Saphenus´ growth in transition and the role of Robert Musils man without quality

An important experience for me as a person interested in sustainability was the friendship with the political scientist Rita Trattnigg. I had the great opportunity to visit her 2015 at the Hemmaberg in Carinthia in her home country, on the borderline to Slovenia, as part of a radio programme I produced on the Austrian Broadcasting Company. It was one thing to talk about God and the world, and another to look at the possibilities of growth. She ultimately sharpened my sense of possibility when it comes to the development of human and social capital in societies and participation in democracy.

This conversation shaped my thinking about sustainability, perhaps more unconsciously at first, but I soon realised that I was developing a sense of possibility that came from a well-known character in a novel by an Austrian writer. The character Ulrich in Robert Musil’s „man without qualitiy“. This sense of possibility was what was needed to think courageously and fearlessly about the future of the next generations. 

Musil described this in a novel as follows: ‘If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility. If you want something to be the way it is, then you think: Well, it could just as well be different. So you could define the sense of possibility quite simply as the ability to imagine how everything could be just as good and not attach any further significance to what is not….“ and further…

when children show this tendency, it is vigorously exorcised from them, and in their presence such people are labelled as birdbrains, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, know-nothings and whingers.“

As an entrepreneur, this naively friendly attitude still drives me to this day and I try to preserve this sense of possibility on an equal footing with the sense of reality. Rita Trattnigg laid the foundation stone back then.