The Two Adaptations and the Principle of the Insufficient Cause

In his Diaries Musil (1999) refers to the problem he identifies in the above passage as that of the relation between Precision, exemplified most clearly in the practice of Science, and Soul - a term which may be employed in many different contexts but which, for the sake of our argument, is taken to relate to the values and beliefs of everyday life, and to the academic disciplines associated with these values. From the perspective developed in the preceding chapters, Science and Soul are the twin achievements of that step in evolution at which a new form of adaptation became necessary, one in which the need for strategies of physical survival to the threats of the environment was supplemented by shared practices of a symbolic nature: acts of sacrifice, cave painting, the reading of auguries, are the earlier stages of a social construction of meaning that defines a "cultural space” connecting the individual and the group.

Such a space allows for a certain existential distance from events and thereby fosters a sense of control over them, even those that in reality are beyond human control. This second adaptation is a re-presentation of events; a separate, cultural reality comes into being and establishes itself as a form by which we understand the world; initially an awakening, then a custom. This description is appropriate for both the affairs of Science and of Soul.

The evolutionary transition to the symbolic form arises from the essential interrelation between Mind, Self, and Society - a self capable of relating an experience to itself and to others, a language which fulfils this function, a society of shared experience, and, one must add, a meaning in experience which is shared because it transcends individual points of view. As for the antecedents of this new form, we suffer the same lack of evidence which confounds the evolution of natural forms; we see the established capacities of the long nose of the elephant in its complete form - the history of its development must be ultimately a matter of speculation. But not idle speculation since the benefits of the new form can provide clues as to its precedents. For example, we can understand how the intimacy of shared experience in family or larger social groups may not only assist social integration but also contribute to the consolidation of the self within the social network and then to the appearance of a form of language conducive to the relation between self and society.

But it may be the case that the awareness of our human vulnerability also played a major role in our receiving the great gift of the second adaptation, namely, that of the mind’s freedom to roam, a freedom “from" which became in the course of time a freedom “to”. Of course, it is not an unconditioned freedom; it is always exercised within contexts, particular situations, which stamp their own imprint on the decision taken. This is, however, not the major reason why the meaning of precision in matters of the Soul is so difficult to define. Whilst, dealing with matters of fact - the exploration of formic acid, the weaving of a piece of cloth, the best noise-cancelling earphones, or the establishment of an account in a tax-free haven (all questions of how to explore and manage “what is”) we do not doubt the existence of the objects of our attention or the capacity to answer them precisely. But questions which entail a “should" are of a different order.

Philosophers tell us that we cannot derive statements of “should “from statements of fact, and this is surely the case if one assumes that the only true propositions are factual in nature. But this conclusion fails to recognise that the distinction between the two worlds of the factual symbolic and the value symbolic and the two different kinds of truth-seeking which they entail, namely, truth of assertion and truth of identity (Hofstadter, 1965). Plotinus, we saw, distinguished the knowledge of assertion, in which you relate one thing to another (it is “finding the other in the other”) from truth of identity which is the knowledge of “finding that which is in itself”.

We must be aware, then, of importing criteria appropriate to the factual into any assessment of the nature of precision in the truth of that which is essentially and intrinsically self-related. Truth of identity is the self communicating with itself about the fulfilment of its identity in the true form of itself. It is the refinement and fulfilment of the whole form of otherness into itself, not an attachment of itself to a partial, singular concern. Let’s for a moment return to Musil’s Man Without Qualities (1968) Ulrich, who finds himself drawn into a campaign to celebrate what is “true" patriotism, “true" progress and the “true" Austria in a celebration of the Emperor Franz Joseph’s Reign.

The problem of identity is central to the novel: the German ‘Eigenschaften’ highlights this emphasis, for ‘eigen’ means own, belonging to the self: the man without qualities, Musil writes, consists of qualities without a man. There is a delightful irony to the first parts of the novel as such a man comes into conflict with a society which mistakenly identifies the self’s fulfilment as occurring in relation to perceived social values - a true patriotism, for example. In one episode, Ulrich is confronted by Director Leo Fischel of Lloyd’s Bank who has just been notified about the aims of this movement to define the true Austria of 1913. “What”, he asks, “do you understand by “true patriotism", “true progress" and “true Austria"? Ulrich responds in the language of business abbreviations, “The p.i.c.".

‘The Principle of the Insufficient Cause!’ Ulrich explained. Being a philosopher yourself, you know of course what the principle of the sufficient cause is. Only, people make an exception where they themselves are concerned. In real life, by which I mean our personal and also our public-historical life, what happens is always what has no good cause...[the insufficient cause] is “something that contributes nothing materially but sets events going. You ought to know from history that there has never been such a thing as the true faith, true morality, and true philosophy. And yet the wars, and all the vileness and viciousness, that have been let loose in their name have fruitfully transformed the world. (Musil, 1968, Vol. 1, p. 181)

Clearly, any identity formed through an adherence to this principle is always an identity ‘against’. A circle is drawn around the “true way" with the purpose of excluding the unbeliever. But what would a sufficient cause look like from the perspective of the symbolic realm? Should we simply dismiss hopes of a true faith, morality, and philosophy, and abandon ourselves to the relativity of ironic detachment? That Musil does not reach this conclusion is evident in the later passages of the novel which recognise the starting point of that different relationship of self and other which previous chapters have outlined. He calls this perspective “the other condition":

One loses oneself and all at once comes to oneself. For example, you sit down in the country to view the scenery. You notice a herd of cows grazing; you notice the flies swarming around the cows and, without being conscious of the thought, you feel the idyllic is impaired. You wonder if there is a bull among them, or where that path leads. In short, there are innumerable tiny intentions, worries, calculations and observations, and they form, as it were, the paper on which one has the picture of the cows. One isn’t aware of the paper at all, one’s aware only of the cows on it - And suddenly the paper tears!, Agathe exclaimed.

Yes. That’s to say: what tears is some tissue of habit in us. Then it’s no longer something edible grazing there. No longer something paintable. Nothing blocks your way. You can’t even form the word “graze” any more, because it has a lot of purposeful, useful connotations that you’ve suddenly lost. What’s left on the pictorial plane is something perhaps best called a billowing of sensations, rising and sinking or breathing and twinkling, as though it filled your whole field of vision without any outlines. Of course there are innumerable individual perceptions contained in all this as well - colours, horns, movements, smells, and everything that goes to make up reality. But that’s no longer acknowledged, even though it may still be recognised. I should like to put it this way: the details no longer have that egoism of theirs which makes demands upon our attention, they are notfraternal andfondly, truly inwardly, linked with one another [italics mine]. And of course there isn’t any pictorial plane there anymore either. Everything somehow merges illimitably into you.

Again, Agatha took up the description. “Now”, she exclaimed enthusiastically, all you need to say instead of the egoism of the details is the egoism of human beings, and then you’ve got what it’s so hard to express: that “Love your Neighbour” doesn’t mean love him on the basis of what you and he ‘are’. What it means is a sort of dreamlike condition!”

“All moral propositions”, Ulrich confirmed, “refer to a sort of dream condition that’s long ago taken wing and flown out of the cage of rules in which we try to hold it fast”. (Musil, 1968, Vol. 3, pp. 122-123)

This passage is Musil’s rallying-cry for an identity gained directly, without the intervention of a cognitive map of the environment. It is, in fact, a defence of metaphor, since the symbolism is essentially metaphorical in its twin aspects of condensation and displacement. He is aware that this experience may be passed off as merely “a holiday mood”, a pleasant escape from the real business of life. Or that it may be seen as a self adornment - the equivalent of what Keats called “the egotistical sublime” - an identity in which the sublime exclusively serves the self without the correspondence of the self serving the sublime.

That we must work to take up the challenge of developing a morality from this other condition is, arguably, the major theme of the novel, and Musil is in no doubt that this task falls to the imagination which can demonstrate that, losing our egoism, we can also be "fraternal and fondly, truly inwardly linked with one another”. "Morality is imagination!”, Ulrich exclaims in the closing passages of the novel. On this account, the morality of the other condition is, to be sure, a state of mind, but, more significantly, it is a perspective that demands to be worked out in human situations. In this way the movement permitted and necessitated by the transition from the natural to the symbolic world is a completion of human being from the "is” of human nature to the "ought” of the symbolic. It is the movement that Aristotle describes under the headings of the formal and final causes.

Setting aside the headings of its different volumes, ‘The Man Without Qualities’ reads in three parts, the first an ironic account of the follies of the intellect, the second, the "Holy Conversations” between Ulrich and his sister, Agathe, revealing the "other condition”, and the third a directionless and inconclusive repetition of the ideas that drive the novel. Musil himself characterised his work as "one pillar of an arch”. But it is a philosophical novel (like no other) - its readers either find it totally addictive (even life-changing) or "not quite what they expect from a novel”. I like to think, on the contrary, that its great strength lies in its borderline nature - the border between fiction and philosophy, between the real and the possible, the sacred and the secular, and, of course, between the scientific and poetic imagination.

The question of "borderline problems” was a major issue for Musil, and in "the Man Without Qualities’ we find opposites that are truly independent - they have a life of their own - and are truly interdependent - but at the same time one does not exist in the mind without the other. The contradiction of dependence/interdependence disappears once we understand the terms as relating to the necessary tension of an always ongoing process of the advent of the self into being: the possible needs the real, the real reveals the possible. But the inconclusiveness of 1913 could only result in the absolute conclusiveness of 1914. Musil would have taken heart from the judgment of a distinguished historian of the Great War that, in parallel with the many other specific causes, there was a lack of imagination on all sides that provided the essential context for the disaster.