Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Parallel Actions
- 1 Early Philology and Existentialist Readings
- 2 From Social Criticism to Cultural Critique
- 3 Psychological and Psychoanalytical Readings
- 4 Aesthetic Readings
- 5 The Order of Feeling: Ethical Readings
- 6 The Information of Communication
- Editions of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
- Musil Bibliographies
- Works Consulted
- Index
5 - The Order of Feeling: Ethical Readings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Parallel Actions
- 1 Early Philology and Existentialist Readings
- 2 From Social Criticism to Cultural Critique
- 3 Psychological and Psychoanalytical Readings
- 4 Aesthetic Readings
- 5 The Order of Feeling: Ethical Readings
- 6 The Information of Communication
- Editions of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
- Musil Bibliographies
- Works Consulted
- Index
Summary
Die Dinge sind anders, weil meine Einstellung zu ihnen eine andre ist. Es handelt sich weniger darum, daß ich andre Seiten wahrnehme als daß ich überhaupt weniger “wahrnehme,” sondern ethisch eingestellt bin.
(TB I, 650)Ich will nicht begreifen, sondern fühlbar machen.
(B I, 24)AROUND THE LATE EIGHTIES a new tone could be heard in Musil scholarship. As the controversy between Helmut Arntzen and Roger Willemsen indicated, no consensus had been reached in the aesthetic discussion of the novel. In other areas of scholarship, existential critique was being displaced by social criticism, and social criticism itself had undergone transformation as a result of cultural critique, which had emerged from within it. While psychology was still an undiminished point of departure for approaches to Musil's novel, it was the question of Musil's ethics that now began to move to center stage.
The debate about modernism and its would-be successor, postmodernism, that by now was raging across literary scholarship of all persuasions, ensured that ethical questions in Musil would be conducted around a wholly new set of assumptions. Under the modernist paradigm, for example, ethics and aesthetics were anything but antithetical undertakings, as Marie-Louise Roth's study of 1972 had sought to demonstrate. The larger issue about ethics that had arisen in the seventies had been partly a matter of whether and to what extent aesthetics and ethics, and, by extension, art and science, could be connected.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003