A scientific revolution does not only create new knowledge. It also generates new ways of thinking, new ways of asking questions, and new ways of answering them. Before the scientific revolution at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when questions were raised, for example, about whether or not blood circulated in the body, people looked for answers in the ancient texts. Aristotle and Galen taught that blood did not circulate in the body; therefore, the question had been answered. How did Aristotle and Galen know what they knew? That question was not posed. They were more knowledgeable than us, and that was sufficient.

Can an algorithm do harm? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is fairly predictable. Like any tool, an algorithm can be used for better or for worse. For example, if most people receive a pay stub every month produced by an algorithm, it would be very easy to modify the algorithm to add a bonus for certain employees depending on their nationality, skin color, gender, or political opinions. Such discrimination is morally reprehensible whether it is carried out by a human or an algorithm.

Where does the apparently paradoxical idea of the economy of free come from?

In many countries, governments are now conscious of the importance, in the age of algorithms, of computer science education. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Royal Society published a report in 2012, “Shutdown or Restart: The Way Forward for Computing in UK Schools,” recommending the introduction of computer science education in schools. At about the same time, Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s devastating critique attracted a lot of attention: “I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in UK school. Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.” As a result, the United Kingdom engaged in a complete reconstruction of its computer science educational system. In the United States, an “advanced placement” course called AP Computer Science was introduced in 1984 as a specialized high school subject. But the education system is quite fragmented and schools are not required to offer it. Barack Obama declared in 2016, “In the new economy, computer science isn’t an optional skill. It’s a basic skill, right along with the three R’s.” In 2018, only about 135,000 out of the 15 million high school students in the United States were enrolled in the course.

We have all had some experience with the digitization of administrative processes, such as filing taxes online. In certain communities, residents can also, for example, notify authorities of roads in need of repair through a website.

In order to understand what an algorithm is, let’s begin by taking a trip back a few millennia in the past to imagine one of our distant ancestors who had seen his late grandmother bake bread and then tries it himself. He doesn’t really know what to do. He hesitates, starts by boiling grains of wheat in water, then realizes it might be a bad idea. He does what we all do when confronted with a problem that we don’t know how to resolve: we think of solutions, we try them out, we feel our way, counting on a touch of serendipity until we succeed, or not.

In the age of algorithms, inventions follow each other in rapid succession. With each invention, there are many reasons to be amazed and, also, to be worried. These inventions make possible the better world we aspire to, as well as the nightmarish world we fear.

ROBERT MUSIL (1880–1942) is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. He is considered one of the great modernist writers whose intellectuality and breadth of vision is approached by only two others: James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Musil's distinctiveness even in the august company of Joyce and Proust, however, is that he was qualified in two technical fields—engineering and philosophy—and drew questions from these fields into the heart of his literary project. As a result, Musil, alone among writers of his rank of any era, was able to produce a set of reflections of profundity and sagacity bearing on the capacity of science to influence the experience of ordinary living. It is to these reflections that the present volume draws attention and from which it takes its point of departure.

This volume has had a complex evolution. Several of its chapters were reworked from previously published materials in German. I would like to thank Micheil Paton for providing me with reliable translations of these materials. As I reworked these materials in English and as the concerns of this volume made their presence felt, a transformation of varying proportions occurred. Though some chapters still betray the purposes for which they were originally crafted, all now respond—I hope in valuable ways— to the present task, which is to assay “the question of science” in Musil from differing but related perspectives.

This volume owes its existence to the generosity of two outstanding funding bodies in Germany, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch dienst. These two organizations have helped sustain a scholarly life in German letters over more than three decades. Thanks are also due to two Australian universities (Melbourne and Queensland) and one New Zealand university (Otago) which, through material support and time release, have played an enabling role in the research that appears here. I am also grateful for the advice and support of colleagues in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland and for comment provided by anonymous reviewers during the final stages of preparation of the manuscript. Finally, I thank the many colleagues, too numerous to mention, whose work has contributed—even more than I am able to acknowledge in this volume—to my own understanding of Musil's legacy.

ROBERT MUSIL's great unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930; 1933) is, among other things, a novel about the impact of science on ordinary human experience. As the novel suggests in its opening chapter, science no longer inhabits the fringes of society; it is not an embroidery around human lives, a helpful, though unnecessary, contrivance. On the contrary, human lives, according to the focalizing perspective established in the novel, can no longer be imagined without science. Science has become one of the key languages that script modern life for us. At the very least, Musil's novel serves as a reminder that a set of larger historical arrangements has now come together to put science at the very center of modern life and all that we take that life to amount to.

For this reason, The Man Without Qualities, as well as most of the works that precede it in Musil's literary development, can be read as a meditation on these historical arrangements. On the one hand, these arrangements brought science out of the science laboratory and the academy and into the public eye, seemingly for the first time. On the other hand, the science on view in the opening sequences of Musil's great novel—the statistical science of probability—could only achieve such visibility after a long gestation extending over many centuries. Musil signals awareness of this gestation at several points in his diaries. For example, surveying the question of the certainty of scientific knowledge in the late 1930s, Musil notes in diary volume 10 that the facts of the physical world can never be known in any final way. At best, knowledge of the physical world can be considered only probable. By contrast, as he also observes, Cartesian method rejects probability as an acceptable goal of scientific procedure and is focused instead on statements of “certainty” (TB 1:525). These observations about the changing goals to which scientific inquiry has been directed over time indicate that the inquiry into science that Musil convenes in the major novel, as well as in earlier works, is arrived at on the basis of a deep acquaintance with the factors that had revolutionized scientific practice by the end of the nineteenth century.

