Notes
1 "Das Auge
darin ich Gott sehe, ist dasselbe Auge, darin Gott mich
sieht. Mein Auge und Gottes Auge ist ein Auge und ein
Gesicht und ein Erkennen und eine Liebe" (qtd. in Suzuki
126). Except for Brod and Grözinger, German sources
are quoted here in the notes in the original. In the text,
however, they are quoted both in the original and in
English translations made by me, the only exceptions to the
latter being Grözinger and Kafka's parables.
Translations of the parables are taken from the
dual-language edition, Parables and
Paradoxes.
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2 Among the
"not so mystical" thinkers would be Herder, who, according
to Michael Morton, is grounded in the tradition of the
coincidentia oppositorum, a tradition stretching
back to Cusanus and, so the author argues, long before him
to the pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher Heraclitus. Morton
calls Herder "the direct ancestor of such thinkers as Hegel
and Nietzsche" (51), this by reason of his 1764 essay, "On
Diligence in Several Learned Languages," the exposition of
which occurs in three stages, "corresponding broadly to the
pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that, a generation
later, becomes the characteristic framework, not merely of
the Hegelian system, nor even solely of German Idealism,
but of Romantic thought and sensibility generally" (28). In
the third chapter of his book, Morton offers a reading of
Herder's essay that shows how its subtle and paradoxical
method of composition clearly prefigures the Romantic
poets' playful deconstruction of the presumably irreducible
identity/difference antinomy. As Beate Allert puts it,
summarizing Morton on Herder: "Unity seems to restore
itself by means of its own disruption. The return to unity,
lost in the process of historically necessary
differentiation, can be achieved only by sustaining
differentiation" (248).
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3 According to
Margarita Pazi, Brod was himself committed to the pursuit
of a "schöpferische Mitte" in his thought and
imaginative writing so that it may be appropriate to speak
of the "Prager Kreis" as a "triumvirate of the
coincidentia": "Bei Kafka ist es die detaillierte,
realistische Wiedergabe irrealer Vorgänge; die
Realität eines Traumes. Bei Brod läßt es
sich als die Suche nach dem Weg bezeichnen, der eine
Vermengung dieser Gegensätze ermöglicht. . . .
Das wahre Ziel kann stets nur in der Verbindung der
Polaritäten erreicht werden, durch das 'und', wie er
es mit sprachlicher Emphasis in 'Stefan Rott' darstellte"
(51-52).
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4 The koan is
the principal form of meditation practiced by the Rinzai
sect. Kapleau defines it as "a formulation, in baffling
language, pointing to ultimate truth. Koans cannot be
solved by recourse to logical reasoning but only by
awakening a deeper level of the mind beyond the discursive
intellect" (369). The mu koan recalls an exchange
between Master Joshu (ninth century) and a monk wherein the
monk asks Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature," and
the latter answers "Mu!" (no) (Kapleau 76). The novice
meditates upon this "Mu" until the Zen master is satisfied
that he has sufficiently discerned its spiritual
significance.
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5 The letter
was written in October of 1917. See Briefe 186-88.
It will have become apparent by now that my approach to
Kafka, like my approach to mystical experience in general,
is one that allows for the possibility of a "pure" event,
i.e., a moment of awareness that transcends cultural
constraint or conditioning of any kind. Thus my position
amounts, tentatively at least, to a kind of rear-guard
action against what might be termed the neo-Kantian
"constructivist" view of consciousness, currently
predominant in religious philosophy and the social
sciences, which views our experience, religious or
otherwise, as invariably shaped by a psychologically and
socially predetermined "set" (nexus of beliefs, values,
attitudes, etc.). In other words, we rather "construct"
than encounter internal and external events. My position,
then, again tentatively, would be opposite that of Rolf
Goebel's in Constructing China or in "Kafka and
the East: The Case for Cultural Construction," or in
"Verborgener Orientalismus," each of which argues for a
Kafka who viewed Eastern spirituality primarily as a foil
for satire of Western orientalism. On this view, Kafka
became disillusioned, some time in the Fall of 1914 after
writing "Vor dem Gesetz" (presumably his "swan song" to
transcendence), with the quest for a "künstlerische
Autonomie- und Reinheitsideal" ("Verborgener" 42), once he
understood that ideal to be no more than an empty
metaphysical construct (Kafka as reluctant constructivist).
