The Man Without Qualities (#6)

I. Nothing New Under the Sun

Many years ago, I had the idea for a novel that I was convinced would capture the spirit of our age. My hero would be a man of the professional-managerial class, a man whose expertise was navigating modern bureaucracies with as much efficiency as they would allow. He would have no specialty, or some obscure specialty developed in graduate school that he had long forgotten, and had impressed his employer with his easy eloquence and quick wit. He would be the master of symbolic manipulation, picking up the jargon of the office and learning to bend it to his own ends. His emails would be impeccably phrased, his directives easy to follow, and he would never spend any time deliberating on any decision for too long, projecting unflappable confidence. And—this is the most critical part of his personality—he would have no idea what he was physically manipulating at work, no understanding at all of the underlying reality represented by his spreadsheets. It may as well be a video game. His primary belief would be that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that correlation was indistinguishable from causation, and as such the latter could be assumed wherever the former appeared. Our man would make a number of gambles based off this information. Some of them would pay off, others wouldn't, but he would show enough pluck and charisma to get himself promoted or shifted to another department before the damage his management produced was detected.

The hero of our story would be a "man without qualities", a creature of 21st Century industrial modernity, put in charge of vast processes that he could not comprehend, instead selected for his knowledge of the right techniques, which would not be physical techniques at all, but a knowledge of how to manipulate the invisible levers of organizations. The rest of his life, such as where he lived, what his family was like, his personal history, would be completely independent of the person he was at work. Put another way: given what I described above, you would not be able to predict where he lived, what he did, who he loved. (It would be too cynical to make him a stereotypical yuppie, chasing trends in a major city.)

It turns out that my idea was not new at all. Austrian novelist Robert Musil beat me to the punch nearly 100 years ago with his unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Musil's man without qualities is a more likable character than mine. His name is Ulrich, a solider, engineer, mathematician and finally a drifter, a callow seducer of women, an amateur philosopher, and in spite of inhabiting all these roles, lacking "qualities" in the eyes of his friends and rivals, who are often the same people.

II. Individual Qualities and Making One's Own Way of Life

Take Ulrich's childhood friend Walter, who is fiercely jealous of Ulrich's relationship with his (Walter's) wife, Clarisse. Walter is Ulrich's foil: he carries the quality of artistic greatness, but he has disappointed all of his benefactors because he is paralyzed by anxiety any time he sits down to compose or paint. And Clarisse only married Walter because she was attracted to his artistic promise. Clarisse is a manic depressive who is stimulated by Ulrich's mind in a way that Walter can't. Walter wants to bear a child by Clarisse, but Clarisse refuses him because he hasn't created his magnum opus yet.

These "qualities" that are referred to here are "qualities" belonging to the soul, the spiritual "essence" of a person. Over and over again, we see the cast of The Man Without Qualities try to determine what the "soul" is, and how we can reorient society around nourishing it, casting aside the petty materialism of the Industrial Age. Ulrich doesn't have a soul. Or, more accurately, Ulrich hasn't yet chosen what qualities his soul should consist of. Ulrich sees his soul as fluid, taking the shape of the container—the context—that his life is placed in. Ulrich sees that, with the rise of liberal individualism and the collapse of older structures of authority, "the significance of all moral events seemed to him to be the function of other events on which they depended." Ulrich is caught between his desire to indefinitely analyze his environment to reconstruct a way to live from first principles and the curse of having been condemned to live all the while. His attempt at reconciliation is by coining a new way to live: "essayism".

Essayists, as Musil writes, "are masters of the inner hovering life", "their domain between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry; they are saints with and without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adventure who have gone astray." They have transferred their qualities onto the page and made a choice of how they want to be subjectively represented in the minds of others. Musil himself is an essayist himself in the way that he renounces the trappings of traditional narrative. But Ulrich can't bring himself to put himself on the page, to choose his path in life. He is stuck between his desire to know the truth and his doubt that he can ever know anything objectively. What Ulrich is in search of is a technique of how to live, an objectively right path forward while approaching all moral precepts with skepticism. That is the paradox of freedom. As Ulrich puts it himself, he is holding onto the inner freedom that "means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn't need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to bound by." He is, as he describes later, "a prisoner waiting for his chance to break out".