ACCORDING TO THE noted literary critic James Wood, the novelist is always working with at least three different languages. These, he explains, are, first, “the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on”; second, “the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment”; and, finally, a third species of language Wood calls “the language of the world” (Wood 2008, 28–29). This third species of language is of an inherited type—it is what is already “out there” when novelists make reference to the world. It might be conceived of as the material substrate of fiction, though the author's imagining of it does not make it objective. The language of the world is, rather, a palpable effect of life that insinuates itself into the author's creative imagination. This imagination then renders it usable for the purposes of literature.

For the Austrian writer Robert Musil, whose major works were published in the period 1906 to 1936, the language of the world plays a particularly important role. Musil's last and unfinished major work, The Man Without Qualities, for example, sets out on its long journey of more than a thousand pages published during the author's lifetime and a thousand more from Musil's posthumous papers (which are included in the standard Rowohlt edition of the novel) not just by talking about the weather, which on the day in question is favorable and fairly unremarkable, but also by adducing a rich array of meteorological data. Along with details relating to barometric lows and highs, the description includes references to seasonal temperature differences and monthly fluctuations of temperature, the rising and setting of sun and moon, and the humidity of the air. The opening paragraph concludes with the remark: “In a word, that describes the factual rather well, even if it was also somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day of the year 1913” (GW 1:9). The point of this description is to invite the reader to consider two types of language that have become available when talking about the world: the language of ordinary experience, that is, that which is referenced in the phrase “it was a fine August day,” on the one hand, and the specialist language of science, as instanced by the meteorological data amounting to the same thing, on the other.

IN THIS CHAPTER I consider Musil's discussion of the philosophical problem of causality. This problem loomed large in Musil's doctoral dissertation on Ernst Mach, which he completed at the University of Berlin in 1908. Causality was a litmus test for the realism of the outer world. To question the validity, or at least the verifiability, of the causal connection was to weaken ontological claims about the status of the outside world. Hume—Mach's great forebear, in this respect—had famously posed seemingly unanswerable questions about the causal connection in his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), finding in that work that causal assignations were rarely, if ever, justified. In the absence of an unimpeachable standard for causality, Hume contended, one should more circumspectly talk of “constant conjunctions” between the elements of a causal relation. In matters of causality, then, Mach was self-evidently a Humean. But Mach also went beyond Hume, calling into question a great many things that appear to be indebted to this connection or make a clear investment in it: the notion of a world of substantial things, for one thing, but also the psychic agency, subjectivity, on the basis of which assumptions about that world are advanced. If causality could no longer be defended on strict scientific grounds, Mach suggested, then neither could the instance of subjectivity nor the subjects standing behind it. With conclusions such as these in view, Mach's antimetaphysical stance was well on its way to dissolving the subject-object continuum on which the substantiality of the world was considered to rest.

What follows in this chapter is close scrutiny of such ideas as we can fairly assume Musil to have received them. The weak realism of the Machian worldview, I argue in this chapter and throughout this study, was of great importance for Musil. It paralleled Musil's own sense of being sunk in an only notionally real world.

MODERN LIFE in technologically advanced societies involves a considerable measure of complexity. How such complexity is to be borne by individuals appears to be an increasing problem for such societies. In Niklas Luhmann's view, complexity is principally dealt with in these kinds of societies on the basis of the concept of trust. In Luhmann's analysis, social trust is an abstract concept whose aim is the conservation and promotion of intersubjective tolerance. Social trust in social groups works by analogy with trust between individuals, where a psychological gain is associated with the rewards that flow from successful trust strategies. Luhmann's approach sets out a comprehensive theoretical framework by which systems, environment, function, and complexity are understood to be structural components of a social theory of communication. According to Luhmann's understanding, society itself is already a form of communication and, in the reverse, communication a form of society: “Society cannot be conceived without communication, and communication, for its part, not without society… . The reproduction of communications by way of communications takes place in society” (Luhmann 1997, 13). As soon as social communication is approached in this matter, it is a short route to the conclusion that modern societies are faced with the real-world problem of complexity management. Luhmann says that social communication “contains more possibilities than that which the system can conserve reactively.” Although a system adjusts selectively and autonomously to its environment, it is the human agents in the system who, in their awareness of the world's complexity and through the nature of their personal experience of their “world,” face the referential problem of how to attend to their own individual self-conservation within the system.

With these starting assumptions in mind, I would now like to drill down into this problem of complexity in the context of Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities. In doing so, I touch upon a set of concerns that have been enlarged upon in literature by several authors over the last 200 years—one thinks, perhaps above all else in German literature, of the early-nineteenth century Prussian author Heinrich von Kleist (1788– 1811), in whose works—as was recognized early in research on Kleist— the question of trust appears front and center among his themes.

