48 Essays 1911-1914 [On the Essay] 1914? This is probably Musils most important statement of his conception of the nature of the essay as an intermediate and mediating form of discourse be- tween morality and life and between science and art. Musil approach to this problem is unusual in that he was a writer who was also highly trained as a mathematician and scientist and deeply read in philosophy, and the form of the essay offered a congenial place in which he could bring these areas and problems together and confront them. For me, ethics and aesthetics are associated with the word essay. It is said to come from “weighing,” and is mostly used by scholars only to characterize the smaller excrescences, those not written with full com- mitment, of their life's work; it is also called “attempt.” I can also make use of it in this latter sense, to which, however, I would like to give a different content. Is the essay something left over in an area where one can work pre- cisely. . . . Or: the strictest form attainable in an area where one cannot work precisely. I will seek to demonstrate the second case. Description of the field: on one side lies the domain of epistemology, the science of knowledge. On the other side, the domain of life and art. At the outset it cannot be put any more exactly; for this reason we must ask how the domain of knowledge is circumscribed. For our purposes it is not best to say that it excludes subjectivity completely; “completely” goes too far. For a certain cold, rational subjectivity is preserved, but there are spontaneous and accidental factors as well. We might better say: Its results are objective. It is dominated by the criterion of truth. This is an objective criterion; it lies in the nature of the field. There are mathematical and logical truths. There are facts and a combining of facts that are generally valid. That are system- atic or in accord with laws. In both cases—and at the same time this is the Teast of the claims we make for them—they admit a far-reaching spiritual order. ‘And there are areas that do not admit of such an order. Try detaching from writers’ books the characters they have charmed into them, and apply- ing to this fictional society the moral laws of human society. One will find that every book-person consists of several people, that he is simultaneously good and reprehensible, that he has no character, is not consistent, does not act causally; in short, that there is no way one can order and classify the{Onthe Essay] 49 moral forces that move him. One can indicate for this person no other path than the accidental path determined by the action of the book. The question whether Térless was right or wrong to torture Basini, whether, further, his indifference to this question is to be taken as a sign of right or wrong, simply cannot be answered. The question why it does not even arise could be answered only in a genuine essay.—As people belonging to a moral circle, with duties, obligations, and intentions, we read a poem and, as we read, all this changes a little in a fashion that can be pinned down almost only by feelings, which quickly dissipate. —Something similar may be said of those experiences we undergo in unusual moments such as those of love, of an anger out of the ordinary, or of any unaccustomed relation to people and things. The essay lies between these two areas. It takes its form and method from science, its matter from art. (The expression “from life” is not correct, because it encompasses the matter of laws as well. What in life is analogous to art is what was meant above by the “area of life.”) The essay seeks to establish an order. It presents not characters but a connection of thoughts, that is, a logical connection, and it proceeds from facts, like the natural sci- ences, to which the essay imparts an order. Except that these facts are not generally observable, and also their connections are in many cases only a singularity. There is no total solution, but only a series of particular ones. But the essay does present evidence, and investigates. Maetferlinck]’ once said: Instead of a truth the essay gives three good probabilities. We will later raise the question when such a probability is to be called “good.” But for the moment we would like to ask once again how there can be areas in which it is not truth that dominates, and in which prob- ability is something more than an approach to truth. It must lie in the nature of the objects. That which is logical in an ex- tended sense remains the same. Heretofore, to be sure, the distinction had been sought in such an extended sense of the function. Intuitive knowing was placed in opposition to the ordinary kind, and the attempt was made to derive from intuitive knowing the dignity of mystical knowledge. There is also intuition in the purely rational sphere. Beyond this, this conception is applied scientifically to. . . . But the mystical function is not this intuition, but a far more encompassing and conceptually less pure one. Man not only thinks, he feels, desires, senses, acts. Just as there are purely automatic ac- tions without the participation of thought, so there are also purely rational ideas without the participation of the feelings or the will. And there are others as well. When a thought seizes us, bowls us over, etc., it does in the area of feelings what a revolutionary insight does in the purely rational area. The depth of its effect is a sign of how great masses of feeling are em-50 Essays 1911-1914 pathetically involved. Masses: for here it is not a question of feelings in the narrower sense of the term, but of basic feelings, dispositions of feeling, out of which individuality is composed. This is still a largely uninvestigated area. But one can assume that one factor here is the general emotional makeup of the individual, what has been called temperament, reactivity, stimulatability, etc.; a relatively stable state. Another factor is the personal experiences, including mental ones. These are preserved in a series of com- plexes interwoven with trains of thought. Depression is a so-called emo- tional disorder, but it consolidates its dominance with the aid of connected ideas which it colors. Philosophical pessimism, stoicism, Epicurean wisdom, are by no means simply rational structures, but also experiences. Now a rational course of thought can be true or false, as can an affective one, but aside from that it “speaks to us” or doesn’t speak to us. And there are trains of thought that really work only through the mode of feelings. For a person who has no ear for them they are completely confusing and incomprehen- sible. But here it is nevertheless visibly a matter of an entirely legitimate means of understanding, even if it is not of binding general validity. The number of such ways of reaching understanding among people is moreover greater than assumed (chimpanzee couples, effect of a leader through cha- risma, etc.). Even the individual person has the experience that the same thought can be dead for him at one time, a mere series of words, alive at another. This sudden coming alive of an idea, this lightninglike reforging of a great complex of feeling (most penetratingly imaged in Sauls becoming Paul) by means of the idea, so that one suddenly understands the world and oneself differently: this is intuitive knowledge in the mystical sense. On a smaller scale it is the constant movement of essayistic thought. Feelings, ideas, complexes of will are involved in it. These are not excep- tional functions, but on the contrary normal ones. But the thread of an idea tears the other functions out of their situation, and their rearrangement— even if it is only virtual—conditions the understanding, the resonance, the second dimension of the idea. Since the difference does not lie in the function, it can only be grounded in the nature of the field. We know how much more limited the circle of our knowledge is than that of our interests. We now exclude mystical interests because their object is metaphysical and because they claim superior knowledge, while we claim for the essay only the reshaping of what is human. Maeterlinck, Emerson, Nietzsche, in part Epicurus, the Stoics: leaving aside the transcendental, the mystics, but also Dilthey, Taine, and nomotheticLiterary Chronicle 51 historical research, all belong in the circle of the essay. Here lies the human branch of religion. We are confronting a new division of intellectual activity. That which is directed at knowledge, and that which is directed at a transformation of man. Complexes of feeling struggle for dominance. Leading ideas of centuries or generations. New kinds of relationships among people are showing up. Now of course a rational reworking of the various results is valuable. At least a systematic ordering. It is simply that it must struggle with difficulties that can never be entirely overcome because of the ambiguity of expression. History of the spiritual movement. Postscripts: Here Hegel’s triple scheme of the rise of the concept is deter- minant. Rathenau is the example of the degeneration of an essayist into a philos[ophical] dilettante. A further boundary area of essayism is political writing in the daily press. It is exploitative without increasing the resources. Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, Lassalle.* The lack of systematic thinking determines that people write poetry and live like swine. Determines Romanticism, Expres- sionism, eccentricity. Speaking past one another. Literary Chronicle 1914? Musil shows himself bemused at the impulse to write; as akways in these essays, his ironic rumination is directed at himself as well as others. Under- lying it is his serious concern with establishing a proper relationship be- tween the difficult problems of aesthetics and specialization on the one hand, and people’ everyday lives on the other. People who write. If one were to express in miles of line lengths or pounds of paper everything published every year just in Germany, one would im- mediately see that one was dealing with one of the most peculiar of social