Topos Uranios: Robert Musil on Truth, Opinion and the Media

One of the threads that runs throughout Musil’s magnum opus, The Man without Qualities, is the lines that are blurred, especially by those in authority and the media, between truth and opinion.  The protagonist, Ulrich, is hired to be a part of the campaign to celebrate the 70th jubilee of Franz Josef’s reign over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and suddenly finds himself coming in contact with the Austrian social, political and economic elites.  One such character is not even Austrian, but a Prussian businessman and prolific writer named Arnheim whose celebrity status outweighs the fact that he is not from the mother country yet is helping to plan a nationalist campaign to celebrate Austria.  The media adores this man of industry, a veritable Renaissance man who is able to discuss and be knowledgeable on just about any topic.  When the Austrian media is supposed to be covering the Austrian campaign to celebrate its Austria emperor, it is Arnheim, the Prussian, that most interests them.  Musil’s commentary on the situation is clever, witty and still relevant 100 years later:

If he were alive today, Plato—to take him as an example, because along with a dozen others he is regarded as the greatest thinker who ever lived—would certainly be ecstatic about a news industry capable of creating, exchanging, refining a new idea every day; where information keeps pouring in from the ends of the earth with a speediness he never knew in his own lifetime, while a staff of demiurges is on hand to check it all out instantaneously for its content of reason and reality.  He would have supposed a newspaper office to be that topos uranios, that heavenly realm of ideas, which he has described so impressively that to this day all the better class of people are still idealists when talking to their children or employees.  And of course if Plato were to walk suddenly into a news editor’s office today and prove himself to be indeed that great author who died over two thousand years ago he would be a tremendous sensation and would instantly be showered with the most lucrative offers.  If he were then capable of writing a volume of philosophical travel pieces in three weeks, and a few thousand of his well-known short stories, perhaps even turn one or the other of his older works into film, he could undoubtedly do very well for himself for a considerable period of time.  The moment his return had ceased to be news, however,  and Mr. Plato tried to put into practice one of his well-known ideas, which had never quite come into their own, the editor in chief would ask him to submit only a nice little column on the subject now and then for the Life and Leisure section (but in the easiest and most lively style possible, not heavy: remember the readers), and the features editor would add that he was sorry, but he could use such a contribution only once a month or so, because there were so many other good writers to be considered.  And both of these gentlemen would end up feeling that they had done quite a lot for a man who might indeed be the Nestor of European publicists but still was a bit outdated, and certainly not in a class for current newsworthiness with a man like, for instance, Paul Arnheim.

In an age when one is just as likely to see or read a news story about world politics as the Kardashians in any major, global news outlet, this paragraph could just as well have been written about the current state of truth/opinion/media.