The essay begins by defining the limits of "precision," as its applied to the situation embodied by Moosbrugger, and suggesting an alternative:
The one is satisfied to be precise and stick to the facts, while the other is not, but always looks at the whole picture and derives its insights from so-called great and eternal truths. The first achieves success, the other scope and prestige. Clearly, a pessimist could say that the results in the first case are worth nothing and in the second case are not true.But the narrator wants to state the case for a viable version of the "other" approach. The dreams of "precision," he declares, "were abandoned to the unwinged use of engineers and scientists, while everyone else reverted to a more worthy and far-reaching frame of mind."
"Uncertainty," he goes on to say, "had made its comeback. Complaints were heard":
. . . pure knowledge tore apart every sublime achievement of mankind without every being able to put it back together, and they demanded a new humane faith, a return to inner primal values, a spiritual revival, and all sorts of things of that kind. . . . Science had begun to be out-dated, and the unfocused type of person that dominates the present had begun to assert itself.In his youth, one of Ulrich's "cherished notions" was "living hypothetically":
. . . it showed the desire for grand connections in life and the aura of revocability a young man feels as he hesitantly ventures into life. . . . The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing anything is final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world . . . in the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself. . . . He seeks to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or intellectually taboo; he feels like a stride, free to move in any direction, from equilibrium to equilibrium, but always forward.He links this form of living with the concept of the "essay."
It was more a less in the way of an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it --- for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept --- that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life.There are moral implications to all this, of course:
. . . the significance of all moral events seemed to him to be the function of other events on which they depended. In this way an open-ended system of relationships arises, in which independent meanings, . . . no longer exist at all. . . . Accordingly, Ulrich felt that he was basically capable of every virtue and every baseness; the fact that in a balanced social order virtues as well as vices are tacitly regarded as equally burdensome attested for him to what happens in nature generally, that every play of forces tends in time toward an average value and average condition, toward compromise and inertia.Shades of Thomas Pynchon's variations on the physics concept of "entropy"!
But the case for "essayism" continues:
. . . an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man's inner life in a decisive thought. Nothing is more foreign to it than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivity. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are not less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable.According to Ulrich --- and Musil, I believe --- "there was only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live."
This long chapter on "essayism" attempts to make a case for one approach, the one most suited to Ulrich's nature. Yet he is left uneasy:
Ulrich could not abandon himself to vague intimations . . . but neither could he conceal from himself that in all those years of scientific scrupulosity he had merely been living against his grain. He wished something unforeseen would happen to him, for when he took what he somewhat wryly called his "holiday from life" he had nothing, in one direction or another, that gave him peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment