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THE APHORISMS OF FRANZ KAFKA
Edited, introduced and with commentaries by Reiner Stach
Translated by Shelley Frisch
Reviewed by Alan Dent
Northrop Frye wrote that literature is words used disinterestedly.
Arguably no modern
writer exemplifies this more than Kafka. His work is bereft of
ulterior impulses. It’s impossible to imagine writing for money or
fame having entered Kafka’s head. His work is reverential. He
approaches the world and words with awe and a sense of overwhelming
responsibility. These qualities are everywhere in his writing but
perhaps nowhere more than the aphorisms written in 1917 and 18 in
Zürau. In his introduction, Stach questions whether all published
here falls under the definition of aphorism. Kafka certainly breaks
with tradition; but whatever name they go by these one hundred and
ten short pieces are remarkable in their search for what he calls
“the ultimate things”. Kafka is always driving towards this
ultimate, which he knows is unreachable. Failure is written into his
enterprise. This book is no more likely to entertain than Einstein’s
world-shaking works; but like them it is impressive in its honesty
and endeavour, even if some of it is baffling.
The first entry begins Der wahre Weg (The true way).
Kafka is obsessed, perhaps tormented, by the need to find the right
way to live. The aphorism is an image: ein Seil, das nicht in der
Höhe gespannt ist, sondern knapp über dem Boden (a rope,
not high in the air, but barely above the ground). The
rope appears made for stumbling rather than walking along. Kafka
loves to condense a thought into an image. We walk, not on a high
wire over an abyss, but
on a rope we won’t kill ourselves if we fall from. Yet it’s a true
obstacle: it makes us stumble over and over. The high wire would
have been a trite image: life as a perilous balance between two
chasms. Kafka’s is original and nearer the truth: our moral failures
are often small but they happen all the time. The price of failure
is not perdition but one petty humiliation on another. There is no
escape. We can’t step off the rope because then we lose our way. Our
nature is moral, but in trying to fulfil it we can’t help but trip
endlessly. Kafka offers no glib reassurance. There are no
simple answers. History provides no ready-made solutions. Living is
an indefeasibly difficult matter. There are no grounds for
self-congratulation or sense of success. Rather, to think yourself a
success is a sure sign of being on the wrong path.
Alle menshchlichen Fehler sind Ungeduld
begins aphorism two; all human errors are impatience.
The third entry amplifies: there are two human sins – impatience and
laxity. The first got us expelled from paradise (he often uses
religious imagery) the second prevents us returning. Impatience is
the greatest fault however. It both got us expelled and prevents our
return. The aphorisms were copied onto sheets of paper from notes
made in octavo books. There he says that god was wrong in believing
the consequence of eating from the Tree of Knowledge was death.
Hardly a conventional view of the deity. Kafka’s impatience with
impatience comes from his view that it involves “breaking off a
methodical approach”. Aphorism five says Von eimen gewissen Punkt
an gibt es keine Rückkehr mehr (From a certain point
on, there is no turning back). He is acutely aware of how we are
forced to choose, sometimes between almost impossible alternatives
(the choices are always fraught because they are moral-in Kafka’s
world there are no choice which aren’t; he is utterly at odds with
the prevailing view that abstract forces make choices for us; to be
human is to be faced moment by moment with moral choices whose
consequences we can never be sure of). The fifth entry goes on to
say that this crucial point from which retreat is impossible has to
be reached. Stach relates this to some of the torturing difficulties
of Kafka’s personal life: breaking off with Felice Bauer; wriggling
free of his father and discarding his middle-class life to follow
his way as a writer (it’s interesting that the two should be
incompatible; they are because middle-class life involves perpetual
dishonesty). However, the idea is a matter of principle. We have to
press on to the difficult moral choices even though we do so like
someone lost in the dark.
Kafka believed we had something indestructible within us and we
develop eternally. He seemed not to believe in god (doing so is
barely compatible with the idea of him making mistakes and in
adolescence he declared his atheism). Did he believe in life after
death? It’s likely this was simply part of his cultural inheritance.
