If by ‘philosophical novel’ we understand the development through the means of literature, of a philosophical idea, or the philosophical interrogation of literary themes or concerns, we cannot call The Confusions a philosophical novel. Musil understands the relationship between philosophy and literature in an altogether different way. He sees as the principal task of both philosophy and literature to express the ‘way of being’, or the mode of existence of the philosopher or novelist and nothing else. The novel stages a confrontation between two distinct philosophical-literary styles, where style refers not to the distinctive ‘taste’ or preference of a novelist or philosopher, or only does so to the extent that it is understood as a certain method of evaluation— an evaluation of things or objects in the world— and which would reflect, that is, be in an immediate relation with the way of ‘being’ of the thinker in question. In other words, the relationship that a thinker construes between a thing and its idea, the thinker’s evaluation of a thing, refers back to the way of being, or mode of existence of that thinker. I am also contending, somewhat contradicting the previous statement, that Musil understands the two— my way of being and my manner of evaluating things— as existing in a unity, one does not determine the other, but both are rather co-determined, as is evident in his having Törless think that
“between the life we live and the life we feel, sense, see far off, there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate in which the images of events have to make themselves small to get through and inside a person”
So, Musil seems to collapse this relation, reminding us that in each case we make a determination of the thing itself not according to some abstract, logical rules but according “to the life we live”. And it is also important that here Musil understands the evaluative function as a sort of feeling, as “the life we feel” since this has important implications for his thoughts on the place sensuality, or, sexuality has in making this determination.
So, who or what are the two combatants confronting one another in this literary field? The confrontation is, I would argue, between the ‘Kantian’ and ‘Nietzschean’ ways of being and their attendant ‘style’ or form of evaluation. This is indeed a profoundly Nietzschean text. Its Nietzscheanism is, I believe woefully misrepresented in the preface to my edition of the text, where the author writes that Nietzsche thinks it
“possible to imagine a way of life which would dispense with moral judgments and seek not to commend actions or condemn them but to understand them”
The problem with this assessment is that it defangs the polemical, combative spirit of Nietzsche in order to cast him as that neutral arbiter who in identifying the cause of an action would have gotten to the heart of the matter, not realizing that this specific interpretative mode would itself be a form of judgment, that is, a legislative evaluation. Nietzsche, and, by extension Musil, is engaged in a wholly different task, in which the ‘genealogy of morals’ undertaken by both thinkers has also a creative function which would finds its expression in a new morality, a new mode of existence springing from a new ‘feeling’, that would no longer have anything whatever to do with judgment. Given his importance for Musil’s thought, we might ask why Nietzsche, unlike Kant, does not find explicit mention in the text. The answer to this question, I think rests on our grasping of what has just been mentioned, namely, that Kant and Nietzsche represent not ‘schools of thought’ but the forms of evaluation, or ‘style’ corresponding to a certain way of being. If this is the case, then their names are merely there as placeholders, that is, for convenience. To put it another way, Kant and Nietzsche do not establish an ethical point of view which others are then made to follow, but rather, simply give expression, in the case of Kant, to an already existing view-point, and in the case of Nietzsche a morality-to-come. Musil need not mention Nietzsche because he expresses in literary form that ethical point of view which Nietzsche gives a philosophical formulation, he need only to mention by name his literary-philosophical enemy, since his ‘style’ has nothing to do with him.
