Self-Utopia and the Robber's Ethics

Robert Musil's affinity with philosophers of self-culture, such as Emerson or Thoreau, sheds a new light on the very idea of a man without qualities. In fact, “the man of possibility” already appears in Emerson's essays as an emblematic figure of a certain version of moral perfectionism. This article defends the idea that the point of Musil's great novel is the moral constitution of the self. It focuses on one of the less commented-upon utopias: self-utopia, that is, the attempt to change oneself, to move from the real, disappointing self to a better one. The key to self-improvement is to be found in the development of an individualist ethics beyond social moral norms, which might be called the robber's ethics

Aesthetics · Constitution · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Individualism · Perfectionism (psychology · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Utopia · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology · Social Psychology