) incorporated an aberrant fact into preconceived notions or concepts. If A and B are usually considered to belong together and we find something new out about B that makes it no longer seem to fit, Mach saw science’s role as conducting more research in order to find out some way to make it fit. But what if it didn’t, Musil wondered? And was thus concerned with what this allowance of adaptive conceptualization said about the value of truth in science.
He concluded that Mach’s theory of conceptualization tended to undermine the processes and validity of science. A Kantian question at bottom: how does the way that we think inhibit thinking? Musil’s doubts seem to be directed in two directions: toward the evidentiary claims of science, on the one hand, and at the danger Mach’s neutral or skeptical processes posed for science.
Of course, this all is connected to the debates that would later ensue among the Viennese Logical Positivists (for whom Mach was idol and primary inspiration) about the possibility of asserting absolute propositions. Neurath’s boat is a provisional resolution of the problem: while we cannot be certain of the truth of provisional propositions, he admitted, we need something to stand on while floating, as it were, in the open sea of the unknown. And so we use what boards and planks we can, while working to build other provisional planks.
Thomas Sebastian highlights a diary entry written during Musil’s time at the university:
"an exchange between two people discussing the established truth of psychophysics, that is, the belief in a functional relationship between body and mind. One of the two asks whether the notion of psychophysical parallelism is a hypothesis or a fact. The other replies that, in the current stage of investigation, it is a bit of both. It is a necessary theory to explain certain empirically proven ‘connections’ (D 80). Yet a connection is not a parallel: 'The main thing is the two parallel bars; but the ladder needs the small transverse rungs. These are—the metaphysical' (D 80)." (Sebastian 17)
The ladder image is of course reminiscent of that of another Austro-Hungarian philosopher, one who was also interested in both mysticism and logic, one who also resisted being categorized into one or another school, and who especially resisted the claims of the Logical Positivists who saw him as a sort of God: Wittgenstein, who in the penultimate aphorism of his Tractatus prefigured Neurath’s boat as well:
"6.54
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright."
I do not mean to suggest that Musil rejected the possibility for science or logic to explain consciousness. On the contrary, he remained committed to discovering the sort of mystic path that one could drive on with a truck, to what he called “Daybright Mysticism,” in contradistinction to murky confusion and obfuscation. Rather, he was searching for a kind of science, a kind of Wissen, that expanded our ideas of what reality is, rather than reducing them. And he, along with Wittgenstein, ultimately came to believe that the exploration of this realm was best to be conducted in the realm of art—through images, patterns, symbols, metaphors—rather than strictly through reductive logical analysis.
Kant’s skepticism about our ability to know either the thing in itself (the real physical world) and the world of spirit did not mean that Kant did not believe in the existence of either (he did). In a similar way, Musil’s skepticism did not mean he had given up on the quest to find a natural, daybright, empirical explanation of the sorts of experiences that did not seem to fit in to our preconceived notions about the world, borderline experiences he called “the Other Condition.” In multiple chapters of the Nachlass, written and revised decades after his time studying in Berlin, he explored the history of the psychology of emotions and its various schools of thought and seems to conclude, in Chapter 58, “Ulrich and the Two Worlds of Emotion,” that ecstasis is not a vision of another, different world, but a different vision of the same world.
Ulrich wonders why this other way of feeling (which he provisionally calls non-specific and internal) has been taken to be less real than its counterpart, when “Nature contains both”. He answers that “The one draws us into action, while the other merely allows us to participate from behind a colorful window” (1305). The non-specific emotion “changes the world in the same way the sky changes its colors, without desire or self, and in this form objects and actions change like the clouds… (1306). This is the realm of the other condition, the realm of ethics and of art, rather than that of reductive science or rigid morality.
Another reason why this way of feeling may have been taken to be less real is that it is more difficult to communicate than the experience of the so-called “normal” world. So while Nietzsche had warned that the study of our consciousness and the attempt to communicate it had the unfortunate tendency to diminish the edge of the individual, presumably according to processes similar to those Mach describes in his Analysis of Sensations (a book Nietzsche had in his library), Musil’s life’s work was in fact an attempt to at least provisionally build a bridge between one lonely mind and another. Nietzsche would affirm that the individual may be marvelously subsumed in the Dionysian merger with the All—an aesthetic state of ecstasis associated with the irrational. And he also insisted that the Apollonian, the realm of borders, form, intellection and individuation was an equally important part of art. Is there then, in Art, a possible bridge between the individual self and the Dionysian in a way that does not completely subsume the individual voice, a connection with—dare we say, universals, continuum, natural laws—of many voices in counterpoint or the sort of harmony wherein one still distinguishes the dissonances of difference? Abandoning the study of psychophysics for the practice of art, Musil seems to have intuitively understood that the realm of art—which is both created by the other condition and itself incites the condition in others—was a better bridge than that of science. Wittgenstein came to a similar conclusion. What could not be expressed in logical language, could be approximated in images and metaphors—an imperfect but life-affirming translation. Art, in other words, a realm that communicates what is individual and otherwise non-translatable, is the bridge.
Ironically, contemporary studies of neuroscience itself confirm this conjecture. In the beautiful and visionary books of poet, Frederick Turner, Beauty the Value of Values and Natural Classicism, we learn that aesthetic experience is itself a process of bridge building, not only between person and person or culture and culture, but between the right and left brain, as images, meter, rhythm, music, and pattern recognition processed by the right lobe interact with the verbal and logical processes of the left, spurring us on—by pleasure rewards in the brain!—not only to individual learning but to social and cultural creation.
Do we need then to finish reading Kant, to look into the mirror and know not only ourselves but how we know ourselves? Only if we care to communicate. Emerson, whom both Nietzsche and Musil well loved, suggested this in a passage young Musil transcribed into his journal long before he took up the arcane studies of perception science: “The Man is only half himself, the other half is expression.”
(Self portrait by Ernst Mach from his Analysis of Sensations. )