by Robert Musil
It seemed to Ulrich quite remarkable that this sometimes paralyzed condition of the emotions, which forms the basis of both scientific investigation and everyday behavior, has a subsidiary counterpoint in that the canceling of emotions is also encountered as a characteristic of earthly life. For the influence our emotions exercise on the mind’s impartial representations, those things that maintain their validity as being true and indispensable, cancels itself out more or less completely over a long enough period of time, as well as over the breadth of matter that gets piled up; and the influence of the emotions on the mind’s non-impartial representations, on those unsteady ideas and ideologies, thoughts, views, and mental attitudes born out of changeable emotions, which dominate historical life both sequentially and in juxtaposition, also cancels itself out, even if it does so in opposition to certainty, even if it cancels itself out to worse than nothing, to contingency, to impotent disorder and vacillation— in short, to what Ulrich exasperatedly called the “business of the emotions.”
Now that he read it again, he would have liked to work out this point more precisely but couldn’t, because the written train of thought that ended here, trailing off in a few further catchwords, required that he bring more important things to a conclusion. For if we project the intellectual image of the world, the one that corresponds to reality (even if it is always just an image, it is the right image), on the assumption of a specific state of the emotions, the question arises of what would happen if we were to be just as effectively controlled not by it but by other emotional states. That this question is not entirely nonsensical can be seen in that every strong affect distorts our image of the world in its own way, and a deeply melancholy person, or one who is constitutionally cheerful, could object to the “fancies” of a neutral and evenhanded person, saying that it is not so much because of their blood that they are gloomy or cheerful as on account of their experiences in a world that is full of heavy gloom or heavenly frivolity. And so, however an image of the world may be imagined based on the predominance of an emotion or a group of emotions, including for instance the orgiastic, it can also be based on bringing emotions in general to the fore, as in the ecstatic and emotional frame of mind of an individual or a community; it is a normal everyday experience that the world is depicted differently on the basis of specific groups of ideas and that life is lived in different ways up to the point of obvious insanity.
Ulrich was not in the least minded to consider that understanding was an error, or the world an illusion, and yet it seemed to him admissible to speak not only of an altered picture of the world but also of another world, if instead of the tangible emotion that serves adaptation to the world some other emotion predominates. This other world would be “unreal” in the sense that it would be deprived of almost all objectivity: it would contain no ideas, computations, decisions, and actions that were adapted to nature, and dissension among people would perhaps fail to appear for quite some time but, once present, would be almost impossible to heal. Ultimately, however, that would differ from our world only in degree, and about that possibility only the question can decide whether a humanity living under such conditions would still be capable of carrying on with its life, and whether it could achieve a certain stability in the coming and going of attacks from the outer world and in its own behavior. And there are many things that can be imagined as subtracted from reality or replaced by other things, without people being unable to live in a world so constituted. Many things are capable of reality and the world that do not occur in a particular reality or world.
Ulrich was not exactly satisfied with this after he had written it down, for he did not want it to appear as if all these possible realities were equally justified. He stood up and paced back and forth in his study. Something was still missing, some land of distinction between “reality” and “full reality,” or the distinction between “reality for someone” and “real reality,” or in other terms, an exposition of the distinctions of rank was missing between the claim to the validity of reality and world, and a motivation for our claiming a priority dependent on conditions impossible to fulfill for what seems to us to be real and true under all conditions, a priority that is true only under certain conditions. For on the one hand an animal, too, adapts splendidly to the world, and because it certainly does not do so in complete darkness of soul, there must be even in the animal something that corresponds to human ideas of world and reality without it having to be, on that account, even remotely similar; and on the other hand we don’t possess true reality but can merely refine our ideas about it in an infinite, ongoing process, while in the hurly-burly of life we even use juxtaposed ideas of quite varying degrees of profundity, such as Ulrich himself had encountered in the course of this very hour in the example of a table and a lovely woman. But after having thought it over in approximately this fashion, Ulrich was rid of his restlessness and decided that it was enough; for what might still be said about this subject was not reserved for him, and not for this hour, either. He merely convinced himself once more that there was presumably nothing in his formulation that would be expected to impede a more precise exposition, and for honors sake he wrote a few words to indicate what was missing.
And when he had done this he completely interrupted his activity, looked out the window into the garden lying there in the late-afternoon light, and even went down for a while in order to expose his head to the fresh air. He was almost afraid that he could now assert either too much or too little; for what was still waiting to be written down by him seemed to him more important than anything else.
