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Subject Without Nation

Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity

Duke University Press

Topographies of Inwardness

The Expressivist Paradigm of Subjectivity

In 1932, the year Robert Musil completed the second volume of The Man Without Qualities, Ludwig Bauer observed, "The air smells of dullness and stupidity." Bauer had no doubts regarding the main symptom of the cultural decay. "A strangely frightening spectacle: The I is disappearing."

Karl Jaspers had made a similar diagnosis the year before. Charting the "spiritual situation of the age," he suggested that the "basic problem of our time is whether an independent human being in his self-comprehended destiny is still possible."

In the spring of 1940 Martin Heidegger lectured on Nietzsche and European nihilism at Freiburg University in the Third Reich. He confirmed, triumphantly, that the individual "I" was vanishing. He also prophesied about an age that would bring forth a new kind of human subject.

The modern age, Heidegger states in these lectures, "is defined by the fact that man becomes the measure and the center of being." This era began when Descartes posited the cogito, the disengaged subject of rational knowledge, as the foundation of being. Yet it is not until the arrival of Nietzsche's doctrine, Heidegger argues, that this philosophy reaches its finale. It is only in "the doctrine of the Overman, the doctrine of man's absolute preeminence among beings" that "modern metaphysics comes to the full and final determination of its essence." The true embodiment of the Western subject of knowledge is the Nietzschean subject of power, der Übermensch.

What is striking is not only Heidegger's bold relativization of the Cartesian conception of subjectivity but the political overtones of his argument. We cannot avoid asking what resonance such lines had in 1940, a year when Hitler's armies of "Aryan" supermen triumphed on battlefields throughout Europe, and Western history appeared to enter a new era. Heidegger's statements demonstrate how a certain historical conjuncture inevitably invests an argument about the relation of subjectivity and Western history with pressing political content, and this even if the argument as such pertains only to the realm of philosophy.

In The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil sometimes describes the links between history and subjectivity in terms that recall those of Bauer, Jaspers, and Heidegger: "Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the 'I' itself" (MWQ 159 /MoE 150). Musil, too, linked a particular conception of subjectivity to a specific historical epoch. He held that the European situation between the wars entailed the decomposition of the individual "I" and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity. Musil's idea of a future human society was, to be sure, antagonistic to Heidegger's. Still, both shared a historical and theoretical problem, which forced both to invent the human subject anew.

The End of Man?

Why this urgency to project a new human being? And why did these thinkers believe that the era of anthropocentrism was coming to an end? They certainly were not alone. What we call the ego, the modern subject, and liberal individualism had many adversaries in this period—from Freud's psychoanalysis to feminist theories of patriarchy, from Oswald Spengler's account of the decline of Western civilization toMarxist objections to bourgeois individualism, from Ernst Mach's materialist demolition of the psyche to Martin Buber's mysticist notion of the expanded self, and from the language theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein to anthropologists and ethnographers such as Melville Herskovits, Michel Leiris, Jan Vansina, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that rationality comes in several different cultural forms and hence that the Western subject of knowledge owns no pre-given epistemological privilege. These theories challenged the idea of the rational subject as the source and center of power and knowledge, some by discarding it as an illusion, others by unmasking the interests that lurked behind the subject's apparently disinterested representation of the world.

The critique was usually motivated by the sense that there was a price to be paid, socially and culturally, for the gifts of modern civilization, and by the conviction that the purveyor of these mixed blessings could be identified with Enlightenment reason, capitalist individualism, Western utilitarianism, or some other manifestation of the so-called subject of modernity. Modernity, it must be remembered, arrived relatively late in Germany and Austria. Once the development of industrialization and urbanization had gained momentum, however, the transformations that followed were felt to be all the more dramatic. Many were alarmed by the prospect of a future society in which economic quantification, scientific abstraction, and professional specialization would make it impossible for the individual to relate "naturally" to the world and to fellow beings. A preview of this future can be glimpsed at the beginning of The Man Without Qualities: a "super-American city where everyone rushes about, or stands still, with a stopwatch in hand.... Questions and answers synchronize like meshing gears; everyone has only certain fixed tasks to do; professions are located in special areas and organized by group; meals are taken on the run. Other parts of the city are centers of entertainment, while still others contain the towers where one finds wife, family, phonograph, and soul" (MWQ 27 / MoE 31).

To this fear of a Taylorized future, organized in accord with the principles of scientific management, should be added the impact of the First World War. It drew a "great red balance line under the bourgeois era," Ernst Jünger said in 1931. Less a fight between nations than a struggle that "two epochs conducted against each other," the war attained immense symbolic dimensions for the defeated German and Austrian intelligentsia. As the historian Erich Marcks remarked, it entailed "a monstrous fall from the brightest height to the darkest depth."

