Kelly Coble

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authenticity in Robert Musil’s Man Without QualitiesKelly CobleIHow is a man without qualities even possible? The question, also a translation of the title of a recent essay mining the philosophical sources of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, has been a perennial one. The Austrian novelist's portrayal of an existence without the density of particularity has been an object of interminable conjecture.1 In the search for an interpretive foothold, the bulk of Musil's commentators has identified Ernst Mach's "doctrine of elements," with its implication of the anonymity of perception, as the chief inspiration of Musil's portrait of a dispossessed inner life.2 Against this view Cambridge philosopher G. H. von Wright has asserted that Mach's influence was "incidental and without deeper significance to the content of Musil's later thoughts."3 Von Wright notes that Musil rejected Mach's skeptical and phenomenalist theses in his 1908 dissertation on Mach's theories, defending instead a realist position in the philosophy of physics. Yet another commentator has adduced evidence of Musil's persistent engagement in the sort of act-object analysis of states of consciousness that one would expect from a follower of Franz Brentano.4In the following pages I will show that Musil's literary masterpiece rests on a synthesis of Machian and Brentanist motifs. But the main impetus of Musil's presentation of an interior with substitutable qualities was not one or another claim in the domain of modern epistemology, "realism" versus "idealism," "phenomenology" versus "phenomenalism," but a crisis in moral reflection ensuing from a commitment to the standpoint of value-neutral objectivity. This standpoint gains its [End Page 337] appeal when both of the known pathways to moral certainty—both the conservative-traditional one of allegiance to enduring practices and institutions and the liberal-enlightenment one of deference to the universal requirements of reason—appear as blind alleys, as they did to inhabitants of Central Europe after the turn of the century and especially in the aftermath of the Great War. To exist without qualities is to abandon oneself to the purely theoretical outlook, and so to be unable to construct a narrative rendering the episodes of one's life as parts of a process with cumulativeness and direction. To live "without qualities" is to live the loss of moral narrative. Accordingly, the intent of Musil's literary investigations is both to illuminate the conditions of this loss and to assay the conditions of ethical life regained.IIAccording to Mach's doctrine of elements, the isolable sensations that constitute the ultimate points of psychological analysis are the very elements with which the physical sciences also have to deal, albeit the physical sciences deal with these elements in abstraction from their relations to our sense physiology. The core thesis of the doctrine is thus that the "sensations" isolated in psychological analysis are not mental events, ontologically speaking, but rather points of perfect convergence of the domains of psychology and physics. What psychologists call "sensations," namely "colors, tones, warmths, pressures, spaces, times, and so on," constitute "the actually real elements of the world"—albeit before the world has been banished to a shadowy realm of pure substances beyond the limits of perception.5 The ultimate, irreducible constituents of reality are not unanalyzable substances and subjects but associations and complexes of elements that compose the luminous fabric of experience.Mach's doctrine of elements replaces substance dualism with a brand of monism that analytical philosophers have tagged "ontological phenomenalism." Mach believed that widespread subscription to phenomenalism would have a liberating effect on the sciences, enabling empirical researchers to get on with the business of subjecting relatively permanent, relatively stable complexes of perceptual elements to the mathematical formalism that is the goal of the exact natural sciences.There is a widespread assumption that Mach was a sense-datist—an epistemological "pointillist" who replaced substances with dots of pure sensation that, in their aggregation, compose our perceptions. The [End Page 338] assumption is false. In Mach's view the sensations of which we can possibly be conscious are irreducibly features of wholes: "The single sensation is neither conscious nor unconscious. It...

I. Introduction In Groundwork III and in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant famously asserted that “Freiheit und unbedingtes praktisches Gesetz weisen […] wechselsweise auf einander zurück.” Kant's thesis of the analyticity of freedom and practical reason was rejected by his prominent early readers. In the eighth of his influential Letters on Kant's Philosophy of 1786–1787, Karl Leonhard Reinhold argued that the identification of the will with practical reason excluded the possibility of ascribing freedom to immoral and amoral actions. Reinhold proposed that free will consequently be defined in libertarian terms, as the free capacity to satisfy one of two fundamental drives at the expense of the other: either ‘den uneigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Triebfeder der reinen praktischen Vernunft’, or ‘den eigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Begierde und Neigungen’ or ‘Eigenliebe’. Most first-generation commentators followed Reinhold in rejecting Kant's assertion of an analytical relationship between freedom and practical reason, but several came out on the other side, denying freedom in order to secure the identity of will and practical reason. Leonhard Creuzer thus concurred with Reinhold that immoral conduct could not be imputed to the causality of pure reason, or by extension, to the rational agent, but then developed a theory of “transcendental fatalism” according to which immoral actions were the effects of forces from the realm of nature intervening upon, and outweighing, the force of the intelligible ground. Nearly a century later, Hermann Cohen dismissed libertarian freedom as incoherent in itself and as incompatible with autonomy. Across the channel Henry Sidgwick withheld judgment on the coherence of libertarian freedom, but he, too, claimed that such freedom is, at all events, incompatible with the causality of practical reason. More recently, Gerold Prauss has suggested that the perennial difficulties posed by Kant's account of the relationship between freedom and practical reason might be resolved by construing the relationship as a synthetic rather than analytic one. This view has found supporters across the Atlantic.

