Kafka in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 105

Beschreibung

Kafka is surely the most widely read, worldwide, of all German-language authors. We owe to him not just a compelling part of the global literary heritage but also a profound philosophical discovery. He has succeeded in grasping like no other writer the radical dependency, for his very being, of Man upon Man: "(We) are tied together by ropes," writes Kafka, "and it's bad enough when the ropes around an individual loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into empty space; ghastly when the ropes break and he falls." His stories allow us profound insight into the abysmal depths of interpersonal relations and into their fundamental structure: an insight from which no one can turn away. Even if in our actual lives we do not find ourselves turned into a giant beetle or suddenly condemned to drowning by our own father, we somehow feel, as readers, the force of these excommunications. Kafka was fully aware of the cathartic effect of his books: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us". Here, Kafka's philosophical truth is revealed using five selected short stories, novellas and novels from his body of work. What does his protagonists' fate consist in? On what do they always founder and fail? Is there some recurrent or constant reason for this failure? How is it that we seem to recognize all this so well from our dreams or even our real experiences? Could it be that Kafka provides us, in the end, with a key to the understanding of the basic structure of interpersonal relations? The book contains over a hundred quotations from Kafka's best-known works. It appears as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Kafka’s Great Discovery

Kafka’s Central Idea

The Metamorphosis – The Monstrousness of Love

The Helmsman – We Are All Replaceable

A Hunger Artist – Honoured, Misrecognized, Forgotten

The Trial : Accused, But Why and By Whom?

The Judgment – Who Doesn’t “Measure Up” Has No Right to Be At All

Kafka’s Central Idea: The Structure of Interpersonal Relations

Of What Use Is Kafka’s Discovery for Us Today?

Excommunication and “Social Death” in Kafka, in Anthropology, and in Modern Society

The Emperor’s Language-Experiment, Modern Research into “Hospitalism”, and Kafka’s Truth

Kafka’s Imperative: Recognize the Individuality and Potential of Every Human Being!

Kafka’s Solace

Bibliographical References

Kafka’s Great Discovery

Kafka (1883-1924) is not a philosopher but an author of literature. Nevertheless, he must be counted among the most important thinkers in world history. There is no incongruity in placing him in the company of Plato, Confucius, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Freud, Wittgenstein and Sartre. Because we owe to Kafka not just an outstandingly compelling part of the global literary heritage but also a philosophical discovery of timeless validity.

Kafka succeeded as very few others have in penetrating to the very core of what it is to exist as a human being. His writing reveals, in the most impressive possible way, just what it is that makes up Man’s innermost essence, what it is that keeps us alive. His novels and short stories circle constantly around one key phenomenon: that of human empathy. A hardworking travelling salesman finds himself transformed one morning into an insect and becomes an object of contempt for his own family; a seasoned ship’s pilot is suddenly driven away from the wheel by a total stranger amidst the dismaying inaction of his crew; a man wakes up one morning to find himself on trial for a crime that is never named to him; a son finds himself senselessly condemned to death by his own father. Always in Kafka the empathy of man with man, or rather more often the crying lack of it, is the theme.

One might put it another way and say that in all his novels and short stories Kafka directs an incorruptible gaze upon the extreme fragility of the relations that bind man to fellow man. No one can compare with him in the acuity of his grasp of how human beings depend upon one another, in every way, for their very existence:

Human beings, Kafka believes, are bound together as mountain climbers are bound together by ropes.

In this way we keep one another secure in our existences. Our hold on life, from start to finish, depends on that “granting of being” to us that takes the form of other people’s recognition and acknowledgment of us as humans like them. But such a radical dependency on recognition and acknowledgment by others means, of course, that our whole existence is exposed to the terrible danger that this recognition and acknowledgment might not be, or might suddenly cease to be, accorded. Where this happens, be it in the form of an excommunication or of a social ostracism even to the point of an individual’s becoming “dead to” those around him, a terrible abyss opens up before the individual thus let fall into “empty space”.

This, then, is Kafka’s great philosophical discovery: the fundamental necessity of mutual recognition and acknowledgment and the essential fragility, for all that, of this vital structure. But he reveals this discovery to us not from the distanced perspective of the philosopher or the scientist but from the “inside”, intimate viewpoint of his literary creations and their individual experiences. Like the protagonists of his novels and short stories Kafka himself suffered terribly from feelings of social abandonment, of lack of recognition as a human being, and from the fundamental sense of “having no foothold in being” that goes hand in hand with these things:

Kafka is an author, a storyteller. But his stories provide much more than just entertainment. They initiate a process in the reader. Despite the variety of their topics they nearly all centre on one and the same thematic core. They draw us into the whirlpool of our own dreams, moods and anxieties. Whoever really engages with Kafka’s writings will end up, in the end, coming face to face with himself and, whether he wants it or not, with the fragility of his own life. Kafka shows us how helplessly exposed we are to powers which we can barely, or not at all, control. He reveals to us the most radically unprotected dimensions of our existence and leads us into regions which, normally, we neither enter nor wish to enter.