This is the way Musil de-privileges the creative efforts of philosophy, or, at the very least, places it on the same plane as literary creation. The difference with ‘following’ Nietzsche as opposed to Kant is, of course, that expression must have a creative function precisely because the ‘point of view’ in question does not yet seem to exist, or cannot exist in the manner that we usually understand that a thing exists. Musil does not need to wait for Nietzsche, nor Nietzsche for Musil since the proper name of both is simply attached to, in service of, this highly impersonal ethical project—the actualization of a collection of forces that exceed both of them. This finds a sublime expression in the book, where Musil writes of Törless’s appreciation of the theatre, that Törless, in his
“excited state… could never think of the people who, over there— invisible— in the theatre, were acting out these passions”
the forces present on stage,
“this sombre flame, these eyes in the darkness, these black wingbeats”
are only gathered
“under the name of the singer who was unknown to him”
simply, as mentioned above, as a matter of convenience. The singer is not apprehended, then, as a subject or an ego but has a certain privilege only to the extent that from her there flow these non-human, animal-like passions and singularities. Or, as Lawrence puts it, borrowing from Marinetti, in the passage provided on the thought provocation, the ‘ego’, the ‘subject’ serves a function to the extent that it makes way for a ‘physiology of matter’, or insofar as it opens up to that ‘non-human physic’. When Lawrence writes,
“I don’t care so much about what the woman feels— in the ordinary usage of the word. That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the woman is”
he means to say that he does not care about what the woman feels about a certain object or thing that would make her laugh, since this would simply be a matter of accounting for the relation between the thing and the woman’s idea of it, that is her judgment of it, rather he is concerned with what what the woman is , that is feeling as such , just as Törless is concerned not with “surface representatives” but only
“the force of the dark mass lurking below that they claimed to represent”
Törless wants to think the identity of the two, of the surface representative and the dark mass. We know that this is what Törless struggles with immensely as when, disillusioned by Kant, he turns to writing himself, and makes “a few attempts to continue his notes, but the written words were dead, a row of long-familiar, sullen question-marks”, as if Musil were suggesting that the solution to young Törless’s confusions lie beyond the book-form, and not as Joyce would have us believe in his version of The Confusions — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man— an endless referring back to the text, daring us to spend a lifetime deciphering, interpreting. Musil, conversely, seems almost to beg us to leave him behind, to leave the book behind, and he is thus closer to Hofmannsthal as when the latter writes in the Letter to Lord Chandos,
“I feel compelled by a mysterious power to reflect in a manner which, the moment I attempt to express it in words, strikes me as supremely foolish”.
Going forward, I will refer to as the way of being that is the special privilege of Törless and his friends (though I also hope to be able to show the uniqueness of Törless in this regard) the ‘passional consciousness’ and that dreary ‘Kantian’ way of being that is the dubious privilege of the headmaster’s as the mature consciousness. In any case, we mustn’t understand the matter teleologically, as if the passional, naive consciousness necessarily leads to the mature one through the mediation of the headmasters. But nor can we understand them as two opposing poles, as if the mature consciousness were well-grounded, and the immediacy of the passional consciousness were the result of its springing forth from a chaotic ‘nothingness’. The difficulty rests in demonstrating their difference while showing that both are, in some sense, though I dislike this word, ‘groundless’. Neither, that is, are given in advance.
For the moment, however, I would like to turn to the question of sexuality, though I think it will soon be apparent that it is impossible to pose the problem of the sensualness of Törless and his friends in isolation from the problem of their ‘passional consciousness’ or way of being. We might also use the word desire here interchangeably with the sexual or sensual. Musil is at his most Nietzschean when the text addresses this problem through the struggles and confusions— the ‘experimentation’, as he puts it later in the text— of Törless and his friends. And when it is first addressed, Nietzsche’s appearance is not subtle — the debtor-creditor relation emerges for the first time at this point. Let us look at the scene in which the friends visit Bozena. Upon entering her chamber, there occurs to Törless
“the thought of his own mother… it had just flashed through the outer limits of consciousness”
and he wonders to himself
“what is it that makes it possible for this Bozena to place her base existence beside that of my mother?… For me this woman is a tangled ball of all sexual desires; and my mother a creature who until now passed through my life in unclouded remoteness, and with no dark spots, like a heavenly body beyond all desire…”
Now we might invoke all sorts of complexes to explain this feeling that occurs to Törless, we might invoke Oedipus, but if we read to the end of the chapter, Törless himself offers, after “betraying the image of his parents”, an alternate explanation, in which the image of his mother standing beyond all desire collapses, where this dirty, shame-producing little secret that is sex is understood to be
“something quite ordinary. They do it as well! They betray you! There are others secretly playing the same!… a terrible, secret delight”
while being met with Bozena’s mocking remark,
“what, is he homesick? Has his mother gone away? And the naughty boy comes straight to someone like me!”
