The ethos of aesthetic judgment: Robert Musil's defense of modernity

The aesthetic and ethical project at the heart of Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930-32) has its roots in the historical upheavals surrounding the First World War, most notably, in the experience of a "disenchanted world" (Max Weber) marked by "transcendental homelessness" (Georg Lukacs) and the lack of stable coordinates for moral orientation. While much Musil scholarship regards the novel as mourning a loss of ethical certainties, this study highlights Musil's attempt to come to a positive assessment of modern reality. In drawing on the reflection on aesthetics and ethics that unfolds in Musil's essays and diaries between the 1910s and the 1930s, this dissertation outlines Musil's quest for an understanding of ethics that enables the individual to come to terms with a modern world torn between conflicting value systems. This objective forms the framework for Musil's reconceptualization of the relation between art and ethics, which transposes central insights of Kant's aesthetics onto the empirical plane of contemporary experimental sciences. In this way, Musil is able to ground ethics in aesthetic judgment, understood as a self-referential principle of orientation located outside of cognition.;The Man without Qualities carries this inquiry further. In staging the failure of the protagonist's utopian visions, the novel denounces all quests for totalizing ethical perspectives. At the same time, the mystical adventure of Ulrich and his sister Agathe redefines ethical experience as the intermittent, non-cognizant perception of a fundamental unity of existence. This study concludes by emphasizing the advantages of the "inductive ethos" that was to emerge from the protagonist's failures. In recognizing that the ethical cannot provide coordinates for steering individual and collective existence, the inductive attitude presupposes that in modernity the question of the 'good life' requires acknowledging and negotiating the claims of different domains of experience without the benefit of a morally superior standpoint. Musil's contribution to ethical reorientation must be seen in this containment of ethics, which endorses the differentiated structure of modernity.