Born in 1883 he belonged to a generation in which it was almost
invariably taken for granted. However, his idea of the eternal might
be contained within our more realistic time-scales. He makes a
repeated distinction between the spirit and the senses. Once we
again, the former doesn’t necessarily have to be interpreted in a
mystical way. The difference could be taken to be between inner and
outer. Kafka is constantly focussed on his inner world. His
self-scrutiny is legendary. Characteristically he sees himself
negatively. Even as a boy he believed he came through at school only
because of the kindness of his teachers. He seems to have
experienced profound self-mistrust from an early age, perhaps thanks
to his bombastic, arrogant father. Without doubt he was beset by
inner conflicts, but the psychological speculations and
retrospective attribution of personality disorders are of little
importance. They are less about understanding and more about control
through labelling. What matters about Kafka is his literary genius.
The most common subject in these aphorisms is evil. Kafka seems to
have associated this with ulterior motives:
Die Hintergedanken, mit denen Du das Böse in Dir aufnimmst, sind
nicht die Deinen, sondern
die des Bösen (The ulterior motives with which you take
evil into yourself are not your own but those of evil).
It’s an odd idea that evil is a free-floating force, an external
power. Yet Kafka seems to have conceived it as something invasive,
rather than arising from within or being a matter of relationships.
Kafka wrote elsewhere of ulterior motives:
“At a certain state of self-knowledge…You will realize that you
are nothing but a rat-hole of wretched ulterior motives.”
Kafka was unable to lie. He suffered mental torment at the thought
of even a white lie, for which Felice Bauer upbraided him. His
self-scrutiny and discipline may appear pathological but perhaps
they are a means of fighting off external forces which drove him
towards acceptance of moral compromise he was unable to make. He was
a regular visitor to brothels, which clashes violently with his
search for moral viability. According to Max Brod, he was tortured
by his sexual desires. In this he was no different from many men of
his time, forced by convention to keep their intended spouses
virgins while descending to
a cash transaction to satisfy their needs. It isn’t possible
to accuse him of hypocrisy. He was open about his sexual behaviour
and if he didn’t write frankly about sex it was principally because
it just wasn’t done in serious literature. He did write about his
tortured relations with women. Aphorism fourteen, which
distinguishes between moving backwards while intending to walk
forwards across a plain and doing so while attempting a steep slope,
is related to his falling in love with a girl in Italy in 1913 and
still having her on his mind while on holiday with Felice in 1916.
Kafka wasn’t a sexual hypocrite. He was incapable of easily bringing
together his affectionate and erotic impulses.
Das Negative zu tun, ist uns noch auferlegt, das Positive ist uns
schon gegeben
(Doing the negative is imposed on us; the positive is
already within us.)
The notion of the positive as inherent appears to be a conviction
that we can find all we need to discover the “true path” or to
understand the “ultimate things” within us. The conflict between the
senses and the spirit is, in a certain way, that between inner and
outer, or in more psychological terms (Kafka had little truck with
psychology – zum letztenmal Psychologie psychology for the
last time, says number ninety-three) autonomy and heteronomy.
Aphorism six says the revolutionary movements based in intellect are
right in refusing validity to everything that has gone before,
because as yet nothing has happened. There is nothing political in
these formulations in any conventional sense, yet here he seems to
be hinting at the radical convictions he embraced as a young man: we
have not yet begun to live out our human nature because we are stuck
in an animalistic phase. All previous history is a falsehood. The
true awakening of our nature is yet to come.
Probably the most famous aphorism is number sixteen:
Ein Käfig ging einen
Vogel suchen
(A cage went in search of a bird). Originally it read, “to
catch a bird”. The alteration shifts some of the
responsibility to the bird, in keeping, as Stach argues, with
Kafka’s view that people who suffer oppression or injustice are in
some way responsible (he also believed that illness was in some way
the sufferer’s fault). This suggestion is found throughout Kafka’s
work. It’s very unfashionable and possibly utterly wrong. What is
true, is that being a victim entails a sense of guilt. As Kundera
says of Kafka, he reverses an ancient relationship: while the fault
used to seek the punishment, in Kafka, the punishment seeks the
fault. No doubt Kafka was driven to seek the fault in himself in
response to his loud and arrogant father’s bullying and dismissal.
