14-16 Walter and a Malady of the Times

Before I talk about Ulrich's boyhood "friend," Walter, I want to throw out a comparison from Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Soren Kierkegaard talks about the two ways an "existing individual" can approach truth.

Essentially there is the traditional "subjective" approach and the modern, scientific "objective" approach.  In extreme cases, Kierkegaard says, both lead to madness.  Don Quixote, he adds, "is the prototype for a subjective madness, in which the passion of inwardness embraces a particular fixed idea." But scientific "objectivity" can also become a madness "which consists of the absence of inwardness." He then sums up the difference.

This type of madness [extreme objectivity] is more inhuman than [extreme subjectivity]. One shrinks from looking into the eyes of a madman of [extreme subjectivity] lest one be compelled to plumb there the depths of his delirium; but one dares not look at the madman of [extreme objectivity] from fear of discovering that he has eyes of glass and hair made of carpet-rags; that he is, in short, an artificial product . . . a cunningly contrived walking stick in which a talking machine has been concealed.

The two boyhood friends, Walter and Ulrich, represent these two approaches.  Being familiar with Ulrich's lack of "qualities," the absence of an "inner" sense of his reality, we easily define him as objective.  In chapter 14 we are introduced to Walter, the type of the extremely subjective.

What are his chief characteristics?  He's a passionate lover of art in all it's forms. We first see him with his wife Clarisse "playing the piano together." But it isn't ordinary piano practice.

Something unfathomable was going on: a balloon, wavering in outline as it filled up with hot emotion, was swelling to the bursting point, and from the excited fingertips, the nervously wrinkling foreheads, the twitching bodies, again and again surges of fresh feeling poured into this awesome private tumult. How often they had been through this!

Of course, Ulrich, being scientific, insists that "music represented a failure of the will and a confusion of the mind."

And what else do we learn about Walter? Ulrich sees him as "a gifted young man narrowing himself down into an ordinary young man, not as a result of any blow of fate but through a kind of preordained shrinkage."  Other people, the narrator reports, "were accustomed to say that he lacked will power, but it would have been equally valid to call him a lifelong, many-sided dilettante." But Walter is no ordinary dilettante -- and the contrast between him and Ulrich is made immediately apparent:

. . . it was quite remarkable that there were always authorities in the worlds of music, painting. and literature who expressed enthusiastic views of Walter's future. In Ulrich's life, by contrast, even though he had a few undeniably noteworthy achievements to his credit, it had never happened that someone came up to him and said: "You are a man I have always been looking for, the man my friends are waiting for." In Walter's life this had happened every three months.

Walter is the artist who has overcome all obstacles, but "now that there was no longer anything left to be overcome, the unexpected happened: the works promised for so long by the greatness of his mind failed to materialize. Walter seemed no longer able to work."

I'll leave Walter's tortured relationship with Clarisse for another time. Instead, I'll jump ahead to Chapter 16 -- Ulrich's thoughts (for some reason, I'm reluctant to call them an analysis) on what the chapter title calls "A Mysterious Malady of the Times." What is this malady?  It seems to be the same thing that Walter suffers from, only on a much grander scale.

There is no lack of talent or goodwill or even of strong personalities. There is just something missing in everything, though you can't put your finger on it . . . a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period's seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older.

At this point, Ulrich's speculates that the cause of this might be "common stupidity." I won't go into details, but I will quote his conclusion:

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is aways at a disadvantage.

Having summed up the power of human stupidity, Ulrich is distracted by a "curious notion."  Being scientific, he examines his "feelings" and concludes chapter 16 with this observation:

A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage, Ulrich felt. But he could never bring himself to love all these manifestations of life, as one's general sense of social well-being requires. For a long time a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination.

Is that where science leads us: to "an all-encompassing distaste" for life in its totality?