This someone who is base, debauched, but nevertheless, or precisely because of this, someone from whom he seeks to derive sensual pleasure. We might, in this regard, look at the relationship that Beineberg has with his father, the general who
“had not only brought back carvings, fabrics, and little factory-made idols, like other Europeans, but he had also felt and retained something of the mysterious, bizarre gleam of esoteric Buddhism”
If this esotericism is transmitted to Beineberg, if his father has any significance in this relation, it is only to the extent that Beineberg believes that he can use these strange forces to “secure mastery” that is, if the father is not left out of the picture of desire it is to the extent that the desire of both invests directly a political field, such that Beineberg is able “to play the leading role in a state— for every class in such an institution is a little state of its own”. Similarly, Reiting wishes that “his mother would later reveal far-reaching claims to him, envisaged coup d’etat and politics on the national scale, and therefore wanted to be an officer”. Törless, on the other hand, lacks the force of decision, for which Musil explains, he has no energy. The significance of this will be made apparent in what follows. And as we will see, these aren’t simply imaginary forms, as perhaps the mature consciousness would treat them, as little child-like forms of desiring-production, for desire is never so innocent. As Musil writes,
“all this was now embodied in one person, had become real … that meant that it had moved from the realm of imagination into life, and had become threatening”
It is no accident that this scene in which we find the emergence of that ‘dirty little secret’ that is sex is immediately followed by the discovery of Basini’s thievery, that is, the emergence of a debtor-creditor relation between Beineberg, Reiting, Törless, and Basini (which was only implicit in the previous scene). Here we will see that the debtor-creditor relation, too delights in, a little secret, one that would require the paying off of a debt (how else does Musil have us imagine the manner in which the boys regard the prostitute Bozena except as someone indebted to society?) , indeed, it is of an explicitly sensual nature. In both cases there is a transaction in which the creditor extracts pleasure from the debtor (and this, also in both cases, is mediated by the money-form). Basini, like Bozena, is “ready to sell himself; without much ado, as long as know one knew about it”, that is, as long as the secret is not divulged. This is why, in the mind of Törless, this whole ordeal “was somehow linked to Bozena”; Basini assumes the same position:
“you just have to drop the idea that we’ve anything in common with Basini except that we can derive pleasure from his baseness”
But even the creditor is always potentially a debtor, for one only needs to go far back enough by referring one secret to another before finally uncovering a new one which would allow for the debt-relation to shift. Indeed, the secret has precisely this distributive function, distributing servitude and sovereignty (recall the ‘sovereign individual’ in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals , which he, importantly, distinguishes from a truly noble type) , determining who is creditor and who is debtor. It is in this sense that it is the eminent social form, which implicates everyone, Bozena the prostitute and Törless’s virginal mother equally.
“What business?”
Törless asks.
“You know, that business”
replies Beineberg. This is also its paradoxical nature— a secret of which it is assumed everyone already knows something of it. And when Beineberg thinks he has stumbled upon something that might allow for him to shift the relation in his favour, he delights in it, asking Törless,
“Now do you see all the things I can do with possession of this secret?”
And we must keep in mind that this relation which is at once sexual (that is, a form of desire), at once economic, is therefore also a political relation, indeed it would appear that Musil does not permit us to distinguish between these categories. Recall that political struggle between Reiting and Beineberg that “ended with the latter’s defeat” because he “lacked Reiting’s charm and winning ways”. Musil writes that
“since that time they had stuck together out of common interest”
but what is uncommon between the two of them is their desire, which has nothing to do with interest. As Beineberg himself explains:
“You know how Reiting admires Napoleon? Well, set against that the fact that the person I like most of all is more like some philosopher and Indian saint.”
Why is that Törless cannot finally posit that identity between the expression of a thing and the thing itself, a failure that makes him feel inferior to Beineberg when he says
“he can’t be looking for the same as I am, and yet he found exactly the right expression for it…”
Herein lies the fundamental difference between the passional consciousness of Törless and the others— the wild, sensual desire of the others is directed at some definite, tyrannical end and is real in that sense, while Törless only feels the eruption of the real in connection with the infinite, a flowing desire that is unable to latch onto a single subject or object, that calls forth something truly new:
“Törless’s perception… was now suddenly demanding to be treated as something real, alive, just as previously the idea of infinity had”
He moreover refuses positing an identity that would be bound by “the chains of thought”, and he thereby gives the “secret” a new meaning, a secret which would be what “all these memories suddenly have… in common”, memories which would not constitute the “permanent possession” of the one who has them. And insofar as the secret has necessarily a sexual nature, Törless’s desire has something to do with the production of new modes of the sexual— this finds its most explicit formulation in a passage that I will attend to shortly.
