Musil uses the word Dichter, poet, as a dignified title reserved for artists of great achievement (different from Schriftsteller, writer). His use of the word emphasizes the importance of the specifically poetic qualities of literature (and of the poetic sensibility of criticism,) not as an idle objection to the contemporary merging of literary works with either pure sensation and feeling, or with other forms of discourse. Focusing on Törless, as well as on Musil's notebooks and essays, this article shows how Musil understands the relationship between rational thinking and the latent ideas and thoughts that emerge within the poetic dimension (the 'other state of mind" or 'other condition.') This approach illuminates Musil's conception of "precision and soul"-the interlocking of sensitive perceptiveness and intellectual rigor-as a necessary precondition for valuable literature and valuable life.

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Abordaremos nesse ensaio os inícios da reflexão sobre os rumos da estética do século XX. Colocamos a obra musiliana das primeiras décadas (1910-30) na perspectiva do seu ensaísmo que traça os objetivos da ficção experimental (peças como Os Entusiastas), a qual representa uma resposta crítica ao teatro convencional da época. A desmistificação do cunho comercial e conservador do teatro nas resenhas musilianas dos anos 1920 tem fortes elos com a critica cultural e a reflexão sobre as condições sociais e políticas da República que emergiu depois da queda do Império.

This article approaches the ambivalent relations between Musil and Freud. It proceeds in three sections. The first analises the spontaneous psychoanalytical intuitions Musil exposes in his first novel, The confusions of young Törless. The psychological insights of the novelist accompany and also anticipate the discoveries of the father of psychoanalysis. The second section exposes the seminal studies of Corino and Henninger (among other authors) who see Musil's reserved attitude towards Freud as a symptomatic resistence and interpret the unconscious determination of his work. The third exposes other reasons (aesthetic and theoretical arguments) which explain the author's reluctance, without excluding the resistencetheory. Musil has a vast scientific and mathematical, philosophical and aesthetic framework of references which differs from psychoanalysis. It emerges in his project which underpins the novels Nupcias (Musil's second work after Törless).

Readers of Hölderlin are familiar with the truly tragic circumstances surrounding his translations and commentaries on Sophocles' tragedies. 1 The young poet, impressed with the beauty of Johann Heinrich Voss's translations of Homer and influenced by Goethe's cautions against excessive philosophical abstraction, endowed his translations with both poetic sensibility and theoretical insight 2 in equal proportion. The negative reception they received, especially the rejection and ridicule at the hands of the philologist H. Voss (the great translator's son) seems to have precipitated Hölderlin's mental breakdown. Voss's review must be read carefully to understand the deep sense of isolation which Hölderlin must have felt in the face of the profound chasm that separated his own outlook and thinking from that of the philologist. Apparently impartial and objective at first, Voss's appraisal grows increasingly savage while his mocking criticism veils his own erroneous assumptions and the theoretical biases on which they rest--for example, the commonly held notion that the tragic poets were representatives of the "clear" and "rational" Greek thought, expressing itself through the "clearly defined characters" of the classical gods, which were supposed to be immediately understandable to the "common sense." 3 Hölderlin's treatment of the logical structures of mythic thought underlying classical poetry was remarkably insightful. However, his rather obscure formulations as to the links between Sophocles' rational discourse and the ancient, mythical contexts offended Voss's notions about the nobility and rationality of the divine and human characters in classical Greek tragedy. Extremely sensitive to the logical, intellectual and "reasoning" ("pensantes") implications of the figurative movement in poetry and myth, Hölderlin detected in the Sophoclean tragedies certain wordplays based entirely on the production of meaning through stylistic contrasts. These contrasts operate at the level of affective and emotional relationships that are charged with latent or virtual cognitive signifiers. In another article I investigated the relationship between Hölderlin's philosophical fragments and his reading of myth and [End Page 107] tragedy which is at once both emotional and rational. 4 Let us briefly go over the major points of Hölderlin's attempt to get at the implicit (non-discursive) thought of poetic form. This figurative mode of expression avoids the limitations of abstract, conceptual thinking, which is inadequate in the domains of aesthetics and of practical, active life.Hölderlin's starting point is Kant's philosophy or, to be more precise, a critique of the scholarly application of Kantian concepts to aesthetic and artistic reality, such as Schiller's aesthetics. Like Goethe, who saw abstract ideas as the horizon of experience, 5 Hölderlin tried to move away from the abstraction of discursive and conceptual propositions by broadening the Kantian notion of "free play of the faculties of the soul." 6 In the Critique of Judgmen...