This is the downside of individualism: in the absence of the strict hand of religion, family, or the state, individuals are left as prisoners of their own freedom. As adults, we are all alone in choosing a way of life that will nourish our preciously unique souls. The way of life handed down by our parents now must be one of acceptance: technological advances have obliterated the concept of tradition grounded in physical rootedness to a place, so parents are expected to pass down the values and knowledge that will enable their children to achieve economic independence in a rapidly shifting society. To borrow Walter's phrase, they want to produce children without qualities. Their only expectation is that the children will be equipped with the basic virtues needed to pass through the education-industrial complex and come out the other side as secure members of the bourgeoisie. But what else their children will develop into, we do not know. The force that parents used to direct toward their children has been reflected: parents are expected to adapt to the milieu that their children are growing up in. Instead of clinging to their life-tested value systems, parents are "demoted from wise authority figure[s] to tentative spokespe[ople] for the child's future self," as Agnes Callard puts it in the linked article.

The collapse of sources of traditional values has also ushered in a period of ambivalence surrounding child-rearing. By this, I mean that having children is no longer the accepted default among young couples, at least among my late-Millenial set. There is a large minority of people who are opting out of having children, and secular-individualist culture does not have a strong counterargument for the economic and hedonic case for being childless (other than, perhaps, the observation that the next generation is going to form the labor pool that is going to make your retirement account grow). The best counterargument I've seen is in Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's essay at The Point, which touched me deeply when I read it 2 years ago:

How to affirm life in the face of suffering, sacrifice and likely failure may have the structure of a question, but, like the apparent questions of who we are and what we are here for, it is far from obvious that what we are meant to do with it is to search for an answer, let alone settle on one. To affirm life is not to give a theoretical justification of life, to acknowledge its merits and counter the charges of its detractors. To affirm life is to live, and to do so in a certain way: committing to projects and relationships, assuming responsibility, allowing things to matter to you... This is no ordinary form of responsibility: life is neither a gift one gives nor a duty one burdens another with. This is why we have no more reason to fear that our kids will demand an explanation for why we brought them into the world than we are in the habit of demanding such justification from our parents.

Ulrich himself is most careful around women the he loves. He can never bring himself to seduce a woman whom he actually respects — barred from Clarisse by her marriage to Walter, and barred from his sister Agathe (introduced in Volume II), his truest love, by taboo. His only lovers are women he holds in contempt.

Have we discovered anything in the past 90 years that will have satisfied him as a suitably analytical approach to life? The applied philosophy in vogue with Ulrich's techno-rationalist heirs is a blend of Stoicism and Buddhism. Both creeds have had their share of popularizers in the West, especially in the last decade. What links them is that they offer a salve to the anxiety permeating modern life: that our standard of living will decline if the labor market decides it no longer needs us. For professionals, getting fired is the equivalent of a fall from grace because the fruits of civilization—a steady income to pay off our financed possessions and employer-sponsored healthcare—will be denied us. The Stoics and Buddhists have a lot to offer that push us closer to Ulrich: self-denial and detachment from circumstance and emotion. We Westerners primarily learn a defensive posture from these traditions: how to restore us to our equilibrium instead of a more positive doctrine toward some specific virtues. This enables us to learn things like mindfulness meditation as "techniques" to be deployed in times of stress, much as a therapist would advise. We take for granted that we will be ruled by economic and hedonic incentives to push us to act, not through any concept of virtue or concept of the common good.

Don't get me wrong—I am not any sort of religious traditionalist or collectivist. I am a fierce individualist on standard-issue liberal grounds (I especially recommend Sarah Constantin's post on individualist cultures), and yet, I still have my issues with total freedom. My own beliefs are currently closest to Camus's muscular brand of existentialism. But it is terrifying to have to gaze into the abyss of culture and have to choose one's way of life, and find some way to maintain it while negotiating around everyone else's independently chosen way of life.

Maintaining a way of life, or deliberately cultivating some virtues, depends on there being frequent reminders of the mission. Our loose bonds have made it easier than ever to opt out of our duties to others and to reject deference to authority. But the relative indifference our peers and coworkers greet us with— as described in Sarah Constantin's post above—is an opening for us to build our own foundation of skills: the skills necessary to support ourselves and others, the ability to care for others and allow others to take care of us in the ways they best know how. The other side of the individualist culture coin is that no one else is going to help you change, so you must take responsibility for yourself first, and then build others up.

