by Robert Musil
But then Ulrich said: “You’re too kind to me, for what I’m asserting isn’t true at all. Almost all intellectual people have this prejudice that the practical questions they understand nothing about would be easy to solve, but when they try, of course it turns out that they just haven’t thought of everything. On the other hand—here I agree with you—if the politician were to think of everything, he would never get around to acting. Perhaps that’s why politics contains as much of the wealth of reality as of the poverty of spirit (lack of ideas)—”
This gave Schmeisser the opportunity for a jubilant interruption, with the words: “People like you never get around to acting because they don’t want the truth! The bourgeois so-called mind is in all its works only a procrastination and an excuse!”
“But why don’t people like me want?” Ulrich asked. “Why couldn’t they want? Wealth, for example, is certainly not what they really desire. I hardly know a prosperous man who doesn’t have a small weakness for it, myself included, but I also don’t know a single one who loves money for its own sake, except for misers, and greed is a disturbance of personal conduct which is also found in love, in power, and in honor: the pathological nature of greed really proves that giving is more blessed than receiving. By the way, do you believe that giving is more blessed than receiving?” he asked.
“You can raise that question in some aesthete’s salon!” was Schmeisser’s response.
“But I fear,” Ulrich maintained, “that all your efforts will remain pointless as long as you don’t know whether giving or receiving is more blessed or how they complement each other!”
Schmeisser crowed: “You no doubt intend to talk mankind into being good? Besides, in the socially organized state, the proper relationship of giving and receiving will be a foregone conclusion!”
“Then I will maintain”—Ulrich completed his sentence with a smile—”that you will just come to grief on something else, for instance that we are capable of cursing someone as a dog even when we love our dog more than our fellowmen!”
A mirror calmed Schmeisser by showing him the image of a young man wearing thick glasses under a stubborn forehead. He gave no answer.
Ulrich had picked out this young man for the General and proposed that they go with the General to visit Meingast, for Schmeisser knew about this prophet, and even if he was a false one, still it was nothing new for Schmeisser to visit the gatherings of opponents; but Ulrich had correctly guessed about his friend Stumm that at various times he was secretly gathering impressions from Clarisse, and through her had also made the acquaintance of the Master, who had made no small impression. But when Ulrich told Agathe about his plan, she didn’t want to hear about it.
Ulrich began to jest. —I bet that this Schmeisser is really in love with you—he maintained—and it’s no secret that Lindner is. Both are/or-men. Meingast, too, is a/or-man. You’ll end up winning him over too.
Agathe naturally wanted to know what/or-men were.
—Lindner is a good person, isn’t he? Ulrich asked.
Agathe confirmed it, although for a long time she had not been as enthusiastic on this count as she had been at the beginning.
—But he lives more/or religion than in a religious state?
Agathe didn’t contest this at all.
—That’s just what a/or-man is, Ulrich explained. —The extensive activity he bestows upon his faith is perhaps the most important example, but it’s just one example of the technique that’s always used to make ideals tenable and available for everyday use. So he explained to her in detail his spontaneously invented notion of living/or and in something.
Human life appears to be just long enough so that in it, if one lives/or something, one can accomplish the trajectory from neophyte to Nestor, patriarch, or pioneer; and in doing so it matters less for human satisfaction what one lives for than that one can live/or something: a Nestor of the German brandy trade and the pioneer of a new worldview enjoy, besides similar honors, the same advantage, which consists in the fact that life, despite its fearful wealth, contains not a single problem that would not be simplified by being brought into contact with a worldview, but would be simplified just as much by being brought into contact with the production of brandy. Such an advantage is precisely what one calls, using a fairly recent term, rationalization, except that what is rationalized is not skilled actions but ideas, and who today would not already be able to survey what that implies? Even in the slightest case this life for something is comparable to owning a notebook in which everything is entered and things that have been disposed of are neatly crossed out. Whoever does not do this lives in a disorderly fashion, never finishes things, and is bothered by their comings and goings; whoever, on the other hand, has a notebook resembles the thrifty paterfamilias who saves every nail, every piece of rubber, every scrap of material, because he knows that someday such a stock will come in handy in his household economy. But this solid, civic/or something, as it was handed down from one’s father’s generation as the height of worthy endeavor, often too as a hobbyhorse or a secret detail one always keeps one’s eye on, represented at that time something which was already somewhat old-fashioned; for a propensity for the broad scale, a yen for developing the living-for-something in mighty associations, had already replaced it.
