Turning in circles, Kyoto as seasons shift, Robert Musil's untimely reflections a century later; these themes from an earlier note I found myself revisiting. Some of this was prompted by a conversation I’ll be sharing later this week, which tries to think through the present moment, partly in reference to parallels and thinkers from fin de siècle Europe. Musil spoke of this period as a ‘time devoid of ordering concepts’, a description that might be applicable to our current condition. With that in mind, this note explores how Musil sought to make sense of the world.
This sense of progress is not pleasant. It reminds you, in the most extreme way, of a dream in which you are seated on a horse and cannot get off, because the horse never stands still. You would gladly take pleasure in progress, if only it took a pause. If only we could stop for a moment on our high horse, look back, and say to the past: Look where I am now! But already the uncanny process continues, and after experiencing it several times, you begin to feel queasy in the stomach with those four strange legs trotting beneath you, constantly carrying you forward.
'Art Anniversary'
Progress itself is not something that unfolds in a single line. Every present period is simultaneously now and yet millennia old. This millipede moves on political, economic, cultural, biological, and countless other legs, each of which has a different tempo and rhythm.
'Mind and Experience: Notes for Readers Who Have Eluded the Decline of the West'
These are two attempts by Musil to describe an idea the Great War had left in tatters. Both evoke similar themes - a creature moving, doing so largely of its own volition and at its own pace - but each emphasises slightly different features. The imagery of the horse captures that feeling of being carried by a force outside one's control; jerky, uneven, uncomfortable. The mild sense of vertigo that one gets when facing a world relentlessly moving forward, combined with the unreality that exists in a dream. With the millipede, he pointed to the difficulties of providing clear explanations:
One simply explains the World War or our collapse first by this, then by that cluster of causes; but this is deceptive. Just as fraudulent as explaining a simple physical event by a chain of causes. In reality, even in the first links of the chain of causality the causes have already flowed and dissolved beyond the scope of our vision.
Musil was not denying the presence of causes, but doubting our capacity to comprehend all of what was present and determinative. Indeed, he questioned those who presented the Great War as a decisive break, and suggested that, ‘everything that has appeared in the War and after the War was already there.’ It is not just elephants that blind men struggle with, we feel different parts of a millipede, and then guess.
Throughout his work, Musil searched for what can be sensed but not fully grasped, what exists at the edge of our comprehension. In The Man Without Qualities he wrote, 'however understandable and self-contained everything seems, that is accompanied by an obscure feeling that it is only half the story.' Awareness without full understanding, appreciating enough to know something is missing, but not being able to precisely locate what that is.
Responding to this condition Musil turned to the format of the essay, which ‘explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it’. In this sense, it matches and echoes our capacities for knowing the world. Thomas Harrison suggests that for Musil the essay was effectively an ethos: ‘human understanding itself as a continuously unfurling inquiry, striving always for something it has not quite said, continually reshaping its forms and methods, rethinking its suppositions.’ The essay embodies a search for comprehension imbued with a spirit of experimentation and openness.
A vital part of Musil's thought was ‘a sense of possibility’ and how that interacts with ‘a sense of reality’. This interplay between what is and what might be shapes our world and our actions within it. The present and the possible sitting together, in conversation. Given this way of thinking, it is not surprising Musil repeatedly referred to circles, his approach is one of the ouroboros. In the second volume of The Man Without Qualities, he wrote:
The paths soon turned back upon themselves. The state of mind induced in both of them by walking on these paths eddied in circles, as a rising current does behind a dam.
What I am trying to explore are different ways of seeing and knowing the world, of recognising what might be present but not yet voiced, looking for the other half of the story. Insofar as we are struggling to name and comprehend the conditions we find ourselves in, part of the problem might lie in our tendency to revert to ill-fitting categories and crude conceptualisations. In the process, we risk misapprehending what is present and what might be taking shape.
In an information environment that favours causes, correlations and certitude, there is something remarkable freeing in adopting an approach that turns on itself. The challenge is in seeing anew, looking for what is already present but not fully apprehended, and in doing so, reckoning with how to live and act in the empire of twilight.