Title: The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity
Abstract: McBride, Patrizia C, The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006.231 pp. $75.95 hardcover. Musil's writing is suffused with an impulse, culminating in the quest of Ulrich, the protagonist of The Man Without Qualities, to seek answers to the question, How should I live? (MwQ II, 972). At the center of Musil's literary-philosophical project, McBride cogently shows in her superbly crafted book, lies the effort to create model of ethics that relinquished the longing for absolute principles in favor of contingent coordinates more suited for coping with a modernity defined by decenteredness and devoid of a metaphysical outside (96). In the introduction and the three opening chapters McBride covers familiar territory in an intelligent, succinct, and eloquent fashion. Musil differs from most of his contemporaries in welcoming the collapse of metaphysical certainties in modernity as a challenge that potentially opens up liberating possibilities for human conduct. Rather than bemoaning the loss of traditional religious or philosophical certainties or seeking to reestablish a stable system of rules, Musil's writing aims at productively coming to terms with this ethical void, seen as constitutive of the human condition itself (8). Chapter one shows how Torless, the adolescent protagonist of Musil's debut novel, overcomes his sexual, ethical, and epistemological crisis by learning to accept this split inherent in modern subjectivity. The second chapter focuses on Musil's early short prose as evidence of his efforts to develop a scientifically rigorous functional mode of thought in which all human actions are seen as embedded in a complex network of conditions and contextual factors that mitigate against apodictic moral evaluation based on set rules. Chapter three is devoted to the theoretical essays, primarily from the 1920s, that formulate Musil's literary program: the war had made manifest the bankruptcy of intellectual systems based on illusions of wholeness and stability, revealing the violent potential inherent in any totalizing world view. In opposition to the cultural pessimism of thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages, Musil in his nondogmatic empiricism (25) formulated an experimental and open-ended mode of inquiry, fundamentally rethinking the relation between ethics and aesthetics in a radically disparate and de-centered world. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 17
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