In his work, doing so becomes a cultural characteristic. Yet the
search is endless. Once put yourself in question and there is no
limit to self-doubt. Perhaps this is close to Orwell’s view that the
way to control another person is to make them suffer. A cage,
however, is a cage. It takes away freedom. In Kafka there is always
this tension: freedom is desired, its removal is negative, yet
people may lose it partly through their own attitudes or actions. In
spite of his rejection of what he called “the nature theories”
without defining just what he meant, a bird is born to fly. Flying
is what it must do to be a bird. To be caged is to be robbed of its
nature and, therefore, the cage is a denial. Further, he is clear
here that the cage seeks the bird. It is the cage which needs to
enclose. Its purpose is to do so. The nature of the cage and that of
the bird can’t be reconciled. For the cage to fulfil its purpose,
the bird must be trammelled. What the bird must do to remain free,
that is to live according to its inner laws, is avoid the cage.
However attractive the cage may seem through its offer of protection
and perhaps also of food and care, the bird must resist or lose an
essential part of its nature. Likewise, there is no reason for the
cage to exist except to enclose. Freedom or entrapment are always a
relationship.
Das Böse ist manchmal in der Hand wie ein Werkzeug..lässt es sich,
wenn man den Willen hat, ohne Widerspruch zur Seite legen (evil in
sometimes like a tool in your hand..it can be laid aside without
opposition if one has the will to do so),
asserts aphorism ninety-five. It’s akin to number one hundred which
argues a belief in the diabolical is impossible because it can’t
exceed the amount which exists. Presumably Kafka saw evil as a
lesser quantity than good, if they can be thought of as quantities.
His suggestion is that good prevails. He is hopeful, though never
optimistic in the sense of relying on the best outcomes. He thinks
it’s possible to perform many evil acts without becoming evil. The
question of the severity of such acts seems to be left open, but
what is at the core of his conviction is perhaps the conflation of
the indestructible core of humanity and the good. That out of his
continual torment he could conclude that laying aside evil can be
accomplished, if not easily, at least without resistance if we are
only strong enough, is remarkable.
In his notebooks Kafka observed that we crush ourselves if we impose
too a great a responsibility on ourselves. Aphorism ninety-two
reflects on animism and the question of responsibility, by which he
implies of a moral kind. He seems to tilt towards shared
responsibility as the means to avoid the crushing of the individual.
In aphorism eighty-five he says evil is a product of human
consciousness at “certain transitional points” which is hard to
reconcile with his notion of it as an external force. Just what he
means by the transitional points is intriguing; maybe that it’s when
our interests are challenged, when we are forced to make a choice
between the narrow interest and a matter of principle, that a choice
of evil becomes possible. As he tends to identify evil with ulterior
motives, it would make sense that the protection of an ulterior
motive provokes evil.
Wahrheit ist unteilbar
(Truth is indivisible) says aphorism eighty and for that
reason it can’t know itself. Anyone who claims to know the truth is
a lie (is a lie rather tells a lie). Stach points out how ethical
and epistemological categories overlap for Kafka: the true is also
the good. Obviously, the untruth is not necessarily evil: it’s
untrue that the sun orbits the earth, but those who believed it
weren’t therefore evil; they merely lacked the means to know
otherwise. Is Kafka right that the truth can’t know itself? It can
know a lie, but does its
nature as integral to itself prevent it from self-reflection?
Perhaps this is the origin of the torment of truth, that it is
insulted and assaulted by lies, but can’t be separate from itself,
can’t grasp its own nature and therefore suffers under the blows of
lying.
It’s reasonable to argue there’s some confusion in Kafka’s thinking
because of his inheritance from religion, Plato and other sources.
His belief that the sensory world is but a pale reflection of the
spirit world is hard to take in the twenty-first century. He might
have benefitted from reading David Hume. Kafka’s seriousness,
high-mindedness and honesty, however, are never in doubt. Nor is his
commitment to writing, which made him feel all other urgencies must
recede. His diligence as a writer, his search for the most telling
image, are a superb inheritance. It’s almost difficult to take him
seriously when he says his memory is terrible, he can recall
nothing, not even the simplest facts; but maybe that was how his
mind worked.
This is a remarkable, unique book. It offers no solutions and
nothing simple but in its astringency and
restraint brings
into focus the indefeasibly moral nature of being human and the
requirement that each of us finds the “indestructible” within us. It
is a marvellous antidote to the glib verbalising which permeates our
culture and will be read when the purveyors of dishonest
simplifications are long forgotten.
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