There can be no question, then, but that Kafka brought to light in these writings also a profound philosophical truth. His stories and scattered thoughts push forward into a sphere of human existence which, for all the emphasis laid here on abandonment, indifference or even the threat posed to man by man, still nonetheless casts a clear light upon the possibility of a form of human community which would not be afflicted by any of these things. Kafka himself saw himself as someone treading, his whole life long, the border between these two worlds of isolation and community:

Perhaps the reason that Kafka was able so grippingly and precisely to portray this lack of true fellowship, and of all that makes interpersonal relations truly successful relations, was because this very lack had almost been his destruction. Already as a very young man, in 1903, he had written to a friend:

Already at this early point in his life a schoolmate described Kafka as someone who seemed separated from all around him as if by a “glass wall”.7 An atmosphere of alienation and exposure to dark, threatening powers emerges and re-emerges so constantly and consistently in his works that posterity has coined the term “Kafkaesque” to evoke precisely such a mood of baffling but pervasive menace.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that “Kafkaesque” is “a word used to describe a situation that is confusing and frightening, especially one involving complicated official rules that do not seem to make any sense”8. Other dictionaries and lexica use such terms as “elusive” and “intangible” to describe the “dark power” that pervades both Kafka’s private and his published writings. In the last analysis, however, the attempt to understand what is “Kafkaesque” without actually immersing oneself in Kafka’s stories and other creations must be a vain one. “Kafkaesque”, in the end, is just that aspect of our experience of the world that shows forth in the events and personalities described by Kafka.

But to what extent can we really say that this pervasive mood of Kafka’s literary world contains a core philosophical idea? Can it really make sense to want to interpret Kafka philosophically? He does, after all, describe in his stories what are above all emotional “states of exception” of a kind which we know more from our nightmares than from anything experienced in everyday life. Is it really plausible, then, to take Kafka’s subversively dream-like descriptions of interpersonal relations as a starting point for a philosophical analysis?

Much suggests that it is very plausible. Because, often, it is precisely a human experience that is wanting or lacking in some way that provides the best foundation for a description of interpersonal relations as they really should be. Attempts, indeed, have already been made by professional philosophers such as the Existentialist Sartre or the philosopher of religion Martin Buber to analyse the basic structure of such interpersonal relations. But these philosophers were not able to render the key phenomena of the “interhuman” experienceable to their readers in anything like the vividness and immediate impressiveness that the literary genius Kafka renders it in. There is no doubt, then, that to understand Kafka is to understand the essential structure of human relations.

This said, however, it must also be said that the thoughts expressed by Kafka’s protagonists tend to have something strangely dry, emotionless, almost business-like about them. Kafka differs from many authors who enjoy a similar level of fame in that his stories seldom evoke any sense of pathos. These stories awaken, nonetheless, strong feelings and this is perhaps because the figures in Kafka’s writings tend to accept with a strange stoicism their often terrible fates. Kafka’s descriptions of the inevitable failures and disasters of his various protagonists is seductive above all through its sober, almost distanced manner of observation and it is perhaps precisely through this that it provides the phenomenological basis for an extraordinary philosophical discovery.

Is it possible that the human individual is, under the surface of his proudly displayed self-confidence and self-awareness, no more than a feather in the winds of his relationships, present and past, with family, friends and society? In fictive scenario after scenario Kafka reveals to us the fragility of that system of relationships that sustains our normal life. And even if, in this normal life, we do not find ourselves suddenly transformed into a beetle or have abrupt sentence of death passed on us by our own parents, we nonetheless feel, as readers, all the uncanny force of such vilifications and excommunications. Kafka was fully aware of the cathartic effect of his works:

Kafka’s books do indeed have something of the effect of an axe. Kafka splits that protective shell which normally surrounds us in daily life and shows us the true drama of our existence. He directs our attention to a truth which is oppressive, but also liberating inasmuch as it reveals, along with the dangers, the opportunities for a humanity lived out together, illuminating above and beyond this the entire basic anthropological structure of the relation between man and man.

In the pages that follow we will attempt to describe and explain this essential truth discovered by Kafka, using examples drawn from his novels and from his longer and shorter stories. In what exactly does the fate of his protagonists consist? On what exactly do their lives founder and go under? Does this “foundering and going under” take one consistent form throughout the whole of Kafka’s literary creation? How is it that we have a sense that the fantastic disasters which befall Kafka’s characters are ones which we are intimately familiar with, from our own experiences and our dreams? And can one somehow perhaps deduce, from the forms of failure and disaster that Kafka describes, some idea of how a genuinely “successful” human co-existence would look? Could it be that Kafka, in the end, gives us the key to an understanding of the ontological structure of interpersonal relations?

In any case, he certainly takes us, in each of his stories, on a journey – a journey into our own inner selves.

Kafka’s Central Idea

The Metamorphosis – The Monstrousness of Love

Among Kafka’s many short- and medium-length stories the one most read and best known is probably that bearing the significant title The Metamorphosis. Its shocking, disorienting opening sentence is a landmark in world literature:

At the opening of this famous story we find the commercial traveller Gregor Samsa lying helplessly on his strange new hard-shelled back and staring in astonishment at the thin insect legs now flickering before his eyes. Only after several vain attempts does