Ulrich holds himself open to consider everything, and recognizes that there is not one single principle that he can reduce his life to. His fate is to stumble between the options of endless dichotomies: love and violence, metaphor and reality, contemplation and action, individualism and organization, capital and culture, beauty and virtue — in short, the concepts that define what it is to live a life where every situation is new and surviving from day to day is not guaranteed. We all have to live with our own lack of experience and the uncertainty about what the future will hold, and all we can do is try to orient ourselves in the direction that the good lies. In short, I felt that Ulrich's amateur philosophizing was close to my own journey, and close to anyone who has tried to determine the source of the good for themselves.

Ulrich realizes late in Part 2 where all his philosophizing comes from. (If you like this passage, you simply must read this novel.)

...for even his immature Napoleonic plans had shown him to be a man who looked on life as a problem he had set himself, something it was his vocation to work out. The urge to attack life and master it had always been clearly discernible in him, whether it had manifested itself as a rejection of the existing order or as various forms of striving for a new one, as logical or moral needs or even merely as an urge to keep the body in fighting trim. And everything that, as time went on, he had called essayism, the sense of possibility, and imaginative in contrast with pedantic precision; his suggestions that history was something one had to invent, that one should live the history of ideas instead of the history of the world, that one should get a grip on whatever cannot quite be realized in practice and should perhaps end up trying to live as if one were a character in a book, a figure with all the inessential elements left out, so that what was left would consolidate itself as some magical entity—all these different versions of his thinking, all in their extreme formulations against reality, had just one thing in common: an unmistakable, ruthless passion to influence reality.

The central tension in my life has been my desire, like Ulrich's, to influence reality, while being deadly afraid of the exposure that my actions would bring; the feeling that my efforts, and by extension, my character, would be shown to be somehow permanently deficient. This is the same dynamic that drives impostor syndrome. Over the past 5 years, though, I've grown enough to be able to be confident in my ability to influence reality for the better; I know what goodness is in the trenches of adult life, at work and home.

I will be making my largest dent in reality yet in 2 months, when my daughter is born. As much as I didn't like large parts of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, I liked her conception of "natality"—the birth of new people—as the source of hope in human affairs, because children will not be as constrained by the weight of the past. My daughter's impending birth has marked the end of a liminal passage in my life, perhaps best represented by reading The Man Without Qualities. The end of the liminal passage is marked by two recognitions. The first recognition is that Musil's novel is a clear distillation of the search that I started in earnest in adolescence: how to live The Good Life. I have now accumulated enough experience to realize that The Good Life is not something that can be determined rationally or calculated from first principles; life must be lived under all the constraints of physical embodiment. As I came to observe Ulrich's inquiry as the shadow of my own, and could see clearly how he was spinning himself in circles without arriving at any real progress, more satisfied with sounding interesting than in doing anything pragmatic, I obtained the insight needed to transcend the need for the search. In short, if I know what is good and can trust my instincts to move in the direction of goodness, what is left is doing good in reality. And that leads to the second recognition: that now I am obliged to try to teach my daughter what the good is, and try my best to nurture it in her, to teach her the skills she needs to make a positive mark on her world.

This task will ultimately demand much more from me than the search ever did. I worry: will I be able to keep up with my reading, writing, exercise, all the things that keep my life rich and worth living? It wouldn't be humane or realistic to expect that I can keep up even the meager pace I am doing now. There will be books left unread, essays unwritten, workouts missed. But that was always going to happen as a consequence living a life in the real world.

III. The Parallel Campaign's Doomed Search

Ulrich's search for qualities at the individual level is mirrored by the social drama that encompasses The Man Without Qualities's characters. The year is 1913. His Grace Count Leinsdorf has arranged for a 70th jubilee celebration for Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef in 1918. This 70th jubilee is a "counter-celebration" for the German Empire's celebration of Kaiser Wilhelm's 30th year on the throne, also to come in 1918. (It is darkly funny that the reader and Musil both know that both Empires will be in tatters by the close of 1918.) Leinsdorf carries the Austrian inferiority complex that his fellow aristocrats have carried since Prussia defeated Austria in 1866 and barred Habsburg rule of Germany forever, so he desperately wants to one-up the Germans. Hearing the Germans have kicked off their jubilee plans 5 years in advance, he compels others in Austrian high society to do the same for their monarchical fête.

