by Robert Musil
Of course it was also clear to him that both sorts of people under discussion could signify nothing other than a man “without qualities,” in contrast to one who has every quality that a man can show. The one sort could also be called a nihilist, who dreams of God’s dreams, in opposition to the activist, who in his impatient mode of conduct is, however, also a kind of God-dreamer and nothing less than a realist, who bestirs himself, clear about the world and active in it. “Why, then, aren’t we realists?” Ulrich asked himself. Neither of them was, neither he nor she: their ideas and their conduct had long left no doubt of that; but they were nihilists and activists, sometimes one and sometimes the other, whichever happened to come up.
Further Sketches
1939 - 1941
48
A MENTALITY DIRECTED TOWARD THE SIGNIFICANT,
AND THE BEGINNING OF A CONVERSATION ON THE SUBJECT
If you speak of the double-sided and disorderly way the human being is constituted, the assumption is that you think you can come up with a better one.
A person who is a believer can do that, but Ulrich was not a believer. On the contrary: he suspected faith of inclining to the over-hasty, and whether the content of this spiritual attitude was an earthly inspiration or a supra-earthly notion, even as a mechanism for the forward movement of the soul it reminded him of the impotent attempts of the domestic chicken to fly. Only Agathe caused him to make an exception; he claimed to envy in her that she was able to believe precipitately and with ardor, and he sometimes felt the femininity of her lack of rational discretion as physically as he did one of those other sexual differentiations, knowledge of which arouses a dazzling bliss. He forgave her this unpredictability even when it really seemed to him unforgivable, as in her association with the ridiculous person of Professor Lindner, about whom there was much that his sister did not tell him. He felt the reticence of her bodily warmth beside him and was reminded of a passionate assertion which had it that no person is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, significant or soul-destroying in himself, but his value always depends on whether one believes in him or is skeptical of him. That was an extravagant observation, full of magnanimity but also undermined by vagueness, which allowed all sorts of inferences; and the hidden question of whether this observation was not ultimately traceable to that billy goat of credulity, this fellow Lindner, of whom he knew little more than his shadow, caused a wave to eddy up jealously in the rapid underground river of his thoughts. But as Ulrich thought about this, he could not recall whether it had been Agathe who had made this observation or he himself; the one seemed as possible as the other. As a result of this heady confusion, the wave of jealousy ebbed over all spiritual and physical distinctions in a delicate foam, and he would have liked to voice what his real reservations were about every predisposition to faith. To believe something and to believe in something are spiritual conditions that derive their power from another condition, which they make use of or squander; but this other condition not only was, as seemed most obvious, the solid condition of knowledge but could, on the contrary, be an even more ephemeral state than that of faith itself: and that everything that moved his sister and him pointed precisely in this direction urged Ulrich to speak out, but his ideas were still far from the prospect of pledging himself to it, and therefore he said nothing, but rather changed the subject before he reached that point.
Even a man of genius bears within himself a standard that could empower him to the judgment that in some totally inexplicable fashion things in the world go backward as well as forward; but who is such a man? Originally Ulrich had not had the slightest desire to think about it, but the problem would not let him go, he had no idea why.
“One must separate genius in general from genius as an individual superlative,” he began, but still had not found die right expression. “I sometimes used to think that the only two important species of humans were the geniuses and the blockheads, which don’t intermingle very well. But people of the species ‘genius’ or people of genius, don’t actually need to be geniuses. The genius one gapes at is actually born in the marketplace of the vanities; his splendor is radiated in the mirrors of the stupidity that surround him; it is always connected with something that bestows on it one merit the more, like money or medals: no matter how great his deserts, his appearance is really that of stuffed genius.”
Agathe interrupted him, curious about the other: “Fine, but genius itself?”
“If you pull out of the stuffed scarecrow what is just straw, it would probably have to be what’s left,” Ulrich said, but then bethought himself and added distrustfully: “I’ll never really know what genius is, or who should decide!”
“A senate of wise men!” Agathe said, smiling. She knew her brother’s often quite idiosyncratic way of thinking; he had plagued her with it in many conversations. Her words were meant to remind him rather hypocritically of the famous demand of philosophy, which had not been followed in two thousand years, that the governance of the world ought to be entrusted to an academy of the wisest men.
Ulrich nodded. “That goes back to Plato. And if it could have been brought about, presumably a Platonist would have followed him as leader of the reigning spirit until one day—God knows why—the Plotinists would have been seen as the true philosophers. That’s the way it is, too, with what passes for genius. And what would the Plotinists have made of the Platonists, and before that the Platonists of them, if not what every truth does with error: mercilessly root it out? God proceeded cautiously when he directed that an elephant bring forth only another elephant, and a cat a cat: but a philosopher produces a blind adherent and a counter-philosopher!”
“So God himself had to decide what genius was!” Agathe exclaimed impatiently, not without feeling a soft, proud shudder at this idea and awareness of its precipitate/childish/vehemence.