This essay reads Kafka as far too spiritually savvy to
confuse the spiritual with such phantasms as lofty ideals,
universal essences, or remote pristine spheres. What Kafka
actually knew the spiritual to "be" (for lack of a better
term)—i.e., the experience (not idea) of the
coincidentia oppositorum—is what I am
attempting to demonstrate here. The reason I hedge in
declaring my opposition to Goebel, and cultural
constructivism generally, is that the coincidentia
paradoxically allows, indeed requires, a compatibility
between the spiritual and any other view of interpersonal
or cultural relations. This is because they are, from the
mystical perspective, advaita or not-two. For
further elaboration, see the "Conclusion" at the end of the
essay. For able representatives of both sides of the
current philosophical debate over mystical experience as
pure versus constructed, the reader is referred to Katz and
Faure (constructivists, though the latter hedges a bit) and
to Forman (purist).
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6 This
particular form of the coincidentia oppositorum is
also what Friedrich Schlegel is alluding to, in terms of
irony, in his famous Athenäum fragment 116
where he describes romantic poetry as a hovering
("schweben") "zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem
Darstellenden" (93). It also seems to be what
poststructuralists are getting at when they rant about the
death of the author: what they mean is the total absorption
of the writer's ego into the act of writing from which
vantage point the whole sense of individual identity can be
seen to be an illusion (of language).
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7 Werner
Hoffmann (102) paraphrases Kafka's own words in the
Hochzeitsvorbereitungen to the effect that
"Schreiben blieb für ihn eine Form, seine Form des
Gebetes." Grözinger stresses Kafka's Kabbalistic sense
of language as a creative power, available to God and man
alike, that expresses the mystery of the essential
continuity, in being, of signifier and signified, word and
thing: "This may explain why life and language are
identical for Kafka and why he attributes a religious
weight to writing as a form of prayer" (140). We might also
mention in this context that Kafka was not unfamiliar with
either the idea or practice of meditation as a means of
achieving a quasi-mystical one-pointed state of
consciousness. In a letter of mid November 1917 to Felix
Weltsch, there is a curious passage in which he speaks
hypothetically of a succession of ever deeper phases of
concentrated awareness culminating in a "Denkzipfel" that
would amount to a temporary banishing of the ego ("So
wärest Du also glücklich ganz beseitigt"
[199]).
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8 Kafka's
intellectual understanding of the unconscious seems to have
come from two different, though parallel, trends in
turn-of-the-century academic psychology: from
psychoanalysis, which both fascinated and repelled him with
its "threat" of an "'Eindrängung' des 'Gegenwillens'",
i.e., a potential return or breakthrough of the repressed,
as he puts it in a letter of October 1917 to Weltsch
paraphrasing the latter ("Was Du mit der 'Eindrängung'
des 'Gegenwillens' meinst, glaube ich zu verstehen, es
gehört zu dem verdammt psychologischen Theorienkreis
[i.e., Freud's inner circle in Vienna], den Du nicht
liebst, aber von dem Du besessen bist [und ich wohl auch]"
[Briefe 187]); and from the cognitive psychology
of Fechner with its more mundane but also more
experimentally supported measurement of thresholds of
perception or awareness (Heidsieck 28).
According to Blank (28 and 49), whose
recent catalog of books in Kafka's personal library, In
Kafkas Bibliothek, supersedes Jürgen Borns
Kafkas Bibliothek of 1990, Kafka had in his
possession at least two psychoanalytic studies, Theodor
Reik's Flaubert und sein Versuchung des Heiligen
Antonius of 1912 and Hans Blüher's Die Rolle der
Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft, 2 vols.,
1917 and 1920. Blank (49) also cites Binder's informative
history of Kafka's highly ambivalent attitude towards
psychoanalysis presumably dating from at least as early as
the Fall of 1911.
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9 The notion
of an inscrutable threshold between opposed spheres that,
by virtue of its very inscrutability, illuminates (and
thereby harmonizes) all, is mentioned by Kafka in an
off-hand conversation of October 1920 with Gustav Janouch,
here too in the context of the "two souls," conscious and
unconscious, that dwell in the human heart. As he reflects
to his young friend on the paradox of psychological freedom
as a value that, à la Faust, must constantly be
maintained by vigilant effort, Kafka says: "Der Funke, der
unser bewußtes Leben ausmacht, muß die Kluft
der Gegensätze überbrücken und von einem Pol
zum anderen springen, damit wir die Welt für einen
Augenblick im Blitzlicht erblicken" (60). Sparks and
lightning are, of course, perennial mystical images of
spiritual insight and suggest Kafka's vision of a "sudden
cure" for the divided human self that goes qualitatively
beyond the plodding effort of, say, psychoanalysis. (It
would seem that the coincidentia was especially
resonant in Kafka's mind at this time since he also alludes
to it in the very conversation preceding this one in
Janouch's record. In this instance the context is less
individual-psychological and more transpersonally mystical
as Kafka instructs his interlocutor on the permeability of
the boundary between self and world: "Der Griff nach der
Welt ist deshalb immer ein Griff nach innen. Darum ist jede
Betonwand nur ein Schein, der früher oder später
zerfällt. Denn Innen und Außen gehören
zusammen. Voneinander losgelöst sind es zwei
verwirrende Ansichten eines Geheimnisses, das wir nur
erleiden, aber nicht enträtseln können" [57]. If
we consider the span of years between the 1903 letter to
Oskar Pollak mentioned earlier ["Ich lese Fechner,
Eckehart"] and this conversation with Janouch in 1920, it
becomes clear that the coincidentia oppositorum,
this deepest of paradoxes, continued to occupy a lofty
position in Kafka's mystical consciousness.)