Count Leinsdorf is not your stereotypically traditionalist aristocrat. He is a capitalist too, and is well aware of the complexity of industrial business operations. He understands the tension between professional and religious life, and admires middle-class life precisely because it must integrate these two forces - dubbed "capital and culture" - to stay on the path of modernization. His Grace is friends with Ulrich's cousin Hermine Tuzzi, the wife of the only high-ranking bourgeois diplomat in the King's ministry. Frau Tuzzi is renowned for possessing internal and external beauty, a reputation that causes Ulrich to dub her "a second Diotima" (for the rest of the novel, even in scenes where Ulrich is not present, Hermine Tuzzi will be called Diotima). With Count Leinsdorf's help, she is able to turn her apartment into a veritable salon of capital and culture and headquarters of the "Parallel Campaign" for the celebration of 1918.

Diotima thinks the Parallel Campaign should be centered around a grand idea that will guide Austria into the future. As I mentioned above, this idea is expected to restore the soul to a place of primacy. Unfortunately, none of the upper-middle class industrial and academic specialists are able to articulate a vision for the Austria of the future. Even Dr. Paul Arnheim, the son of a Prussian titan of industry and himself a dilettante extraordinaire, is unable to help Diotima come to anything stronger than the empty phrase "Global Austria". The Campaign's committees fracture along lines that mirror Austrian society: the ethnic minorities are suspicious of Arnheim's German influence and Leinsdorf's ties to the aristocracy; Leinsdorf is himself suspicious of Arnheim not only derailing the campaign to serve Germany, but diverting Diotima's admiring gaze; the military inserts itself into the Campaign to arrange arms deals with magnates like Arnheim; there is some disgusting antisemitism and white nationalism on display when Hans Sepp arrives. Our hero Ulrich is placed as an observer, as the campaign's Secretary, where he can sit in judgment of the absurdity around him. The great minds of the empire are shown to be useless, forever engaged in rhetoric instead of trying to solve problems.

As the novel reaches the early months of 1914, Diotima and Leinsdorf have become disillusioned. Their search for an animating ideal for a "Global Austria" to embody has come up wanting, and instead, the axis of the Parallel Campaign changes from "capital and culture" to militarism; the celebration of the "Emperor of Peace" turns to a means to arm the nation. Action is the word, and the reader knows that it will lead Austria to an ignominious end.

The empty dithering of the Parallel Campaign's officials perfectly reflects how our politics have become overtaken by marketing and public relations specialists. Our politics refuses to build the consensus needed to coordinate action to solve real problems or to govern the people, instead, we are captured by soundbites for social media. We have psycho-technocrats write articles days before a pandemic breaks out that being worried about a pandemic is just being irrational, then publish an editorial in the midst of the pandemic that people who aren't taking the pandemic seriously enough are being irrational. The people of the Parallel Campaign act as if their world will persist indefinitely into the future, even though it is about to be shattered irrevocably.

We are left dangling by Musil's choice to not finish the novel. We know that the Great War will fall upon all of his characters, destroying the decadent Parallel Campaign. The aristocrats and even Ulrich himself will be pulled into military service and odds are good that they will die on the Eastern Front. Emperor Franz Josef himself will die before the war is over, passing the Habsburg throne to Charles.

The shadow of the war highlights that Ulrich's search for a new way of life can only take place in a period of historical stability. Individual fulfillment cannot be pursued in a time of collective crisis. My daughter's birth also signals a new stage of life where the stakes are much higher: I am charged not just with her survival and flourishing, but with the preservation of my family. My parents are getting older and will lose the ability to take care of themselves at some point. Will I be strong enough to take care of them? We are inching closer to crossing swords with China—will we be pulled into a total war (short of nuclear weapons use) if it turns hot? The ability to optimize, to make plans for the future, is all conditional on good material conditions. We cannot know if those will hold, and we cannot take them for granted. With the benefit of hindsight, it will be easy to see if we were on the verge of falling off a cliff, but as Musil demonstrates, it is very difficult to see it coming.