Modern heroes: Nietzsche, 'The Man without Qualities', and Niklas Luhmann.

摘要

Modern Heroes: Nietzsche, The Man without Qualities, and Niklas Luhmann questions modernity's preference --as expressed in twentieth-century literature and literary scholarship -- for House Odysseus over Achilles' line. Why are there so few sympathetic portrayals of heroes who prefer open contest to cunning? Typologically Friedrich Nietzsche, Ulrich (eponymous hero of Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man without Qualities]), and Niklas Luhmann are extensions of the Achilles narrative. An Achilles-like rage drives them to reorganize story elements from old myths and modern discourses so that they may set their own values in accordance with modernity's terms. Formal resemblances centered on the motif of a new assertive, modern heroism motivate the selection of texts from the diverse genres of philosophy (Nietzsche), literature (Musil), and sociology (Luhmann). Each figure treats reality as underdetermined -- i.e., that things are the way they are does not mean they must be so. Each argues for the primacy of distinction over unity. And each mobilizes the under-elaborated terms of distinctions that matter -- "untruth," "illegality," "evil," etc. -- to his advantage. One can read their narratives as enactments of Michael Andre Bernstein's concept of "side-shadowing." That is, their stories depart from the easier gratification of "a triumphalist, unidirectional view of history" to follow non-teleological, open and contingent possibilities. For example, Ulrich moves through a fictional 1913 that is not over-determined by portents of World War I. Nietzsche thinks and shapes existence as a flux of appearance -- against a tradition he sees as fixated on determining essences, or the way things are. And Luhmann exemplifies the heroic restraint needed not to moralize in scientific analysis. Using a conceptual apparatus that combines sociology, narratology, communications theory, and philosophy, this dissertation evaluates how and to what extent these depictions of character and circumstance demonstrate the possibility of molding and affirming modern life on terms that are critical and self-reflective, yet not antithetical to the society the narrative presupposes.