Aesthetic Experience in Robert Musil

My dissertation Aesthetic Experience in Robert Musil analyzes the second volume and unpublished chapters of Musil’s unfinished novel Mann ohne Eigenschaften, as well as other writings from the perspective of aesthetic theory. Musil’s life-long exploration of the relationship between reason and emotion finds its ultimate expression in the chapters devoted to the quasi-mystical, quasi-erotic experiences of the novel’s protagonist Ulrich and his sister Agathe. I argue that Musil’s concept of “der andere Zustand,” introduced in the first volume of the novel, emerges as an aesthetic problem in Volume II and it enables Ulrich to overcome the moral and epistemic impasses he faces in various aspects of his life. Using hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches, but juxtaposing them with the empirical psychological methods of Musil’s generation, I demonstrate that for Musil aesthetic experience mediates between the physical and the intelligible world, or what could be called Form and Sinn. The artwork as the paradigmatic object of aesthetic experience brings the interplay of Form and Sinn to the foreground, thereby enabling the subject to transcend its form and produce meaning that hinges on, but is simultaneously irreducible to re-presentation. In the first chapter I establish my conceptual framework with a close reading of Musil’s novella Die Amsel against the backdrop of early twentieth-century debates about the relationship of form and life. The second chapter establishes Agathe as a character who embodies aesthetic experience in Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Chapter three discusses Musil’s literary responses to experiences in the visual arts, which is an aspect of his works that has gone largely unaddressed in the secondary literature. The final chapter concludes with the formulation of Musil’s theory of “gestaute Bedeutung” as the paradigm of aesthetic experience. While being drawn to it, the aesthetic observer remains at a peculiar distance to the artwork, which hinders any attempt to fully grasp it. I argue that the aesthetic experience is grounded in the material world and hence unfolds within the categories of science, but that this experience ultimately transcends these very categories by way of self-reflective modes of representation. In addition to showing the importance of aesthetic thought in Musil’s later career, my thesis contributes to the current debates about the place and scope of aesthetics as a discipline