This second of the series of “letters” written from the perspective of a woman appeared on February 5, 1925, a few weeks after the first one, in Musil’s friend Franz Blei’s journal, Roland. In it, Musil mocks the misuse of Kant’s categorical imperative (“Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”) by highlighting the way that in real life we often (perhaps always) are faced with exceptional cases that do not fit into general moral laws. This favoring of the particular over the general case was one of the reasons that Musil chose to write novels instead of philosophy. Towards the end of the letter, Susanna quotes from Emerson’s essay “Circles,” an essay that Ulrich also quotes from in The Man Without Qualities, with the comment, “A man whom I love wrote that.”
Stay tuned for Susanna’s third letter sometime soon….
A Page from Emerson’s Essays
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