The sequence of upheavals culminating between 1914 and 1918 generated a steady flow of conservative reactions. Fearing that the intellectual spirit of modernity was too rationalistic and that the emergent social forms were too individualistic, or, even worse, too democratic, German and Austrian intellectuals sought to redress the powers of instrumental reason by asserting the spiritual powers of German culture, and to hedge the leveling impact of the masses by propagating the ideal of personal Bildung. The work that best codified this response to modernity and also exerted the greatest influence on later generations was no doubt Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft und Gesettschaft (1887, Community and Society). Tönnies distilled the essence of a wide range of ideas about the human condition, presented by German writers since Goethe and Schiller, and he synthesized these ideas into a theoretical system so compelling that it came to crystallize the worldview of the intelligentsia up until the 1930s. Tönnies, often called the father of German sociology, is therefore a good place to begin our investigation of the prevailing cultural patterns that Robert Musil reacted against.

It is well known that Tönnies distinguished between Gemeinschaft, a rural or small-town community regulated by the customs of tradition, and Gesellschaft, an urban society geared toward the maximizing of individual happiness. It is less often noted that this sociological distinction was based on a theory of the human subject that distinguished between the subject of "natural will" (Wesenwille) and the subject of "rational will" (Kürwille). Tönnies argued that the human being is most fundamentally defined by the natural will. "Natural will is the psychological equivalent of the human body," he explained. Just as the individual's physical existence is constituted by his or her body, so is the individual's psychic existence constituted by his or her inborn natural will. As the term (Wesenwille) makes clear, natural will is thus an expression of the nature or essence (Weseri) of the subject. What the human being feels, does, or thinks is a manifestation of this nature.

Of all the manifestations of the natural will that appear in the evolution of humanity Tönnies focused particularly on the capacity of abstract thinking. With this capacity is born what he called rational will, or Kürwille, which designates a person's ability to deliberately opt or choose (küren) the object of his or her will. The person's volition is thereby turned into an instrument, subordinated to the power of reason, and calculated to realize rationally determined ends. Henceforth, what a person feels, does, or thinks is no longer an expression of the person's natural essence but an effect of his or her mental deliberation. "Rational will" is thus Tönnies's term for the rational subject. He underlines that this rational mode of being is secondary to the natural will, out of which it develops. As soon as the rational will becomes the dominant motive of human action, however, social life is transformed accordingly—the Gemeinschaft becomes a Gesellschaft. For what characterizes the latter is precisely that it is regulated by rational will; people pursue their own happiness and treat their fellow beings as means to their individualistic ends. In the Gemeinschaft, by contrast, rational will has no such autonomy. Individuals are not yet individualists, not even proper individuals. The social order "rests on harmony and is developed and ennobled by folkways, mores, and religion." All persons and activities remain expressions of one communal essence.

In formulating his concepts of Gemeinschaft and natural will, Tönnies gave the most coherent account of what I throughout this book will call the expressivist paradigm. I regard this paradigm as the dominant cultural superstructure in Germany and Austria between 1800 and 1930. What unites the ideas belonging to this paradigm is the view that personality, identity, morality, culture, art, politics, and ultimately the historical world as a whole are expressions or objectivations of an intrinsic disposition that resides in all beings and unites them in an organic totality. If Tönnies called this principle the natural will, others spoke of Geist, soul, life, subjectivity, personality, or individuality.

Many of these terms were used vaguely. Those who articulated the expressivist paradigm at the beginning of the twentieth century often drew freely upon the archive of German idealism—from old masters like Goethe, Fichte, Humboldt, and Hegel, to later thinkers like Nietzsche and Tönnies, including the Stefan George circle and the so-called Lebensphilosophie of Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband, Georg Simmel, and Max Scheler. Furthermore, the expressivist paradigm was reflected not only in books and ideas but also in buildings, objects, and bodies; indeed, as I will discuss in this chapter, it constituted a virtual topography that encompassed the cultural world as a whole.

To be sure, there are crucial historical and theoretical differences between the various systems and ideas that I fold into the expressivist paradigm. Despite these differences, however, these ideas all share one principal notion: that the identity of the individual subject and of the collective is grounded in an intrinsic essence, which conditions those manifestations, utterances, and ways of behavior through which this identity is externalized or expressed. It is precisely this notion of expressivity that allows us to grasp the significance of Musil's reconceptualization of subjectivity, for he argued that the human being is defined, on the contrary, by its lack of any interior essence.

Tönnies made no normative judgments regarding the historical transformation from community to society, from "living organism," as he called it, to the "mechanical and artificial aggregate" of modernity. Since he held this process to be irreversible, he thought it was futile to lament the passing of the old order. Most of his contemporaries and followers saw the same process as a decline. They wanted to put the train of progress in reverse and return to the authentic and harmonious Gemeinschaft. This is why, as the intellectual historian Fritz Ringer explains, "Tönnies's concept of community was converted into a popular slogan" during the First World War. By the 1920s, Ringer adds, "no German professor doubted that a profound 'crisis of culture' was at hand."