By this means what Ulrich had begun in jest took on, as he uttered it, more serious significance. The distinction he had hit upon tempted him with its inexhaustible prospects, and became for him at this moment one of those views that make the world fall asunder like a split apple under the knife, exposing what lies within. Agathe objected that one also often says that a person is completely subsumed by something, or lives and breathes it, although it was certain that according to Ulrich’s nomenclature such ardent livers and breathers were doing it for whatever their affair might be; and Ulrich conceded that it would be more precise to proceed by distinguishing between the notions of “finding oneself in the state of one’s ideal” and “finding oneself in the state of working for one’s ideal,” but in which the second “in” was either unreal and in truth a “for,” or the claimed relationship to working/or it would have to be an unusual and ecstatic one. Language, moreover, has its good reasons not to be so precise about this, since living/or something is the condition of worldly existence, in, on the contrary, always that which one imagines and pretends to live, and the relation of these two states to each other is extremely refractory. People, after all, do secretly know, without, of course, being able to admit it, of the miraculous fact that everything “it’s worth living for” would be unreal if not actually absurd the moment one tried to immerse oneself in it completely. Love would never again arise from its lair; in politics, the slightest proof of sincerity would necessarily lead to the mortal destruction of one’s opponent; the artist would spurn all contact with less perfect beings, and morality would have to consist not of perforated prescriptions but of taking one back to that childlike condition of love of the good and abhorrence of the bad which takes everything literally. For whoever really abhors crime would not find it too little to hire trained professional devils to torture prisoners as in old paintings of hellfire, and whoever loves virtue with his whole life ought to eat nothing but goodness until his stomach rises into his throat. What’s remarkable is that at times things really do go that far, but that such periods of Inquisition or its opposite, gushing over the goodness of man, are in bad odor bad memories remain memories.
That is why it is simply to preserve life that mankind has succeeded in inventing, in place of “what it’s worth living for,” living/or it or, in other words, putting its idealism in place of its ideal condition. It is a living before something; now, instead of living, one “strives” and is henceforth a being that with all its energies presses on just as much toward fulfillment as it is exonerated from arriving at it. “Living for something” is the permanent principle of the “in.” All desires, and not just love, are sad after they are fulfilled; but in the moment in which the a
ctivity for the desire fully takes the place of the desire, it is canceled out in an ingenious way, for now the inexhaustible system of means and obstacles takes the place of the goal. In this system even a monomaniac does not live monotonously but constantly has new things to do, and even whoever could not live at all in the content of his life—a case that is more frequent today than one thinks: for example, a professor at an agricultural college who has set the management of stall wastes and dung on new paths—lives for this content without complaint, and enjoys listening to music or other such experiences, if he is a capable person, always, as it were, in honor of managing stables. This doing something else “in honor of something” is, moreover, somewhat further removed from the “something” than from the “for” and consequently is the method most frequently applied, because it is as it were the cheapest, of doing in the name of an ideal all those things that cannot be reconciled with it.
For the advantage of all “for” and “in honor of” consists in the fact that through serving the ideal, everything which the ideal itself excludes is again brought to life. The classic example of this was furnished by the traveling knights of chivalric love, who fell like mad dogs upon every equal they encountered in honor of a condition in their heart that was as soft and fragrant as dripping church wax. But the present, too, is not lacking in small peculiarities of this kind. Thus, for example, it organizes luxurious festivals for the alleviation of poverty. Or the large number of strict people who insist on the carrying out of public principles from which they know themselves exempt. Then, too, the hypocritical admission that die end justifies the means belongs here, for in reality it is the always active and colorful means for whose sake one usually puts up with ends that are moral and insipid. And no matter how playful such examples may appear, this objection falls silent before the disturbing observation that civilized life doubtless has a tendency toward the most violent outbursts, and that these are never more violent than when they take place in honor of great and sacred, indeed even of tender, emotions! Are they then felt to be excused? Or is the relationship not rather the opposite?
Thus, by many interrelated paths, one arrives at the conclusion that people are not good, beautiful, and truthful, but rather would like to be, and one has a sense of how the serious problem of why this is so is veiled by the illuminating pretense that the ideal is, by its very nature, unattainable. This was more or less what Ulrich said, without sparing attacks on Lindner and what he stood for. Right thinking that was the effortless result of this. It was certain, he maintained, that Lindner was ten times more convinced of two-times-two or the rules of morality than he was of his God, but by working for his conviction about God, he largely evaded this difficulty. For this purpose he put himself into the condition of belief, an attitude in which what he wanted to be convinced of was so ingeniously combined with what he could be convinced of that he himself was no longer able to separate them—
Here Agathe noted that all acting is questionable. She reminded herself of the paradoxical assertion that the only people who remain real and good in their hearts are those who do not do many good deeds. This now seemed to her extended, and thus confirmed, by the agreeable possibility that the condition of activity was fundamentally the adulteration of another condition, from which it arose and which it pretended to serve.
