Born on this date (6 November). Here is Roger Kimball’s well-known take. Here too is The Monist issue dedicated to “The Philosophy of Robert Musil” and Mette Blok’s article “Robert Musil’s Literary Ethics: The Man without Qualities Reconsidered“. Musil’s debut The Confusions of Young Törless is freely available here as is Vol. I of his masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Last, here is an excerpt from the Wilkins and Kaiser translation (1979): chapter 28 “A chapter that can be skipped by anyone who has no very high opinion of thinking as an occupation“.
manwithoutqualities 