Most scholars and intellectuals attempted to contain the "crisis" by supporting an educational, cultural, and political program aimed at resurrecting the cultivated personality and reviving the organic national community. In 1925, Ulrich Peters, editor of the Zeitschrift für Deutsche Bildung, suggested that the "German soul" must return to itself; William Stern and Eduard Spranger argued that the integral "I" and the "soul" should be reinstituted as foundational psychological and philosophical concepts, while the educator Aloys Fischer asserted that these concepts should serve to "create the irrational bases and forces of communal life." Though these statements are torn out of their contexts, they are typical of a dominant discourse in the 1920s. It was upheld by intellectuals who assumed the task of developing a cultural synthesis and of reeducating people so as to make them believe in an interior truth or communal essence, which in the view of these cultural leaders had to be realized, both individually and socially, in order to save society from imminent decline. If Peters, Stern, Spranger, and Fischer dismissed most things modern—its scientific methodology of abstraction, its social logic of specialization, and its political ideals of democracy and equality—it was because they believed such phenomena distanced the individual from this internal truth, preventing him or her from expressing the sources of national vitality.

Musil had little patience with the jargon of soul, personality, culture, and community. He fervently attacked the expressivist paradigm, along with the entire idealistic notion that there is a hidden cultural essence. "People believe there is a degeneration they must cure," he wrote in his 1923 essay, "The German as Symptom":

The literature of our time... has poured out an ocean of complaints about our soullessness, about our mechanization, our calculatedness, our irreligion; and the accomplishments of science as well as art are regarded as excesses of these conditions. All the individual does now is calculate, and even his supposedly great scientific achievements are said to be nothing but excesses of this drive to calculate. Except for socialism, the remedy is nearly always sought regressively in turning away from the present. For the liberated man the old bonds are recommended: faith, prescientific thinking, simplicity, humanity, altruism, national solidarity, subordination of the citizen to the state: the abandonment of capitalist individualism and its frame of mind. (PS 176 / GW 2:1381f.)

As I shall argue in the first part of this study, The Man Without Qualities represents the exhaustion of the expressivist paradigm in literature and intellectual discourse. In the second part I will explore in detail how this exhaustion compelled Musil to radically reconceptualize human subjectivity, and I will clarify this shift by relating it to the moment of historical danger and cultural crisis to which he devoted all his intellectual powers. In order to assess the importance of Musil's anti-expressivist turn, however, we must first understand why the expressivist paradigm emerged as a dominant cultural matrix during the nineteenth century and why, after the first decades of the twentieth century, it lost its normative function.

Musil's work, however, offers only an oblique analysis of the historical constitution of the expressivist paradigm. But there is another work of this period that addresses the historicity of human subjectivity directly, namely Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness of 1923. Lukács belonged to the same generation as Musil; both were subjects of the same imperial dominion, educated in similar institutions, and they experienced the same political events. Although Lukács and Musil did not believe in the same solutions to the problems characterizing Central-European culture around 1920, they were both keenly aware that the idealist and expressivist ideas that appealed so strongly to intellectual Germans and Austrians of the period represented an intellectual irrationalism, or even "a destruction of reason," as Lukács later stated. Most importantly, both staged their respective analysis of modern mass society as a drama about the fate of the self.

Unlike his contemporaries, Lukács did not ask how to prevent modern civilization from deforming the self. Turning this question on its head, he instead analyzed how this self came into being in the first place. In History and Class Consciousness he thus asks if the idea of a timeless human nature, commonly believed to be endangered by modern society, had not. in fact been produced, at an earlier stage, by the very same society. Exploring this problem, Lukács developed a critical history of the modern subject.

Georg Lukács's History of Subjectivity

Lukács's history of subjectivity bridges what look like opposites. Starting with a critique of Kantian Aufklärung, it ends with an analysis of the Taylorization of industrial labor. In objecting to Kant's philosophy of rationalism, Lukács follows mainstream German philosophy. He argues that Kant's pure reason, by subsuming a world of particularity and change under the abstractions of the concept, locks all phenomena into permanent identities, thus repeating the procedure of the Cartesian cogito. In Lukács's view, this rationalist method is fraught with contradictions. Reason wants to establish the formal similarities and conceptual identities of its object. Yet, since reason can grasp only those aspects of reality that fit the pregiven categories that it projects onto the world, it ends up rejecting as irrational and unknowable—as a Ding an sich—all those aspects and elements that fail to correspond to its principles. The limit of irrationality is reproduced by the very act whereby reason attempts to erase it.

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Excerpted from Subject Without Nation by Stefan Jonsson. Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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