Ulrich affirmed this once more. “We have on the one side,” he repeated by way of summary, “people who live for and, without taking the word too literally, in something, who are constantly on the move, who strive, weave, till, sow, and harvest, in a word the idealists, for all these idealists of today are really living/or their ideals. And on the other side are those who would like to live in some fashion in their gods, but for these there is not even a name—”
“What is this ‘in?” Agathe asked emphatically.
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders and then gave a few indications. “One could relate ‘for* and ‘in* to what has been called experiencing in a convex and experiencing in a concave way. Perhaps the psychoanalytic legend that the human soul strives to get back to the tender protection of the intrauterine condition before birth is a misunderstanding of the In/ perhaps not. Perhaps ‘in’ is the presumed descent of all life from God. But perhaps the explanation is also simply to be found in psychology; for every affect bears within it the claim of totality to rule alone and, as it were, form the ‘in* in which everything else is immersed; but no affect can maintain itself as primary for long without by that very fact changing, and thus it absolutely yearns for opposing affects in order to renew itself through them, which is pretty much an image of our indispensable ‘for*— Enough! One thing is certain: that all sociable life arises from the ‘for* and unites mankind in the aim of apparently living/or something; mankind mercilessly defends these aims; what we see today by way of political developments are all attempts to put other ‘fors in place of the lost community of religion. The living ‘for something’ of the individual person has lagged behind with the paterfamilias and the age of Goethe. The middle-class religion of the future will perhaps be satisfied with bringing the masses together in a belief that might have no content at all but in which the feeling of being for it together will be that much more powerful—”
There was no doubt that Ulrich was evading a decision (about the question), for what did Agathe care about political development!
On Agathe
Agathe at Lindners
During this entire time Agathe was continuing her visits to Lindner.
This made extravagant claims on his Account for Unforeseen Loss of Time, and all too often this overdraft meant a reduction in all his other activities. Moreover, empathy for this young woman also demanded a great deal of time when she was not there:
Thus Lindner had found a soul, but deep tones of discontent were intermingled with it and kept him in a state of constant irritation.
Agathe had simply ignored his forbidding her to visit.
“Does my visiting embarrass you?” she asked the first time she showed up again.
“And what does your brother say to this?” Lindner replied earnestly every time.
“I haven’t told him anything about it,” Agathe confided in him, “because it might be that he wouldn’t like it. You’ve made me anxious.”
Of course one cannot withhold a helping hand from a person seeking help.
But every time they made an appointment Agathe was late. It was no use telling her that unpunctuality was the same as breaking a contract or as lack of conscience. “It indicates that the rest of the time, too, your will is in a slumbering state, and that you’re dreamily giving yourself up to things that turn up by chance, instead of breaking away at the right time with collected and focused energy!” Lindner conjectured severely.
“If only it were dreamily!” Agathe replied.
But Lindner declared sharply: “Such a lack of self-control makes one suspect every other kind of undependability!”
“Apparently. I suspect that too,” was Agathe’s response.
“Don’t you have any will?”
“No.”
“You’re a fantasist and have no discipline!”
“Yes.” And after a short pause she added, smiling: “My brother says that I’m a person of fragments; that’s lovely, isn’t it? Even if it’s not clear what it means. One might think of an unfinished volume of unfinished poems.”
Lindner was resentfully silent.
“My husband, on the other hand, is now impolitely asserting that I’m pathological, a neuropath or something like that,” Agathe went on.
And thereupon Lindner exclaimed sarcastically: “You don’t say! How pleased people are today when moral tasks can apparently be reduced to medical ones! But I can’t make things that comfortable for you!”
The only pedagogical success that Lindner was able to achieve he owed to the principle that five minutes before the end of each visit, which was always set and agreed upon beforehand, without regard to its delayed start and however much the
conversation might absorb him, he began to fall silent and gave Agathe to understand that he now needed to devote his time to other obligations. Agathe not only greeted this rudeness with smiles; she was grateful for it. For such minutes of the conversation, framed on at least one side as if by a metal edge and ticking sharply, also imparted to the remainder of the day something of their incisiveness. After the extravagant conversations with Ulrich, this had the effect of leanness or tightly belted straps.