CRITICAL OPINION ABOUT The Man Without Qualities—and by implication, the works leading up to the novel seen to represent earlier stages of a consistent intellectual project—has not reached unanimity in regard to Musil's intentions. Disagreement is concentrated in particular on the meaning of the sibling idyll in book 2 of the novel. Part of the disagreement among critics has come from the fact that the novel was not completed during the author's lifetime. In this respect the reader of Musil's novel faces a situation of uniquely challenging proportions, where questions of this type must be raised: did the novel remain incomplete simply because Musil ran out of time at the end of his life, or was he unable to complete it because of his own uncertainty about its themes and direction, thus suggesting that Musil would never have finished the novel even if he had lived longer?

Since these questions have never been properly answered in Musil scholarship, some critics have preferred to focus attention on those parts of the novel that were published during the author's lifetime, in particular, Musil's satirical portrait of Viennese society that forms the focus of book 1 of the novel. The highwater mark of such attention is certainly Norbert Wolf's monumental Kakanien als Gesellschaftskonstruktion (2011), a study that values the novel for the comprehensive sociocritical portrait of modern life that it draws. David Luft's Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–1942 (1980) had already assayed similar territory in an early study written in English. Another English-language critical work of note is Mark Freed's Robert Musil and the NonModern (2011), which arises from the interest in the sociological, but connects this interest to a critique of modernity (see chapter 5 for an extended discussion of Musil in relation to the crisis of modernity). Freed's study is valuable for several reasons, including for the attention it gives to the idyll of the sibling lovers. Freed reads this idyll, and the ground of the “Other Condition” in which it is rooted, in positive terms as “a strategy of autonomy” directed against those who would seek “to realize their wills through the instrumental use of others” (Freed 130).

FEW WOULD DOUBT that the terms of knowledge have undergone a fundamental change in recent times. In the view of many scholars who have tracked this shift, we are currently journeying through a revolution that is changing the way we arrive at knowledge. This is not a revolution about what humans know, as with all three previous revolutions. In this latest revolution, a so-called “fourth revolution” in knowledge, knowing has moved in significant measure away from the agency of human beings on account of the technical contrivances that help us know things. Our knowing, on this view, is fundamentally altered by the machines we build—above all the digital computer. These machines become a factor in the generation of knowledge not least because they exist outside us and outstrip the innate capacity of human beings to arrive at knowledge on their own. As a result, the ideal of “unassisted human reason,” once cherished by the “philosophes” of the eighteenth century, no longer pays off. “Big data” is the headline of a front-page story whose backstory tells of how the vast memory and processing capacities of modern computational devices help us know things we would never otherwise come to know if left to our own devices—these devices being, say, the Kantian time-space parameters governing human perception and cognition and the schematism that helps us know things from the tiny molecules of proto-knowledge that our sensual hardware and our conceptual software make available to us.

The new aspect of this knowledge revolution is not anything that we now know differently—for example, according to a genealogy promoted by Floridi (2014), that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round (the first, Copernican, revolution), or that humans descended from apes as a result of the workings of the same processes of evolution that govern the emergence of every other life-form we encounter on earth (the second, Darwinian, revolution), or even that our wakeful consciousness is swamped by unconscious stirrings, attachments, and projections that further destabilize our capacity to have reliable “unassisted” knowledge of things (the third, Freudian, revolution).

THE YEARS FOLLOWING the release of Musil's first work, The Confusions of Young Törless, were of decisive significance for the budding writer. Towards the end of 1906 or in early 1907 Musil met his future wife, Martha Marcovaldi (1874–1949), six years his senior. In the following year he concluded his studies in philosophy and psychology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin with a doctoral thesis on the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (discussed in detail in chapter 2). The thesis was given the grade of “laudable” and later was to bring about the offer of an assistant position with the noted professor of psychology in Graz, Alexius Meinong. This offer represented a chance to embark on a further academic project, qualify as a professor, and establish a university career. As attractive as this offer undoubtedly was to Musil, however, the unexpectedly auspicious debut of The Confusions of Young Törless had put him in mind of a literary career. This did not mean that he turned his back on the investigation of inner states that he had begun to address with such success in that first novel. He had no intention of abandoning this type of psychological project. Rather, he did not see the environment of the university, with its interest in articulating definitive general statements about the social behavior of human beings, as being conducive to the sort of project to which he was increasingly committed.

As Musil was later to remark in the foreword to his last published volume, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, the project he was keen to develop further at this time involved the question of the relationship of individuals to their ideals (GW 7: 972). Clearly, any exclusively empirical approach to questions such as this would quickly hit upon limits. Musil's interest, by contrast, lay with the kind of complex value attributions and investments human actors make when the need to act presses upon them. These attributions could only hope to be partially elicited through external observation and conventional scientific inquiry. The academic approach to the question of human ideals seemed to Musil, for this reason, to fall short of the complex understanding of human motivation and behavior his project aimed for. Despite this, his intention was to embark on a credible intellectual path toward arguably the same results on which scientific analysis was premised.