“I fear it bores him!” Ulrich said. “At least the Christian God. He’s out for hearts, without caring whether they have a lot of understanding or a little. Moreover, I believe that there’s a lot to be said for the church’s contempt for the genius of laymen.”
Agathe waited a bit; then she simply replied: “You used to have a different opinion.”
“I could answer you that the heathen belief that all ideas that move people rested beforehand in the divine spirit must have been quite beautiful; but it’s hard to think of divine emanations, since among the things that mean a lot to us there are ideas called guncotton or tires,” Ulrich countered at once. But then he seemed to waver and to have grown tired of this jocular tone, and suddenly he revealed to his sister what she wanted to know. He said: “I have always believed, and almost as if it’s my nature to, that the spirit, because one feels its power in oneself, also imposes the obligation to make it carry weight in the world. I have believed that to live meaningfully is the only reward, and have wanted never to do anything that was indifferent. And the consequence of this for culture in general may seem an arrogant distortion but is unavoidably this: Only genius is bearable, and average people have to be squeezed to either produce it or allow it to prevail! Mixed in with a thousand other things, something of this is also part of the general persuasion: It’s really humiliating for me to have to respond that I never could say what genius was, and don’t know now either, although just now I indicated casually that I would ascribe this quality less to a particular individual than to a human modality.”
He didn’t seem to mean it so seriously, and Agathe carefully kept the conversation going when he fell silent. “Don’t you yourself find it pretty easy to speak of an acrobat with genius?” she asked. “It seems that today the difficult, the unusual, and whatever is especially successful ordinarily figure in the notion.”
“It began with singers; and if a singer who sings higher than the rest is called a genius, why not someone who jumps higher? By this reasoning you end up with the genius of a pointing dog; and people consider men who won’t let themselves be intimidated by anything to be more worthy than a man who can t
ear his vocal cords out of his throat. Evidently, what’s vague here is a twofold use of language: aside from the genius of success, which can be made to cover everything, so that even the stupidest joke can be, ‘in its fashion,’ a work of genius, there is also the sublimity, dignity, or significance of what succeeds: in other words, some kind of ranking of genius.” A cheerful expression had replaced the seriousness in Ulrich’s eyes, so that Agathe asked what came next, which he seemed to be suppressing.
“It occurs to me that I once discussed the question of genius with our friend Stumm,” Ulrich related, “and he insisted on the usefulness of distinguishing between a military and a civilian notion of genius. But to grasp this distinction, I’ll probably have to tell you something about the world of the Imperial and Royal military. The companies of engineers,”[The German Genie means both “genius” and “engineer”] he went on, “are there to build fortifications and for similar work, and are made up of soldiers and subalterns and officers who don’t have any particular future unless they pass a ‘Higher Engineer[/Genius] Course,’ after which they land on the ‘Engineering [/Genius] Staff.’ ‘So in the military, the Engineer [/Genius] Staffer stands above the engineer [/genius],’ says Stumm von Bordwehr. ‘And at the very top, of course, there is the General Staff, because that is absolutely the cleverest thing God has done.’ So although Stumm always enjoys playing the antimilitarist, he tried to convince me that the proper usage of ‘genius’ can really be found only in the military and is graded in steps, while all civilian chatter about genius is regrettably lacking in such order. And the way he twists everything so that you really see to the bottom of truth, it wouldn’t be at all a bad idea for us to follow his primer!”
But what Ulrich added to this concerning the dissimilar notions of genius was aimed less at the highest degree of genius than at its basic form, the significant, whose doubtfulness seemed to him more painful and confusing. It seemed to him easier to arrive at a judgment about what was exceptionally significant than about the significant in general. The first is merely a step beyond something whose value is already unquestioned, that is, something which is always grounded in a more or less traditional order of spiritual values; the latter, on the other hand, calls for taking the first step into an indefinite and infinite space, which offers almost no prospect of allowing a cogent distinction to be made between what is significant and what is not. So it is natural for language instead to have stuck with the genius of degree and success rather than with the genius value of what succeeds; yet it is also understandable that the custom that has developed of calling any aptitude that is hard to imitate “genius” is connected with a bad conscience, and of course none other than that of a dropped task or a forgotten duty. This scandalized the two of them in a joking and incidental way, but they went on speaking seriously. “This is clearest,” Ulrich said to his sister, “when, although it mostly happens only by accident, one becomes conscious of an external sign to which scant attention is paid: namely, our habit of pronouncing the noun Genie and its adjective, genial, differently, and not in a way to indicate that the adjective derives from the noun.”
As happens to everyone who is made aware of a practice to which scant attention is paid, Agathe was somewhat surprised.
