Positivism and Inwardness: Schopenhauer's Legacy in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil's unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities is testimony that Arthur Schopenhauer's legacy in early-twentieth-century European culture cuts across the familiar opposition between neo-romantic irrationalism and scientific positivism. I adduce evidence in Musil's unfinished novel and contemporaneous essays and journal entries that his utopian vision of an integration of ethical inwardness and scientific objectivity, an integration productive of an existence without qualities, is symptomatic of a Schopenhauerian outlook that prevailed in Europe êntre deux guerres and yielded a crisis of narratives and consequent moral ambivalence. Musil's literary style achieves a vivid rendering of the causes and conditions of the ethical paralysis afflicting the modern self committed to the exploration of inwardness.