Understanding Fact and Fiction in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities

Abstract

This chapter further illuminates the topic of the language of law in its interdisciplinary context. It takes up the Wittgensteinian proposition that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world to show that the wars between law and forensic behavioural sciences on the topic of free will and criminal responsibility are a language problem. With an analysis of the German author Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities and the criminal case of its fictional murderer Moosbrugger it is argued that the problem of madness and the crisis of modernity is closely connected to a view on the language of law as a representation of states of affairs. The lesson to be drawn from Musil’s novel is that law and literature are value-laden constructs and that this also urges us to carefully consider the methodological and epistemological peculiarities of any discipline.