58
ULRICH AND THE TWO WORLDS OF EMOTION
“Where would be the best place to begin?” Ulrich asked himself as he wandered around the garden, the sun burning his face and hands in one place, and the shadow of cooling leaves falling on them in another. “Should I begin right away with every emotion existing in the world in binary fashion and bearing within itself the origin of two worlds as different from each other as day and night? Or would I do better to mention the significance that sobered feeling has for our image of the world, and then come conversely to the influence that the image of the world born from our actions and knowledge exercises on the picture of our emotions that we create for ourselves? Or should I say that there have already been states of ecstasy, which I have sketchily described as worlds in which emotions do not mutually cancel each other out?” But even while he was asking himself these questions, he had already made up his mind to begin with everything at the same time; for the thought that made him so anxious that he had interrupted his writing had as many associations as an old friendship, and there was no longer any way of saying how or when it had arisen. While he was trying to put things in order, Ulrich had moved closer and closer to this thought—and it was only on his own account that he had taken it up—but now that he had come to the end, either clarity or emptiness would have to emerge behind the dispersing mists. The moment when he found the first decisive words was not a pleasant one: “In every feeling there are two fundamentally opposed possibilities for development, which usually fuse into one; but they can also come into play individually, and that chiefly happens in a state of ecstasy!”
He proposed to call them, for the time being, the outer and the inner development, and to consider them from the most harmless side. He had a crowd of examples at his disposal: liking, love, anger, mistrust, generosity, disgust, envy, despair, fear, desire…, and he mentally ordered them into a series. Then he set up a second series:
affability, tenderness, irritation, suspicion, high-spiritedness, anxiety, and longing, lacking only those links for which he could not find any name, and then he compared the two series. One contained specific emotions, chiefly as they are aroused in us by a specific encounter; the second contained nonspecific emotions, which are strongest when aroused by some unknown cause. And yet in both cases it was the same emotions, in one case in a general, in the other in a specific state. “So I would say,” Ulrich thought,
“that in every emotion there is a distinction to be made between a development toward specificity and a development toward nonspecificity. But before doing that, it would first be better to list all the distinctions this involves.”
He could have toted up most of them in his sleep, but they will seem familiar to anyone who substitutes the word “moods” for the “nonspecific emotions” from which Ulrich had formed his second series, although Ulrich deliberately avoided this term. For if one makes a distinction between emotion and mood, it is readily apparent that the “specific emotion” is always directed toward something, originates in a life situation, has a goal, and expresses itself in more or less straightforward behavior, while a mood demonstrates approximately the opposite of all these things: it is encompassing, aimless, widely dispersed, and idle, and no matter how clear it may be, it contains something indeterminate and stands ready to engulf any object without anything happening and without itself changing in the process. So a specific attitude toward something corresponds to the specific emotion, and a general attitude toward everything corresponds to the nonspecific emotion: the one draws us into action, while the other merely allows us to participate from behind a colorful window.
For a moment Ulrich dwelt on this distinction between how specific and nonspecific emotions relate to the world. He said to himself: “I will add this: Whenever an emotion develops toward specificity, it focuses itself, so to speak, it constricts its purposiveness, and it finally ends up both internally and externally in something of a blind alley; it leads to an action or a resolve, and even if it should not cease to exist in one or the other, it continues on, as changed as water leaving a mill. If, on the other hand, it develops toward nonspecificity, it apparently has no energy at all. But while the specifically developed emotion is reminiscent of a creature with grasping arms, the nonspecific emotion changes the world in the same way the sky changes its colors, without desire or self, and in this form objects and actions change like the clouds. The attitude of the nonspecific emotion to the world has in it something magical and—God help me!—in comparison to the specific attitude, something feminine!” This is what Ulrich said to himself, and then something occurred to him that took him far afield: for of course it is chiefly the development toward a specific emotion that brings with it the fragility and instability of the life of the soul. That the moment of feeling can never be sustained, that emotions wilt more quickly than flowers, or transform themselves into paper flowers if one tries to preserve them, that happiness and will, art and conviction, pass away: all this depends on the specificity of the emotion, which always imposes on it a purposiveness and forces it into the pace of life that dissolves or changes it. On the other hand, the emotion that persists in its nonspecificity and boundlessness is relatively impervious to change. A comparison occurred to him: “The one dies like an individual, the other lasts like a kind or species.” In this arrangement of the emotions there is perhaps repeated in reality, even if very indirectly, a general arrangement of life; he was not able to gauge this but did not stop over it, for he thought he saw the main argument more clearly than he ever had before.
He was now ready to return to his study, but he waited, because he wanted to mull over the entire plan in his head before putting it down on paper. “I spoke of two possibilities of development and two states of one and the same emotion,” he reflected, “but then there must also be present at the origin of the emotion, of course, something to initiate the process. And the drives that feed our soul with a life that is still close to animal blood actually demonstrate this bipartite disposition. A drive incites to action, and this appears to be its major task; but it also tunes the soul. If the drive has not yet found a target, its nebulous expanding and stretching become quite apparent; indeed, there will be many people who see precisely this as the sign of an awakening drive—for example, the sex drive—but of course there is a longing of hunger and other drives. So the specific and the nonspecific are present in the drive. 1*11 add,” Ulrich thought, “that the bodily organs that are involved when the external world arouses an affect in us can on other occasions produce this affect themselves if they receive a stimulus from within; and that’s all it takes to arrive at a state of ecstasy!”
