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rfmcdonaldOn New Year's Eve, I noted that in Hervé Guibert's To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, the name for the character corresponding to Michel Foucault--a brilliant philosopher, boldly and dangerously experimental in life, was Muzil.
Friday, I inadvertantly learned through a conversation at work about the German-language Austrian author Robert Musil. As Roger Kimball noted in The New Criterion, in examining Musil's magnum opus The Man Without Qualities, Musil was a man strongly concerned with the problems of individualism in the modern scientific age.
Scientific rationality in this sense is not merely disillusioning; it is radically dehumanizing. It replaces the living texture of experience with a skeleton of "causes," "drives," "impulses," and the like. The enormous power over nature that science has brought man, Musil suggests, is only part of its attraction. Psychologically just as important is the power it gives one to dispense with the human claims of experience. How liberating to know that kindness is just another form of egotism! That beauty is merely a matter of fatty tissues being arranged properly! That every inflection of our emotional life is nothing but the entirely predictable result of glandular activity! Just another, merely, nothing but ... How liberating, how dismissive are these instruments of dispensation—but how untrue, finally, to our experience.
Musil presents scientific rationality as a temptation as well as an accomplishment because he sees that inherent in its view of the world is an invitation to forget one’s humanity.
Guibert was a well-educated multilingual European writer. He had to have known of Musil, and The Man Without Qualities, and his view of modernity. It's interesting, then, that he chose to write about his life and that of Muzil/Foucault in such a modern style, to reveal everything that there was to be known. Arnaud Genon, at Fabula, observes in a review of Jean-Pierre Boulé's Hervé Guibert : L’entreprise de l’écriture du moi that the author argues that "Guibert [. . .] inscrit son corps [dans ses textes], le soumet à diverses expérimentations et même si sa volonté de s’écrire au jour le jour est déjà présente, l’auteur oscille encore entre le conte, le récit, le journal, entre la première et la troisième personne."
Friday, I inadvertantly learned through a conversation at work about the German-language Austrian author Robert Musil. As Roger Kimball noted in The New Criterion, in examining Musil's magnum opus The Man Without Qualities, Musil was a man strongly concerned with the problems of individualism in the modern scientific age.
Musil ridicules the Romanticism of characters like Diotima who condemn science for disenchanting the world with "facts." And yet he seems to side with Ulrich when he explains that "knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion. At bottom, an impermissible mode of conduct: like dipsomania, sex mania, homicidal mania, the compulsion to know forms its own character that is off balance."
In one pivotal chapter, Musil reflects on the "peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical, and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them." This is the key passage:
The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions; notes that eight or nine tenths of a human being consists of water; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic mental by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty tissue; graphs the annual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behavior; sees a connection between ecstasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mouth as the rectal and the oral openings at either end of the same tube—such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human illusions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favor as being impeccably scientific.
Scientific rationality in this sense is not merely disillusioning; it is radically dehumanizing. It replaces the living texture of experience with a skeleton of "causes," "drives," "impulses," and the like. The enormous power over nature that science has brought man, Musil suggests, is only part of its attraction. Psychologically just as important is the power it gives one to dispense with the human claims of experience. How liberating to know that kindness is just another form of egotism! That beauty is merely a matter of fatty tissues being arranged properly! That every inflection of our emotional life is nothing but the entirely predictable result of glandular activity! Just another, merely, nothing but ... How liberating, how dismissive are these instruments of dispensation—but how untrue, finally, to our experience.
Musil presents scientific rationality as a temptation as well as an accomplishment because he sees that inherent in its view of the world is an invitation to forget one’s humanity.
Guibert was a well-educated multilingual European writer. He had to have known of Musil, and The Man Without Qualities, and his view of modernity. It's interesting, then, that he chose to write about his life and that of Muzil/Foucault in such a modern style, to reveal everything that there was to be known. Arnaud Genon, at Fabula, observes in a review of Jean-Pierre Boulé's Hervé Guibert : L’entreprise de l’écriture du moi that the author argues that "Guibert [. . .] inscrit son corps [dans ses textes], le soumet à diverses expérimentations et même si sa volonté de s’écrire au jour le jour est déjà présente, l’auteur oscille encore entre le conte, le récit, le journal, entre la première et la troisième personne."
