9-13 A Great Man and a Racehorse of Genius

Chapters 9 through 11 summarize Ulrich attempts to become a great man, even though as the narrator explains, "he knew neither how to become one nor what a great man is."  Ulrich initially attempts to achieve greatness as a soldier, but he is soon disillusioned.

He had expected to find himself on a stage of world-shaking adventures with himself as hero, but now saw nothing but a drunken young man shouting on a wide, empty street, answered only by the paving stones.

Then, with characteristic logic, Ulrich decides to become an engineer because he is enamored of their world view.

Looked at from a technical point of view, the world is simply ridiculous; impractical in all that concerns human relations, and extremely uneconomic and imprecise in its methods; anyone accustomed to solving his problems with a slide rule cannot take seriously a good half of the assertions people make. . . . If you had a slide rule and someone comes along with big statements or great emotions, you say: "Just a moment, please -- let's first work out the margin for error and the most-probable values."

But he is soon disillusioned with engineers too, and starts asking questions like why "do they wear suits constructed like the early stages of the automobile?" Or:

 . . . why, finally, do they never speak of anything but their profession, or if they do speak of something else, why do they have that peculiar, stiff, remote, superficial manner that never goes deeper inside them than the epiglottis?

In his third attempt at greatness, Ulrich turns to mathematics, the heart and soul of science.

The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. . . . People simply don't realize it, they have no idea how much thinking can done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they would change their lives.

Ulrich's work in mathematics brings him "recognition" and he is officially "promising." But all of his convictions regarding his new career are shattered when he reads the phrase "racehorse of genius" and "instantly [grasps] the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius of racehorses."

Ulrich had been attempting greatness through a life of the mind. But when the "spirit of the age" can declare that racehorse is a genius, where does that leave the scientist?

The fact is, science has developed a concept of hard, sober intelligence that makes the old metaphysical and moral ideas of the human race simply intolerable, even though all it has to put in their place is that hope that a distant day will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.

"Valleys of spiritual fruitfulness?"  The phrase seems overripe.  But that is what Musil intends.  At this point, the narrator declares, Ulrich realizes his image of science "works only so long as the eye is not forced to abandon visionary distances for a present nearness, or made to read a statement that in the meantime a racehorse has become a genius."

In a word, Ulrich is once again disillusioned.  At the end of chapter 13, he reaches this conclusion:

. . . since, now that genius is attributed to soccer players and horses, a man can save himself only by the use he makes of genius, he [Ulrich] resolved to take a year's leave of absence from his life in order to seek an appropriate application of his abilities. 

But when a man doesn't have a sense of his own reality, to what does he apply his abilities?  And to what purpose? If you are so absent from yourself, how can your life have a purpose?