Then he reflected that according to the results of research, and especially after his discussion of these results in his diaries, it was also to be assumed that the impulse for one emotion can always serve for another emotion, too, and that no emotion, in the process of its shaping and strengthening, ever comes to an entirely specifiable end. But if that was true, then not only would no emotion ever attain its total specificity, but in all probability it would not attain perfect nonspecificity either, and there was neither an entirely specific nor an entirely nonspecific emotion. And in truth it almost always happens that both possibilities combine in a common reality, in which merely the characteristics of one or the other predominate. There is no “mood” that does not also include specific emotions that form and dissolve again; and there is no specific emotion that, at least where it can be said to “radiate,” “seize,” “operate out of itself,” “extend itself,” or operate on the world “directly,” without an external emotion, does not allow the characteristics of the nonspecific emotion to peer through. There are certainly, however, emotions that closely approximate the one or the other.
Of course the terms “specific” and “nonspecific” involve the disadvantage that even a specific emotion is always insufficiently specified and is in this sense nonspecific; but that should probably be easy to distinguish from significant nonspecificity. “So all that remains is to settle why the particularity of the nonspecific emotion, and the whole development leading up to it, is taken to be less real than its counterpart,” Ulrich thought. “Nature contains both. So the different ways they are treated are probably connected with the external development of emotion being more important for us than the inner development, or with the direction of specificity meaning more to us than that of nonspecificity. If this were not so, our life would truly have to be a different one than it is! It is an inescapable peculiarity of European culture that every minute the ‘inner world’ is proclaimed the best and most profound thing life has to offer, without regard for the fact that this inner world is treated as merely an annex of the outer world. And how this is done is frankly the secret balance sheet of this culture, even though it is an open secret: the external world and the “personality” are set off against each other. The assumption is that the outer world stimulates in a person inner processes that must enable that person to respond in an appropriate fashion; and by mentally setting up this pathway leading from a change in the world through the change in a person to a further change in the world, one derives the peculiar ambiguity that permits us to honor the internal world as the true sphere of human grandeur and yet to presuppose that everything taking place within it has the ultimate task of flowing outward in the form of an orderly external action.”
The thought went through Ulrich’s mind that it would be rewarding to consider our civilization’s attitude toward religion and culture in this sense, but it seemed to him more important to keep to the direction his thoughts had been following. Instead of “inner world,” one could simply say “emotions,” for they in particular are in the ambiguous position of actually being this inwardness and yet are mostly treated as a shadow of the world outside; and this of course was involved with everything that Ulrich thought he could distinguish as the inner and nonspecific development of emotions. This is already shown in that the expressions we use to describe inner governing processes are almost all derived from external processes; for we obviously transpose the active kind of external happening onto the differently constituted inner events even in representing the latter as an activity, whether we call it an emanation, a switching on or off, a taking hold, or something similar. For these images, derived from the outer world, have become accepted and current for the inner world only because we lack better ones to apprehend it. Even those s
cientific theories that describe the emotions as an interpenetration or juxtaposition on an equal footing of external and internal actions make a concession to this custom, precisely because they ordinarily speak of acting and overlook pure inwardness’s remoteness from acting. And for these reasons alone, it is simply inevitable that the inner development of emotions usually appears to us as a mere annex to their external development, appears indeed to be its repetition and muddying, distinguishing itself from the outer development through less sharply defined forms and hazier connections, and thus evoking the somewhat neglected impression of being an incidental action.
But of course what is at stake is not simply a form of expression or a mental priority; what we “really’ feel is itself dependent on reality in hundreds of ways and is therefore also dependent on the specific and external development of emotions to which the development of inner and nonspecific emotions subordinates itself, by which the latter are, as it were, blotted up. “It shouldn’t depend on the details,” Ulrich resolved, “yet it could probably be shown in every detail not only that the concept we create for ourselves has the task of service-ably integrating its ‘subjective’ element into our ideas about reality, but also that in feeling itself, both dispositions merge in a holistic process that unites their outer and inner development in very unequal fashion. Simply stated: we are acting beings; for our actions we need the security of thinking; therefore we also need emotions capable of being neutralized—and our feeling has taken on its characteristic form in that we integrate it into our image of reality, and not the other way around, as ecstatics do. Just for that reason, however, we must have within us the possibility of turning our feeling around and experiencing our world differently!”