“After my conversation with Stumm that time, I looked it up in Grimm’s dictionary,” Ulrich offered by way of excuse. “The military word Genie—in other words, the engineering soldier—came to us, of course, like many military expressions, from the French. In French, the art of the engineer is called le genie, and connected with it is geniecorps, arme du genie, and Ecole du genie, as well as the English engine, the French engin, and the Italian ingenio macchina, the artful tool; the whole clan goes back to the late Latin ingenium, whose hard g became in its travels a soft g and whose fundamental connotation is dexterity and inventiveness: a summation, like the now rather old and creaky expression, ‘arts and crafts,’ with which official communications and inscriptions still sometimes bless us. From there a decayed path also leads to the soccer player of genius, indeed even to the hunting dog of genius or the steeplechase horse of genius, but it would be consistent to pronounce adjective and noun the same way. For there is a second Genie and genial, whose meaning is likewise to be found in every language and does not derive from genium but from genius, the more-than-human, or at least, in reverence for mind and spirit, the culmination of what is human. I hardly need point out that for centuries these two meanings have been dreadfully confused and mixed up everywhere, in language as in life, and not only in German; but, characteristically, in German most of all, so that not being able to keep genius and ingenious apart can be called a particularly German problem. Moreover, it has in German a history that in one place affects me greatly—”
Agathe had followed this extended explanation, as is usual in such cases, with some mistrust and a readiness for boredom, while waiting for a turn that would free her from this uncertainty. “Would you consider me a linguistic grouch if I were to propose that from now on we both start using the expression ‘inspiriting’?” Ulrich asked.
A smile and a movement of her head spontaneously indicated his sister’s resistance to this archaic term, which has fallen out of use and now bears the scent of old trunks and costumes.
“It is an archaic word,” Ulrich admitted, “but this would be a good occasion to use it! And as I said, I did read up on it. If it doesn’t bother you to do this in the street, let me have a look at what else I can tell you about it.” With a smile, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and deciphered various notes he had made in pencil. “Goethe,” he announced. “ ‘Here I saw regret and penitence pushed to caricature, and because all passion replaces genius, really inspiriting.’ In another place: Tour inspiriting composure often advanced to meet me with magnificent enthusiasm.’ Wieland: The fruit of inspiriting hours.’ Hölderlin: The Greeks are still a beautiful, inspiriting, and happy people.’ And you’ll find a similar ‘inspiriting’ in Schleiermacher, in his earlier years. But already with Immermann you find ‘inspired economy and ‘inspired debauchery.’ So there you already have the disconcerting transformation of the notion into the kettle-patching and slovenly, which is how ‘inspired’ is understood today.” He turned the piece of paper this way and that, stuck it back in his pocket, and then took it out once more for assistance. “But its prehistory and preconditions are found earlier,” he added. “Kant was already criticizing ‘the fashionable tone of a geniuslike freedom in thinking’ and speaks with annoyance of ‘genius-men’ and ‘genius-apes.’ What annoyed him so much is a respectable piece of German intellectual history. For before him as well as after him people in Germany talked, partly ecstatically, partly disapprovingly, of ‘genius urge,’ ‘genius fever,’ ‘storm of genius,’ ‘leaps of genius,’ ‘calls of genius,’ and ‘screams of genius,’ and even philosophy’s fingernails were not always clean, least of all when it believed it could suck the independent truth from its fingers.”
“And how does Kant decide what a genius is?” Agathe asked. All she associated with his famous name was that she remembered having heard that he surpassed everything.
“What he emphasized in the nature of genius was the creative element and originality, the ‘spirit of originality,’ which has remained extraordinarily influential up to the present day,” Ulrich replied. “Goethe later was relying on Kant when he defined the geniative with the words: ‘to have many objects present and easily relate the most remote ones to each other: this free of egotism and self-complacency.’ But that’s a view that was very much designed for the achievements of reason, and it leads to the rather gymnastic conception of genius we have succumbed to.”
Agathe asked with laughing disbelief: “So now do you know what genius and geniative are?”
Ulrich took the joshing with a shrug of his shoulders. “Anyway, we’ve found that among Germans, if we don’t see the strictly Kantian ‘spirit of originality,’ we feel that eccentric and conspicuous behavior indicates genius
,” he said.
49
GENERAL VON STUMM ON GENIUS
The conversation with Stumm that Ulrich mentioned had occurred at a chance meeting and had been brief. The General seemed worried; he did not indicate why, but he began to grumble over the nonsense that in civilian life there were so many geniuses. “What is a genius, really?” he asked. “No one has ever called a general a genius!”
“Except Napoleon,” Ulrich interjected.
“Maybe him,” Stumm admitted. “But that appears to happen more because his whole evolution was paradoxical!”
Ulrich didn’t know what to say to this.
“At your cousin’s, I had lots of opportunity to meet people who are designated as geniuses,” Stumm declared pensively, and went on: “I believe I can tell you what a genius is: a person who not only enjoys great success but also, in some sense, has to get hold of his subject backward!” And Stumm immediately expounded on this, using the great examples of psychoanalysis and the theory of relativity:
“In the old days it was also often true that you didn’t know something,” he began in his characteristic fashion. “But you didn’t think anything of it, and if it didn’t happen during an examination it didn’t harm anyone. But suddenly this was turned into the so-called unconscious, and now everyone’s unconscious is the size of all the things he doesn’t know, and it’s much more important to know why you don’t know something than what it is you don’t know! Humanly speaking, this has, as one says, turned things topsy-turvy, and it’s apparently a lot simpler too.”