by Seance » Thu Jan 02, 2020 7:42 pm
I did recently finish reading The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil.
It was a pretty big read (two volumes worth). I think I originally encountered
quotes from it in Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas. At points it was hard to
keep going... but then there are passages like this, which I think perfectly describe
the modern moment even though the novel is set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
before WWI breaks out.
It is often hard, nowadays, to avoid the impression that the concepts and the rules of the moral life are
only metaphors that have been boiled to death, with the revolting greasy kitchen vapors of humanism
billowing around the corpses, and if a digression is permissible at this point, it can only be this, that one
consequence of this impression that vaguely hovers over everything is what our era should frankly call its
reverence for all that is common. For when we lie nowadays it is not so much out of weakness as out of a
conviction that a man cannot prevail in life unless he is able to lie. We resort to violence because, after
much long and futile talk, the simplicity of violence is an immense relief. People band together in
organizations because obedience to orders enables them to do things they have long been incapable of
doing out of personal conviction, and the hostility between organizations allows them to engage in the
unending reciprocity of blood feuds, while love would all too soon put everyone to sleep. This has much
less to do with the question of whether men are good or evil than with the fact that they have lost their
sense of high and low. Another paradoxical result of this disorientation is the vulgar profusion of intellectual
jewelry with which our mistrust of the intellect decks itself out. The coupling of a “philosophy” with
activities that can absorb only a very small part of it, such as politics; the general obsession with turning
every viewpoint into a standpoint and regarding every standpoint as a viewpoint; the need over every kind
of fanatic to keep reiterating the one idea that has ever come his way, like an image multiplied to infinity
in a hall of mirrors: all these wide-spread phenomena, far from signifying a movement towards humanism,
as they wish to do, in fact represent its failure.
—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Pg. 648.