Abstract
In his essays and in his great novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil defends a singular position in metaphilosophical space, combining philosophical naturalism with Romanticism. This conception can be aptly characterized (in allusion to Quine) as "naturalized Romanticism". In the line of reasoning by which Musil defends this conception, the paradoxes of self-reference are a crucial element. These paradoxes played a key role in the crisis in the foundations of mathematics around 1900. I propose to reconstruct Musil's line of thought, which runs from the paradoxes of self-reference to the realm of the non-ratioid, by integrating it into the context of the crisis in the foundations of mathematics.
