Kafka's Suffering (in process)

"Man has no nature -no simple homogeneous being. He's a strange mixture of being and nonbeing. His place is between those two opposite poles".

"For nature is such, that it everywhere indicates a God lost, both in man and out of man".

-E. Cassirer

The question of the colours is an old aesthetical struggle, since both Goethe and Kant [the discovery of the judgement faculty through "autonomy", Kant's being "eternal" -following Aristotle, and Goethe's being developmental, in tune with Biblical humanism, Kaufmann].... The idea of black and white, that can be gained and retained only from within the experience. Problematic enough is nevertheless out fascination with twilights and in-betweens that remain at the core of our creative force, the power of description. "Die Frage der sprache ist wieder da", thus starts Eveline's book on the Critique of Reason, I could even dare say the question is once again "darin"; and perhaps Cassirer more than others help me to understand why Rosenzweig wouldn't "take pleasure" in the reading of Kafka, claiming his novels were written in the same style that the author of the Bible had in mind when writing that book, a writing on the wall.

The days waft in the uneasiness of hueing beneath the tremble of the abyss, and choosing to swim therein has shown me that there's no possible philosophy within, therefore as Heidegger has shown the province of being is manifested through mani-fold channels, "Das Seiend-Sein kommt vielfaeltig zum Scheinen", translating the following passage from Aristotle (I might be actually wrong, because this sounds a lot more akin to Parmenides): τὀ ὂν λἐγεται πολλαχῶς. Accordingly Kafka might be a lot truer to the spirit of thinking than Heidegger, as in the two-fold nature of man reflected in the Midrash -the one and the many; Simmel only adds up with "Kultur ist der Weg von der geschlossenen Einheit durch die enfaltete Vielheit zur entfaltete Einheit". Then Barbara Hahn presents the idea of plurality from Hannah Arendt to us: "Die Eins - ist kein Anfang; sie ist immer schon gegeben, insofern eine Zwei existiert. Erst die Zwei macht die Eins zur Eins.

Then Arendt writes in her Denktagbuch: "Experimental Notebook of a Political Scientist: To establish a science of politics one needs to reconsider all philosophical statements on Man under the assumption that men, and not Man, inhabit the earth. The establishment of political science demands a philosophy for which men exist only in the plural. Its field is human plurality. Its religious source is the second creationmyth - not Adam and rib, but: Male and female he crated them".

This is followed by a long footnote in "The Human Condition" (on whose relationship to the text there's indisputable agreement between Hahn and me); this speaks of the first chapter when she introduces the notion of plurality from the Biblical source.

"In the analysis of postclassical political thought, it is often quite illuminating to find out which of the two biblical versions of the creation story is cited. Thus it is highly characteristic of the difference between the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and of Paul that Jesus, discussing the relationship between man and wife, refers to Genesis 1:27: "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female" (Matt. 19:4), whereas Paul on a similar occasion insists that the woman was created "of the man" and hence "for the man", even though he then somewhat attenuates the dependence: "neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man" (I Cor. 11:8-12). The difference indicates much more than a different attitude to the role of woman. For Jesus faith was closely related to action; for Paul, faith was primarily related to salvation [I know from somewhere this is an insight of Rudolf Bultmann]. Especially interesting in this respect in Augustine, who not only ignores ignores Genesis 1:27 altogether but sees the difference between man and animal in that man was created unum ac singulum, whereas all animals were ordered "to come into being several at once". To Augustine, the creation story offers a welcome opportunity to stress the species character of animal life as distinguished from the singularity of human existence.

B. Hahn mentions morever, the particular choice of Arendt to quote from the Rosenzweig-Buber Bible, and not from the King James or any other edition available in English or German. Particular enough is to notice that apparently this reading of the Bible in general was the only thing Arendt had to do with Rosenzweig. He appears quoted in p.333 of the Human Condition as a footnote; the note is motivated by the following paragraph:

"The reward of toil and trouble lies in nature's fertility, in the quiet confidence that he who in "toil and trouble" has done his part, remains a part of nature in the future of his children and his children's children. The Old Testament, which unlike classical antiquity, held life to be sacred and therefore neither death nor labor to be an evil (and least of all an argument against life), shows in the stories of the patriarchs how unconcernd their lives they were, how they needed neither an individual, earthly immortality nor an assurance of the eternity of their souls, how death came to them in the familiar shape of night and quiet and eternal rest "in a good old age and full of years". -The Human Condition, chapter 3, Labor

Followed by the footnote abovementioned:

"Nowhere in the Old Testament is death "the wage of sin." Nor did the curse by which man was expelled from paradise punish him with labor and birth; it only made labor harsh and birth full of sorrow. According to Genesis, man (adam) had been created to take care and watch over the soil (adamah), as his name, the masculine form of "soil", indicates (v. Gen. 2:5, 15). And "Adam was not to till adamah and He God created Adam of the dust of adamah.... He, God, took Adam and put him into the Garden of Eden to till and watch it" (I follow the translation of Martin Buber & Franz Rosenzweig).....

That was seemly the only connection of Arendt to Rosenzweig, in anycase most of his writings other than the Star remained unpublished by the time of Arendt's death. Nevertheless she maintained a correspondence with both Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, but did not seem to have known Emil Fackenheim or A.J. Heschel. The case of Kafka was very different, as she often speaks of him in her writings and devoted a very important essay to the novel "The Palace" as the philosophical foundation of what Anti-semitism caused to European Jewry.
Two particularly important references to Kafka in the Arendtian corpus:

The chapter VI of "The Human Condition" starts with a sub-heading paragraph by Kafka: "He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition". This stands right before section 35., that speaks of "World Alienation".

The idea of the Archimedean point appears several times through the book, in the following instances:

"On the other hand, the conditions of human existence -life itself, natality and mortality, wordliness, plurality, and the earth-can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences -anthropology, psychology, biology, etc.-which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth's conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural sciences owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth" (p. 13). It follows the prologue from "The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition"; it is interesting to notice how Arendt does not say world instead of earth, for world is included under the rubric of "The Human Condition of work is worldliness. Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and trascend them all". (p.9). She is attaching to the world a meaning of being "humanly created", therefore not related to the earth, the heavens, the waters. Heidegger himself speaks about "deities, mortals, heavens, earth" in his essay "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" and he presents the earth as the dwelling place for mortals; the world isn't mentioned but whenever he refers to "Dasein" which necessitates a temporal and spatial location, namely a world.

Another instance brings us closer to the pained world of Kafka, that shall be extensively discussed thereafter; "The Cartesian removal of the Archimedean point into the mind of man, while it enabled man to carry it, as it were, within himself wherever he went and this freed him from given reality altogether-that is, from the human condition of being an inhabitant of the earth-has perhaps been as convincing as the universal doubt from which it sprang and which it was supposed to dispel. Today at any rate, we find in the perplexities confronting natural scientists in the midst of their greatest triumphs the same nightmares which have haunted the philosophers from the beginning of modern age".

Slowly Arendt penetrates the inner world of Revelation, as though trying to get a grasp of the world from the universe outside the earth, not only dwelling on the old exiles but adding up to it the exile from the earthliness and the human condition itself; which is mesmerizing in being distinctive of Kafka's ambiguous pesimism. Arendt is looking for answers that are nowhere to be found in the Western tradition and through the Rosenzweig-Buber translations (and perhaps the correspondence with Gershom Scholem as well) she unwittingly creates for herself an orifice inside a vacuum; but unlike Nietzsche she's not doing philosophy with a hammer and disturbing the peaceful co-existence of the inhabitants of the philosophical worlds. Her rather innocent criticism develops into an insight that might just as well come in the disguise of nihilism or amorality; but without touching upon it she's entering the world of Kafka, that to my opinion is not necessarily a world inhabited neither by Kafka himself nor by the whole of German Jewry. It is a pariah world, that resembles the "memory" of Lessing's world, which was no longer available to them. Nor Kafka or Arendt and much less Rosenzweig are parvenus in the Western tradition; the weight of Judaism is beared almost with pride but is mimetized into Greek and Christian myths that permit the thinker to un-obliterate the thinking spaces necessary to still remain "beholding a world"; It seems the three of them live in a multi-layered world not unlike that un-paradisiac one portrayed in the Midrash.

The closing pages of "The Human Condition" return to Kafka once again, (section 45, "The Victory of the Animal Laborans"): "If, in concluding, we return once more to the discovery of the Archimedean point and apply it, as Kafka warned us not to do, to man himself and to what he is doing on this earth, it at once becomes manifest that all his activities, watched from a sufficiently removed vantage point in the universe, would appear not as activites of any kind but as processes, so that, as a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel. For the watcher from the universe, this mutation would be no more or less mysterious than the mutation that goes on before our eyes in those small living organisms which we fought with antibiotics and which mysteriously have developed new strains to resist us. How deep-rooted this usage of the Archimedean point against ourselves can be seen in the very metaphors which dominate scientific thought today".