Hermann Cohen’s early interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom anticipates contemporary interpretations in denying that freedom signifies a literal metaphysical power. Cohen would have been critical, however, of the view popular among contemporary Kantians that the concept of autonomy can be justified by a direct appeal to the standpoint of the one who exercises and evaluates conscious moral choices. Cohen rejects Kant’s own strategy of appealing to the moral law as a “revelation” of freedom, undertaking a strictly transcendental derivation of both freedom and morality. Cohen’s own attempt to ground freedom and morality in a set of purely transcendental refl ections is a failure, but understanding the reasons for this failure enables us to draw important conclusions about the alleged priority of the value of autonomy in the normative domain, and hence about the contemporary viability of Kantian positions in the field of ethics.

Kant's moral theory has received trenchant criticism for its rigorism. Rigorism generally denotes an overemphasis on rules in moral theory, and a consequent neglect of the roles of emotional receptivity and perception in moral judgement. Critics of Kant's ethics have invoked the term rigorism with reference to any one of three overlapping features of Kant's moral theory. Usually rigorism designates the 'rigid and insensitive uniformities of conduct' that result from the mechanical application of rules. Occasionally it refers to the excessively strict moral standard implied by Kant's conception of the good will. But some critics object to rigorism in just the sense in which Kant himself understood and embraced it: as referring to moral theories that admit only two types of moral character, namely good and evil ones. The complaint, which Kant was fully aware of, is that this bipolar view of character is woefully inadequate to our experience of the gradations of virtue and vice.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authenticity in Robert Musil’s Man Without QualitiesKelly CobleIHow is a man without qualities even possible? The question, also a translation of the title of a recent essay mining the philosophical sources of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, has been a perennial one. The Austrian novelist's portrayal of an existence without the density of particularity has been an object of interminable conjecture.1 In the search for an interpretive foothold, the bulk of Musil's commentators has identified Ernst Mach's "doctrine of elements," with its implication of the anonymity of perception, as the chief inspiration of Musil's portrait of a dispossessed inner life.2 Against this view Cambridge philosopher G. H. von Wright has asserted that Mach's influence was "incidental and without deeper significance to the content of Musil's later thoughts."3 Von Wright notes that Musil rejected Mach's skeptical and phenomenalist theses in his 1908 dissertation on Mach's theories, defending instead a realist position in the philosophy of physics. Yet another commentator has adduced evidence of Musil's persistent engagement in the sort of act-object analysis of states of consciousness that one would expect from a follower of Franz Brentano.4In the following pages I will show that Musil's literary masterpiece rests on a synthesis of Machian and Brentanist motifs. But the main impetus of Musil's presentation of an interior with substitutable qualities was not one or another claim in the domain of modern epistemology, "realism" versus "idealism," "phenomenology" versus "phenomenalism," but a crisis in moral reflection ensuing from a commitment to the standpoint of value-neutral objectivity. This standpoint gains its [End Page 337] appeal when both of the known pathways to moral certainty—both the conservative-traditional one of allegiance to enduring practices and institutions and the liberal-enlightenment one of deference to the universal requirements of reason—appear as blind alleys, as they did to inhabitants of Central Europe after the turn of the century and especially in the aftermath of the Great War. To exist without qualities is to abandon oneself to the purely theoretical outlook, and so to be unable to construct a narrative rendering the episodes of one's life as parts of a process with cumulativeness and direction. To live "without qualities" is to live the loss of moral narrative. Accordingly, the intent of Musil's literary investigations is both to illuminate the conditions of this loss and to assay the conditions of ethical life regained.IIAccording to Mach's doctrine of elements, the isolable sensations that constitute the ultimate points of psychological analysis are the very elements with which the physical sciences also have to deal, albeit the physical sciences deal with these elements in abstraction from their relations to our sense physiology. The core thesis of the doctrine is thus that the "sensations" isolated in psychological analysis are not mental events, ontologically speaking, but rather points of perfect convergence of the domains of psychology and physics. What psychologists call "sensations," namely "colors, tones, warmths, pressures, spaces, times, and so on," constitute "the actually real elements of the world"—albeit before the world has been banished to a shadowy realm of pure substances beyond the limits of perception.5 The ultimate, irreducible constituents of reality are not unanalyzable substances and subjects but associations and complexes of elements that compose the luminous fabric of experience.Mach's doctrine of elements replaces substance dualism with a brand of monism that analytical philosophers have tagged "ontological phenomenalism." Mach believed that widespread subscription to phenomenalism would have a liberating effect on the sciences, enabling empirical researchers to get on with the business of subjecting relatively permanent, relatively stable complexes of perceptual elements to the mathematical formalism that is the goal of the exact natural sciences.There is a widespread assumption that Mach was a sense-datist—an epistemological "pointillist" who replaced substances with dots of pure sensation that, in their aggregation, compose our perceptions. The [End Page 338] assumption is false. In Mach's view the sensations of which we can possibly be conscious are irreducibly features of wholes: "The single sensation is neither conscious nor unconscious. It...

Robert Musil's unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities is testimony that Arthur Schopenhauer's legacy in early-twentieth-century European culture cuts across the familiar opposition between neo-romantic irrationalism and scientific positivism. I adduce evidence in Musil's unfinished novel and contemporaneous essays and journal entries that his utopian vision of an integration of ethical inwardness and scientific objectivity, an integration productive of an existence without qualities, is symptomatic of a Schopenhauerian outlook that prevailed in Europe êntre deux guerres and yielded a crisis of narratives and consequent moral ambivalence. Musil's literary style achieves a vivid rendering of the causes and conditions of the ethical paralysis afflicting the modern self committed to the exploration of inwardness.