VLVL2 (15): The Robert Musil Story

[Keith McMullen]

 >>>Huh?  Philosophy, psychology, but physics?  Can't
finmd a quick determination on this, but ...<<<

In 1897, the year in which he began writing in earnest, Musil went to 
study  civil engineering. He took a diploma from the Technical 
University in  Brno in 1901, and, after doing his military service, 
spent a year  working in the engineering laboratories in Stuttgart. He 
then went  to Berlin, where he studied psychology, logic, and 
philosophy (the  gloomy Maurice Maeterlinck and, later, Emerson and 
Nietzsche were particularly important influences). His doctorate, under 
Karl Stumpf,  was on the epistemology of the great Austrian physicist 
and  philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916), about whom William James once  
remarked that he appeared to have read and thought about everything.  
And although Musil decided against pursuing an academic career, he  
remained deeply interested in empirical science. He was even  something 
of an inventor. Early on, he invented a chromatometer.  This device, an 
earlier version of which was invented by Newton, resolves all the 
colors of the spectrum into whiteness—an appropriate invention, as one 
commentator has observed, for the  author of a book called The Man 
Without Qualities.

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/14/feb96/musil.htm