61 A Life Lived With Precision

In this chapter we learn that Ulrich is losing interest in Moosbrugger: "The depressing mixture of brutality and suffering that is the nature of such people was as distasteful to him as the blend of precision and sloppiness that characterized the judgments usually pronounced upon them."

This leads our narrator to discuss the idea of trying to live a life with precision.  What does such a life amount to?

It would more or less come down to keeping silent when one has nothing to say, doing only the necessary where one has nothing special to do, and, most important, remaining indifferent unless one has that ineffable sense of spreading one's arms wide, borne aloft on a wave of creation. One will observe that this would be the end of most of our inner life, but that might not be such a painful loss.

But what about the implications to our "moral life"?

It would be a useful experiment to try to cut down to the minimum the moral expenditure (of whatever kind) that accompanies our actions, to satisfy ourselves with being moral only in those exceptional cases where it really counts, but otherwise not to think differently from the way we do about standardizing pencils or screws.  Perhaps not much good would be done that way, but some things would be done better; there would be no talent left, only genius; the washed-out prints that develop from the pallid resemblance of actions to virtues would disappear from the image of life; in their place we would have these virtues' intoxicating fusion in holiness.

The narrator raises that point that this is a "Utopian" vision, a "utopia of precision."

The logical outcome of this should be a human being full of the paradoxical interplay of exactitude and indefiniteness. He is incorruptibly, deliberately cold, as required by the temperament of precision; but beyond this quality, everything else in him is indefinite.  . . . Ultimately . . . the passions disappear and . . . in there place arises something like a primordial fire of goodness.

This is roughly a description of Ulrich, the man without qualities --- though I question the assumption that what arises in him is like "a primordial fire of goodness."  It is something more like a sense of emptiness.  Here's how the argument ends:

This man, given to taking everything seriously and without bias, is biased to the point of abhorrence against the idea of taking himself seriously, and there is, alas, no doubt that he would regard the utopia of himself as an immoral experiment on persons engaged in serious business.