Kant, Mach, Bahr and the "Unsalvagable I"

A very rough draft excerpt from the biography

Feb 14, 2025

On February, 1902, while still an engineering student in Brno, Robert had flippantly noted that he had given up on reading Kant, but was doing just fine nevertheless. But he really could not get away with not grappling with Kant’s foundational questions about how the mind interacts with the world, about whether or not there is a thing-in-itself and how we might experience it as phenomena through our senses or as intuition through the mind’s a priori processes. He may have been compelled to return to him, on June 8, 1902, by his renewed study of Nietzsche and Emerson in early May or by his epoch-making reading of Ernst Mach’s Popular Scientific Lectures later that month.

According to Mach, whom Musil would write his dissertation on, and who was paradoxically a hero for the Vienna Circle, science was a very refined accumulation of generalizations—abstractions from the infinite variegation of the world, where no two things are ever exactly alike. Without abandoning the realm of science—indeed, Mach asserted that experimental empirical methods would somehow provide evidence that a shifting experience of the objects of the world was perfectly natural and traceable to physiological responses—he seemed to expand for Musil what science and reality were. (And for many, many others: Einstein said, “I even believe that the people who consider themselves opponents of Mach, scarcely know how much of Mach’s way of thinking they have absorbed, so to say, with their mother’s milk.”)

Not only did Mach insist, like Fechner, upon a non-dualistic conception of body and mind, but he also strove to overcome the gap between the disciplines of science (including biology, evolution, physics, mathematics), philosophy, psychology—and, since his suppositions and findings had a direct bearing on aesthetic experience, he was also building a sort of bridge for Musil between these academic disciplines and the realm of art. Thus, even if Musil subsequently came to question some of Mach's ideas and methods in his dissertation, Mach was an important role model for him of radical interdisciplinarity and of the sort of skepticism that does not lead to nihilism or despair of finding provisional approximate bridges to understanding and conduct of life.

At a crucial stage in the “battle between the brain and the medulla oblongata,” Robert wrote in his notebook that he had read Mach just in time to save him from abandoning reason altogether.

He was discovering, along with his contemporaries, a kind of science that took into consideration the existence of seemingly irrational processes in the human brain, or, as David Luft put it, thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Musil were interested in "irrationalism" not as an "advocacy of the irrational but [in] the effort to come to terms with the presence of the irrational in ourselves and in the world."[i] An expansion of what science was, an expansion—along the lines of his contemporary, Einstein—of what physical reality consisted. Mach, whom Musil would write his dissertation about 6 years later, explained the process of perception as an abstracting whereby the brain adapts itself to the world by creating analogies, categories, and conceptions that are subject to distortion, illusion, and a continual transformation. This would have appealed to Musil's own experience of the shifting, unstable world and may have begun to point the way toward a scientific explanation for “spiritual” intimations. The revelation or acknowledgment that even science was subject to the sort of analogical thinking associated with literature, mysticism, and the irreducible aesthetic-ethical realm of essay, threatened to undermine the absolute truth value of science—indeed, Robert’s dissertation, influenced by his advisor Stumpf’s negative assessment of Mach, concludes that Mach’s theory undermines the scientific validity of his arguments—but simultaneously provided possible scientific, physiological explanations for processes that otherwise might be understood as metaphysical and, as such, even more of a threat to a scientific world view. Mach’s method, moreover, of perspectival skepticism which does not devolve to nihilistic despair about approaching truths was an important model for Robert. The last line of Mach’s Anti-Metaphysical Preliminary Remarks for his Analysis of Sensations was: “No standpoint has absolute enduring value: each one is only significant for a particular aim”(24).

Robert’s initial abandonment of Kant—and by association Mach and the whole field of study he would embark on about a year later—was not that different from that of Hermann Bahr, whose wildly influential essay “The Unsalvageable I,” introduced Mach to a generation of artists and thinkers. While Bahr’s analysis of Mach is not the most sophisticated, it was certainly important for the popular transmission, among artists and lay intellectuals, of the Moravian philosopher-scientist’s ideas. Robert comments on another essay in Bahr’s book (“Dialogue on the Tragic”) in the same period when he is re-reading Nietzsche and Emerson. We can be sure he read “The Unsalvageable I” as well. Before subjecting Kant and Mach to a dismissive and pragmatist treatment similar to young Robert’s, Bahr opens the door to all sorts of dizzying perspectives, beginning with a childhood trauma upon being told by his father that the sun does not actually rise and fall, but that it is the earth that moves. Then he proceeds to Kant, whose complex analyses of the limits and variations of human knowledge of the world impelled crises in many readers before Bahr, whether or not they understood him correctly. Bahr’s Kant is a philosopher who tells him that the self literally creates his own world, and so he goes about for a few days thinking he need not eat or sleep, since the body is an invention of the mind. Bahr’s reading here is similar to Marie Bashkirtseff in a passage Musil quotes from around the time of his reading of “The Unsalvageable I”—it is likely that Bahr had read the woman whom Adorno called the “patron saint of the fin de siècle” as well. Bashkirsteff writes: “Kant pretends that things exist only through our own imagination. That is going too far”. But then she concedes that he is right when it comes to “sentiment,” imagining also how all of our perception would look to someone from another planet. Musil, who would later write a satirical fantasy novel called Planet Ed, which reveled in just the sort of thought experiments Bashkirtseff suggests, quotes from two passages a half a page later:

