The Paradoxical Interplay of Exactitude and Indefiniteness

: The aim of this paper is to explore the radically new relationships among reality, temporality, and probability, and the corresponding revision of these concepts themselves, that emerged in the wake of the introduction of quantum mechanics in 1925 – 1926. I argue, however, that an analogous understanding of these concepts and their relationships had begun to emerge in literature, as a response to Kant ’ s philosophy, with the Romantics, such as Kleist and Hölderlin in Germany and Shelley and Keats in England, and has gradually developed throughout the history of literature and later on in philosophy. This understanding became especially pronounced in modernist literature, under the direct impact of quantum theory. Musil ’ s The Man Without Qualities serves as the main modernist example of this understanding in this paper. and the developments and the intended statement, the living of the calculable