From the earliest notebooks, Musil displays a concern with erotic feeling and the relations between the erotic and the ethical. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seems to him to hold the best promise of bringing humankind to a higher ethical plane. He deplores the rigid sexual roles that bourgeois society has laid down for women and men. “Whole countries of the soul have been lost and submerged” as a consequence, he writes. 

In asserting the sexual relation as the fundamental cultural relation, and in advocating a sexual revolution as the gateway to a new millennium, Musil is curiously reminiscent of his contemporary D.H. Lawrence. Where he differs from Lawrence is in not wishing to exclude the intellect from erotic life—indeed, in seeking to eroticize the intellect. As a writer, he is also capable of an unmoralizing brutality of observation that is simply not in Lawrence’s repertoire. He watches a young woman watching her mother kiss a younger man. “Up till now she has only known a woman’s kiss as a tentative gesture; but this is like a dog sinking its teeth into another.”