So one denies their existence, just as the average citizen denies the air, maintaining that it is empty space. You cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get on a streetcar without touching the balanced lever of gigantic apparatus of laws and interrelations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain you in your peaceful existence one knows hardly any of these levers, which reach deep into the inner workings and, coming out of the other side, lose themselves in a network whose structure has never yet been unraveled by anyone. „There is always something ghostly about living constantly in a well-ordered state. “A man matters, his experiences matter, but in a city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves, and this is of course the beginning of life’s notorious turning into abstraction.“ So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is-some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.” What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context-nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about.

He'll always see a good side to every bad action. When something moves him, he turns against it. When he is angry, something in him laughs. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect-why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities-yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. “His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either.

Musil the man without qualities