AROUND THE LATE EIGHTIES a new tone could be heard in Musil scholarship. As the controversy between Helmut Arntzen and Roger Willemsen indicated, no consensus had been reached in the aesthetic discussion of the novel. In other areas of scholarship, existential critique was being displaced by social criticism, and social criticism itself had undergone transformation as a result of cultural critique, which had emerged from within it. While psychology was still an undiminished point of departure for approaches to Musil's novel, it was the question of Musil's ethics that now began to move to center stage.

The debate about modernism and its would-be successor, postmodernism, that by now was raging across literary scholarship of all persuasions, ensured that ethical questions in Musil would be conducted around a wholly new set of assumptions. Under the modernist paradigm, for example, ethics and aesthetics were anything but antithetical undertakings, as Marie-Louise Roth's study of 1972 had sought to demonstrate. The larger issue about ethics that had arisen in the seventies had been partly a matter of whether and to what extent aesthetics and ethics, and, by extension, art and science, could be connected.