LOUIS A. SASS
105
Many of the dangers of this kind of relativism are illustrated by the
character of Ulrich, the anti-hero protagonist of
The Man Without
Qualities,
the great modern novel by Robert Musil, who was an avid
reader of Nietzsche from an early age. Ulrich, who stands for Musil as a
sort of representative modern man, is an exceptionally self-conscious be–
ing, ever preoccupied with myriad possibilities and ways of being. A
"possibilitarian," he has lived since childhood in a subjunctive mood,
once arguing in a schoolboy essay that "even God probably preferred to
speak of His world in the subjunctive of potentiality ... for God makes
the world and while doing so thinks that it could just as easily be some
other way." The result is a feeling of negative freedom, a constant
awareness of the groundlessness of existence. Indeed, Ulrich is so aware of
"the leaps that the attention took, the exertion of the eye-muscles, the
pendulum-movements of the psyche occurring at every moment" that
even the act of keeping one's body vertical in the street seems to him to
require a tremendous amount of energy. He cannot forget the importance
of perspectives or horizons, nor can he trust his own, for, as another
character in the novel points out, Ulrich knows too well that it is always
"only a possible context that will decide what he thinks of a thing."
And so it is difficult for Ulrich to make decisions, whether in the
matter of furnishing his house or choosing a career; he too easily sees the
arguments for all possible choices. Indeed, he loses all sense of reality, for
in his hyper-reflexive state, nothing exists "in-itself' but only as an
emanation of the viewing mind. There is nothing but a "world going in
and out, aspects of the world falling into shape inside a head."
Nothing is stable for [Ulrich]. Everything is fluctuating, a part of a
whole, among innumerable wholes that presumably are part of a
super-whole, which, however, he doesn't know the slightest thing
about. So every one of his answers is a part-answer, every one of his
feelings is only a point of view, and whatever a thing is, it doesn't
matter to him what it is, it's only some accompanying 'way in which
it is,' some addition or other, that matters to him.
Ulrich's indecisiveness might be considered a symptom of what
Heidegger has called "the age of the world-view." This is the era, inau–
gurated by Descartes in the middle of the seventeenth century and reach–
ing a kind of crescendo in the twentieth, when the world is no longer felt
to exist as an encompassing or solid external reality, when it is experi–
enced instead
as
a view - a mere subjective projection whose being
derives from the individual human subject or from whatever human
perspective or symbolic system incorporates it.