“I become enthusiastic for these learned, patient, extraordinary, tremendous follies—these reasonings, these deductions, so concise, so learned. There is but one thing which grieves me, and that is, I feel them to be false and have not the time nor the inclination to find out why.

[…]

For, to affirm that nothing exists, we must have knowledge of the real existence of something or other, no matter where, were it only to demonstrate the difference between objective and imaginary values.”[ii]

Musil notes that Marie was eighteen years old when she wrote these lines that must have reminded him of himself—if only he could talk to Herma as he would have talked with this passionate, talented and intelligent Russian aristocrat! But at least he had Bahr to read, who reiterates Bashkirtseff’s conclusion about Kant: “we are on the earth, let us remain on it,” when he blithely declares the philosopher’s truth (like that of the earth’s movement) as impractical for anyone who wants to live and thereby thinks he has put end on it. Until he one day picks up Euripides’ “Heracles” and reads the words, “he was no longer himself” in a description of Heracles’ attack on his children. The “I” is revealed to Bahr to be uncertain in a way that he suddenly understood (93). Euripides leads him to the haunting descriptions of multiple personalities in Ribot’s Maladies de la personalite and then to a consideration that Goethe’s older self is quite different from his younger one (94). Are both the younger and the elder Goethe the same self? “Perhaps,” he quips, “all of this was only a curious way for me to become ripe, ripe for Mach” (96).

In Mach, Bahr discovers that “the I is unsalvageable,” and “only a name,” “an aid, which we shrewdly utilize to order our impressions.” “There is nothing but associations of colors, tones, warmth, pressure, space, time, and ‘moods, feelings, and will are bound to these associations.’ Everything is in eternal mutation” (97). In Mach’s Analysis of Sensations, we read: “My table is now more brightly, now more darkly lit, can be warmer or colder. It can have an ink stain. A foot can break. It can be repaired, polished, and replaced piece by piece. But it remains for me the same table at which I write every day” (2 Analysis of Sensations). Directly after the passage Musil quotes from Bashkirtseff we read his own version of this furniture thought experiement, with the added concept of the Russian painter’s “sentiment”:

“One says a thing is the sum of its qualities or something similar. But there is a relationship therein that contradicts this. Perhaps in all things [a relationship] of sympathy.

I have an old chair for years. And I carve a notch in its armrest, or I tear open its upholstery. I thus take something away from it. And yet it does not appear new to me at all; rather it becomes even more what I feel to be my old chair, when I take something away from it.

That is how it often is with love.”

Referring to Mach’s writing table, Bahr tells the reader that despite even the author’s admittance that it remains his table no matter how many parts of it are replaced, Mach concludes that there “is nothing that will remain of it if one removes its colors, tones, temperature. The thing is nothing aside from the connection of colors, tones, heat. We only speak of ‘bodies’ and of “I” in order to provisionally orient ourselves…” (98 Bahr). Continuing to paraphrase Mach, Bahr tells the reader that “The I is no static, certain, sharply bordered unity. (99). Bahr takes this news in the same defensive way he responded to his father’s explanation about heliocentricism: “The I is unsalvageable. Reason has overthrown the old gods and put the earth on the throne. Now it threatens to annihilate us as well. Then we will see that the element of our life is not truth, but an illusion.” And his pragmatist conclusion, like Marie’s: “For me, what is important is not what is true, but what I need, and so the sun still rises and the earth is real and I am I.” (101). Musil, despite reservations about the table or chair and its enduring substance, was not quite as satisfied with Bahr’s somewhat glib solution to the problem of the two realms of reality (the true and the useful). Instead of finding Mach’s pronouncements devastating, at first he finds them liberating—expanding the realm of what is real and empirically grounded.

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