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Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities

Written on January 19, 2025 by Emilian Kasemi.

2 min read

Photo of the The Man Without Qualities imaginary representation
He's a man without qualities!

And now you just run your mind over the sort of man he is. He always knows what to do. He can gaze into a woman's eyes. He can exercise his intelligence efficiently on any given problem at any given moment. He can box. He is talented, strong-willed, unprejudiced, he has courage, and he has endurance, he can go at things with a dash and he can be cool and cautious - I have no intentions on examining all this in detail, let him have all these qualities! For in the end he hasn't got them at all! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When he is moved by something, he will reject it. Every bad action will seem good to him in some connection or other. And it will always be only a possible context that will decide what he thinks of a thing. Nothing is stable for him. Everything is fluctuating, 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-anwer, every one of his feelings, 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.
I don't know whether I make myself quite clear to you?

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