It is precisely because he takes the infinite so seriously that Törless finds Kant so objectionable and repulsive. He cannot stand his maths master’s response to his questions:
“you see, you spoke of transcendental…you simply have to accept that these mathematical concepts are purely necessary elements… it is very difficult to give the real explanation for many things we have to touch on”
But we know that the real is what Törless is after. This is precisely what it means to say that the way in which we evaluate a thing is inseparable from our way of being, a type, which would be noble or base. As Nietzsche writes,
“why is the belief in…judgments necessary? — to realize, in other words, that such judgments must be believed true for the purpose of preserving beings of our type”
The question, as it pertains to knowledge, then, is never “how is that possible?” which would be the Kantian question and is also the question that Törless first asks himself of Bozena,
“what is it that makes it possible for this Bozena to place her base existence beside that of my mother?”
(to pose the question this way is to already presuppose far too much about the matter supposedly being questioned; the answer is already at hand before the question is even posed, as when the headmaster
“has an answer so quickly to hand”
that, as Törless protests,
“he didn’t even let me finish”
) The question that actually makes a difference is the one Törless later asks of himself
“what is it that disturbs me?”
to which one could add, “what is it that compels me? What do I find repulsive? What do I find beautiful?” The former way of evaluating things would belong to a base type, the latter a noble type— we see how the distinction between noble and base is now completely freed of the debtor-creditor relation, once it is understood that the judgment is not the only evaluative mode available to us. The ‘base’ judgment always needs to posit this distinction between the real and the illusory. For the Kantian, the infinite can only have a regulative role, that is, it is always indeterminate, allowing for us only to undertake determinate activities like mathematical calculation. The Kantian pedagogue, far from preparing his students, is the one who demonstrates the futility of all preparation, or at the very least, infinitely prolongs the period of apprenticeship, hence why Törless complains,
“Prepare? Practice? For what? This is the way it is: an eternal wait for something of which all you know is that you’re waiting for it… that’s so boring…”
In this sense, the relation that the Kantian pedagogue has with his students is a debtor-creditor relationship. Indeed, it is the supreme achievement of Kant, his stroke of genius, to infinitize this debt… the Kantian pedagogue tells us that we don’t understand this because we have yet to do such and such, and so on, to infinity— as Beineberg says,
“only after they’ve spent ten years softening him up can they do it”
and even that is generous, since the Kantian pedagogue is precisely he who does not know. He makes use of the infinite in this repressive manner. He never allows himself a true encounter with the infinite which would have him say, as does Törless,
“I do find the whole thing strange. I find the idea of irrational, imaginary things… disturbing”
In the domain of ethics, any sign of discontent is referred back to the supreme authority and the superior knowledge of the despot, or democratically-elected leader, or in this case, the headmaster: how can you say such and such? Do you really think you know better than so-and-so? The Nietzschean response, which is the one Törless will give, and which will provoke the outrage of these pedagogues, is
‘I do not know better. I feel differently’
Of course, they cannot even begin to understand what is meant by feeling in this context, since they insist on the division between the real and the illusory. It is for this reason that the books of Kant belonging to his father
“were in the case with the green panes in his…study, and Törless knew that the case was never opened except to show it to a visitor”
It would seem, then, that the Kantian canon has something of the dirty little secret about it; it says something that everyone must already know innately, hence why the books are simply decorative and don’t have to be read, because the demonstrations must hold and apply universally, indeed it is the supreme proof of the correctness of our way of being and method of evaluating. But as soon as one dares question it, as does Törless, it suddenly becomes something arcane, esoteric that only a select few have the privilege of actually understanding. It is no longer the proof of our being modern creatures, but a specialized knowledge wielded by a few. Or if one’s experience of the world does not conform to that which Kant considers as possible experience, one is deemed mad, as when the mathematician says of Törless,
“He really was so odd that I almost think he has a tendency to hysteria”
Kant settles our affairs for us, who says of the world that it is the way it is for good reason and exerts an immense effort to prove this. Most importantly, despite its pretensions to the contrary, despite its efforts to imprison sensuality, the Kantian system is never accepted by the proof of demonstration, but precisely by a
“wild, excessive sensuality that tears [ones] whole being apart, tears it apart with lascivious intention”
at precisely the moment when it has
“shattered the balance of [ones] self-assurance”.
Törless reinserts desire, somewhat unconsciously, into this whole operation. He suddenly, while speaking about this seemingly banal theoretical problem, resists the urge to say something about Basini:
“I feel tormented by mathematics, and when I—, but he quickly changed his mind and said nothing about Basini.”
And, when he says,
“for me, Basini and this are two separate things, and I’m not in the habit of lumping two different things together”
he is, of course, lying to himself and the others. It is no surprise that this outburst is immediately followed by the passage in which Törless’s new sensuality finds its most explicit formulation in the text.