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10 "Stirb ehe
du noch stirbst / damit du nicht darffst sterben / Wann du
nu sterben solst: sonst möchtestu verderben."
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11 Cf. the
short parable, "Die Quelle," for another—in this case
very pointed and precise—elaboration of the
coincidence of part and Whole (or ego and Self). As with
Gregor before his Enlightenment, so too here does the
"part" (the "er"-persona who is thirsty) have a dim
"Ahnung" of its true identity as the Whole.
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12 On Kafka's
conversance with the nearly universal mystical archetype of
the series of gates leading to ever more rarefied levels of
spiritual perception, see Grözinger (46-54) for the
Kabbalah and Lee (256-72) for Taoism and Buddhism. In "Vor
dem Gesetz" Kafka, as usual, gives a traditional image his
own Zen-like paradoxical twist: Enlightenment is not a
gradual thing, not a matter of getting through so many
doors of perception, but a sudden, liberating intuition
(grounded though it be in long suffering and frustration)
of one's intrinsic identity with everything (Zen's
kensho), occurring at the moment of ego-death (the
allegorical death of the man from the country). Individual
identity surrenders to cosmic: the quest for the Law had
been but a quest for one's own True Self.
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13 For
another reading of "Vor dem Gesetz" as a parable of the
coincidence of opposites—the perspective in this case
Taoist-mystical—see Lee 9-10, 242-72. Lee likens
Kafka's Law to the Tao, viewing both as a matrix for such
interdependent opposites as transcendence and immanence,
and interior (human) and exterior nature (hence also
morality and nature). The identification of the Law with
the Tao ("the right and perfect life" [174]) has also been
made by Max Brod in his biography of Kafka.
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14 The
growing disparity in size between man and gatekeeper
("[D]er Grössenunterschied hat sich sehr zuungunsten
des Mannes verändert" [Parables 62]) is
analogous to the deepest stages of koan meditation in which
the meditator may struggle with the anxious sense that he
is disappearing and only the koan itself remains, looming
like an invincible mountain. The paradox, of course, is
that the moment the koan exists by itself, it ceases to
exist since, as the German proverb has it, "Einer ist
keiner."
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15 Zen, in a
typical affront to logic, might call this "casting off
one's conditioning without casting it off." The paradox I
adumbrate in my reading of "Vor dem Gesetz" allows me to
insist on a mystical-transcendent perspective on Kafka as a
sine qua non for appreciating the subtlety of his art while
still endorsing, without fear of contradiction, the richly
nuanced materialist approach of cultural constructivism as
practiced by Goebel et al (e.g. Sander Gilman's intriguing
view of Kafka's life and work as embodying "the world of
disease that formed Kafka's [Jewish] experience" [230]; or
Mark Anderson's brilliant examination of Kafka's complex
relations to the important cultural trends of his own time
and place, such as Hapsburg decadence, dandyism and
changing social attitudes towards the body; or Karen
Piper's convincing reading of the penal colony as an
allegory of the beginning of the end of empire). My only
caution is that the reader beware of any assertion by a
constructivist commentator that these two approaches are
mutually exclusive. Anderson [14], by contrast, implies
their possible congruence in his subtle discussion of the
"richly ambiguous" sense in which Kafka often uses the term
Verkehr in his writing: to indicate "the movement
of the modern [urban] world" [diesseits] as well
as the [mystical?] ecstasy that he occasionally experienced
in the throes of "intercourse" with writing
[jenseits]. This surprising openness of Anderson
to transcendence comes a mere nine pages after his firm
assertion that "Kafka's status as a modern depends
on the failure of his effort to reach das
Allerheiligste" [5].
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