Robert Musil and the Question of Science: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Problem of the Two Cultures. By Tim Mehigan. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020. 180 pages. $90.00 hardcover, $24.99 e-book.

In Robert Musil and the Question of Science: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Problem of the Two Cultures, Tim Mehigan explores how Robert Musil probes the potential and the limits of scientific knowledge in everyday life and in the ethical quest for the “right way to live.” Robert Musil lends himself particularly well to such an inquiry: trained as a student in the fields of engineering, philosophy, mathematics, and experimental psychology, he valued scientific knowledge, and he strongly opposed his contemporaries’ propensity to hail the obscure forces of life, intuition, or irrationalism. His technological and scientific expertise, however, made him keenly aware of the limitations of scientific inquiry in the ethical realm. Musil’s attempt to bring into dialogue what C.P. Snow termed the “two cultures” and his effort to bridge the divide between reason and mysticism find a powerful illustration in Ulrich’s call for a “World Secretariat of Precision and Soul” in Chapter 116 of The Man Without Qualities. This unfinished novel also illustrates the challenges linked to such an endeavor, and it exemplifies the unresolved tensions between literature and science.

Tim Mehigan’s book is divided into two main sections. The first part, “Musil and the Two Cultures,” examines Musil’s early contribution to the “two-culture debate” and the centrality of the question of science in his work (Chapter One). Specifically, Mehigan explores Musil’s lifelong engagement with Ernst Mach’s thinking (Chapter Two). In his dissertation, Musil criticized Mach’s shortcomings and metaphysical assumptions. This critique was in line with the deep reservations of his dissertation advisor, Carl Stumpf, about Mach’s theories. Yet, as Mehigan aptly emphasizes, Mach’s psycho-physical monism, functionalism, rejection of causality, and deconstruction of the Ego had a lasting impact on Musil’s work, from The Confusions of Young Törless (1906) to The Man Without Qualities (1930–32), a title that echoes Mach’s rejection of essentialist definitions of the self. The subsequent chapters on “Musil’s Theory of Vision” (Chapter Three) and “The Essays” (Chapter Four) trace how Musil’s scientific and technological lens disrupts the ordinary and humanist ways of seeing, and how his decontextualizing and destabilizing gaze opens up “new possibilities of understanding” (60). Similarly, while Musil’s essays and the essayist form broaden literature’s conceptual resources, they also question the overreliance on scientific rationality—what Musil coins the “ratioid” domain—especially in the realm of ethics.

The second part of the book, “Aesthetics and Ethics in the Context of the Two Cultures,” further explores Musil’s ethical stance and his attempt to promote literature as a form of knowledge in its own terms. If modernity’s crisis elicits a greater sense of contingency and indeterminacy, thus challenging the idea of the sovereign subject (Chapter Five), Musil responds to this crisis by asserting the value and the primacy of singularity. The focus on singularity—which Mehigan traces in the short piece “The Flypaper”—testifies to the relevance of Nietzsche’s thinking in Musil’s work. In contrast to a morality based on a strict adherence to rules, Musil promotes a situational and contextual ethics that needs to be constantly reimagined and that embraces Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values (Chapter Six).

The emphasis on singularity is also at the core of Unions (1911), a rigorous investigation of inner states, which Mehigan views as an exemplification of Musil’s feeling-based—rather than rational—ethics (Chapter Seven). Similarly, Mehigan highlights Musil’s quest for a singular and non-systemic approach by contrasting Musil’s conception of trust with Luhmann’s systems analysis and his understanding of trust as a mechanism of complexity reduction (Chapter Eight). Musil’s “radically individual ethics” (148) also finds a powerful illustration in “The Blackbird,” in which mystical experiences are depicted as more meaningful than a skeptical and rational approach (Chapter Nine).

In the conclusion to the volume, Mehigan assesses Musil’s work in light of the digital revolution—a fourth revolution of knowledge that further decenters the individual subject since machines achieve knowledge on their own. According to him, Musil not only anticipated the fourth revolution, but he was also a precursor of “posthumanism” and a promotor of a post-rational ethics that tries to balance the conflicting demands of exemplarity and singularity.

Tim Mehigan’s study rightfully brings to the fore key features of Musil’s literary agenda: his reliance on scientific knowledge, the key influences of Mach and Nietzsche, his turning away from Kant’s categorical imperative in order to promote an ethics based on singularity, his attempts to find a way out of the sterile opposition between adherence to rationality and the cultivation of intuition and feelings, and his vision of literature as a privileged terrain for imagining new ethical possibilities.

This study, however, remains wanting in several respects. First, as Mehigan himself notes, this volume has a “complex evolution” (vii) and grew out of a series of previously published articles—some of them in German—which were then translated into English. The result is a book that lacks cohesion. The reader is confronted with scattered chapters that feel disconnected from one another overall, and occasionally repeat the same claims or the same quotes. Second, the status of science and the influence of Mach and Nietzsche in Musil’s work have already been the subject of numerous studies. Mehigan does acknowledge the existing scholarship. For the purpose of delineating his own position, he discusses in detail specific studies by Jonsson and Kümmel (86–91) and McBride (100–106). The problem is that this critical discussion of secondary literature takes place at the expense of an actual engagement with Musil’s text. Third, the generality of the argument undercuts its effectiveness. The book’s remarks on the influence of Gestalt psychology are vague and sketchy. More broadly, the book fails to analyze how Musil integrates—and critically dialogues with—scientific knowledge. No mention is made, for instance, of the parodic intent of the weather report in the opening paragraph of The Man Without Qualities, although this parody of scientific jargon would substantiate Mehigan’s claim that science alone is unable to provide helpful orientation in life. Similarly, the reading of the “The Flypaper” as a “touching insight into the fly’s ‘subjectivity’” (97) would need further elaboration. As Christoph Hoffmann (2011) and Ewout van der Knaap (1998) have demonstrated, what the narrator takes for the eye of the fly at the end of the parable is in fact part of its respiratory system: there is no glancing back from the fly, and the parable mostly reveals the lure of anthropomorphic projections and hermeneutic illusions. The fly’s “otherwise unseen inner life” (97) remains out of reach. Musil’s short prose piece thus highlights the limits of both the scientific and literary gaze. Mehigan’s book hints at these challenges and suggests that the question of science cannot be dissociated from an investigation of the kind of knowledge literature can provide, especially with regards to the problem of ethics. One wishes that this important line of inquiry had been developed to its full potential.