“When he was still in skirts and didn’t yet go to school, there were times when he felt an inexpressible longing to be a girl.”
And this desire of Törless, this feeling that he is becoming a girl (this what I meant earlier about a new mode of existence springing from a new feeling) is just as real as the desires of Beineberg and Reiting, hence why Musil writes,
“and this longing was not stuck inside his head, oh, no, nor in his heart, it tickled him all over and rushed around the underneath of his skin”
It is only with this real becoming-girl that
“he felt infinitely safe from these clever people, and for the first time he felt that in his sensuality”.
And if ever we were in doubt that the Kantian tribunal of reason, and the debtor-creditor relationship were a complimentary pair— that is, if we ever doubted the unity of sensuality and knowledge in favour of an ‘asexual logic’, or even further, if we ever doubted that the passional consciousness and the mature consciousness feed from the same ‘groundless’ well-spring, then I think this passage would be the final blow to that doubt:
“They put all the blame on Basini, and one after the other the whole class asserted the Basini was a despicable, thieving wretch… and again the whole class swore that Basini’s maltreatment was merely an overreaction in the heat of the moment to the extremely coarse scorn he had poured on those who, for the noblest of reasons, were only trying to help him. To cut a long story short, it was a well-rehearsed piece of play-acting, brilliantly directed by Reiting, hitting all the moral notes that were music to the ears of those responsible for their education”
The Kantian tribunal delights in the little secret— perhaps the judges of the tribunal knew all along, and it is only when the secret is out that they have to put together this rehearsal. It is not only the kids who are ‘play-acting’ but everyone else as well, the debtor-creditor relationship being of a sexual nature means that it implicates the desire of everybody, even the judges. The tribunal of reason could be better called the ‘theatre of reason’ — guilt and forgiveness, just like the maths master’s answers to Törless, are always ready at hand, to be dished out immediately. The difference between this moral theatre and that passional theatre observed by Törless is immense. But this finally leads us to Törless and his somewhat fraught relationship with decision-making, as was described earlier in the text:
“It was only when it came to making a decision, to taking on his own responsibility, one of the possible psychological reactions as definite, that he was found wanting, lost interest, and had no energy”
But can we not say that Törless, in having Basini divulge his little secret, in exposing this sham that is the moral-legal theatre, that he is the only one in the text of whom it can be said that he really decides, that he feels the real, immediate force of decision, in a far more profound way than either Beineberg and Reiting? It is also in this sense, that Törless is the real ‘man of politics’, or to put it in the Nietzschean idiom, the ‘overman’ of this story, despite his desire not having as clear-cut a political meaning as Beineberg’s Indian philosopher or Reiting’s Napoleon. And this would be the final difference between the passional consciousness of Törless and the two others, which would also be the final link between desire, sexuality, and politics: the difference lies in their mode of sexual experimentation with Basini. It is true that both Basini and Reiting, in their sexual encounter with Basini, invest the social-political field, as Basini explains,
“Yes, he’s very nice to me. Mostly I have to get undressed and read something from a history book out to him; about Rome and the emperors, about the Borgias, about Tamburlaine… you know, great events with lots of blood. Then he even caresses me”
But for both Beineberg and Reiting, that eminent social-political form, which is to say, the very structure through which they enact their fantasies — the debtor-creditor relationship— remains unquestioned; this torment is ultimately all that is invested; cruelty is the only end, they only care to extract their own pleasure. It is only Törless’s sexual experimentation that does entirely away with this relation, as when Törless tells Basini:
“Yes, I’m tormenting you. But that’s not what I’m after; I just want to know one thing: what’s inside you when I stick all this into you like knives? What goes on inside you? Does anything break inside you?… the image you’ve formed of yourself, doesn’t it vanish like a candle being blown-out; doesn’t another pop up in its place, like magic-lantern pictures appearing out of the dark?”
That is, unlike the others, Törless implicates Basini in his sexual experimentation, searching not only for his own but also Basini’s singularities, Basini’s own mode of desiring-production, which has nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure, whether it be his or Basini’s, and thereby makes of Basini a veritable ally in the endeavor. Törless, in other words, is the only one to grasp politics as a problem not of individual desire, but of collective desire, and it is because of this fundamental insight that he is able to replace the debtor-creditor relation, the money-form, even if it is only for a moment, with a relationship that is not productive of shame or guilt.