Dr Franz Kafka: why am I living outside your body?

 Dr Franz Kafka: why am I living outside your body?

 

The mind-body conundrum – i.e. the separation of the mind from the body – is supposed to have been buried a long time ago by Descartes, says Noam Chomsky, hence his Cartesian linguistics, i.e. language arises from the brain. There cannot be any doubt that the mind and language arise from the brain (the body), QED. To put it succinctly: you can have a body without a mind but cannot have a mind without a body. If only it was this easy. For a start, what to do with all those people who are full of mindfulness? Is it a kind of pathology if one insists in the separation of the mind from the body? Is Freuds triad of the Superego, Ego and Id a map of the mind alone, or does it include the body? What exactly is the study of psychology? If we follow Chomsky, we can only conclude that linguistics is a branch of psychology because psychology deals with the mind that arises from the brain (body), which in turn is subject to the laws of nature. Nevertheless, it seems that the mind and language can transcend the body in various ways, negating the laws of nature and thus being in great peril of losing the mind altogether, or at least ending up as a fool. On the other hand there are any number of snake oil sellers who pounce on the absent minded, reminding them of the necessity to restore harmony between the body and the mind by way of body and mind exercises and supplements that will relieve you of your hard-earned money. The capitalist wellness industry is the Master of Advertising – the behaviourist manipulation that Chomsky characterised as neo-fascist – bombarding us with subliminal messages that convince us to buy the remedies that nobody needs but everyone wants. Given that the body is a complicated machine where everything that can go wrong will go wrong, we succumb to any advice with a tinge of guilt insofar we ourselves are to blame for what goes wrong. Random selection as to which cell in the body goes haywire is not in the vocabulary of the para-normal or religious fanatics. Any illness and disease are punishments by a god or at least by a perverted mind. Spiritual redemption is possible as much as a miracle cure. By the turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century, the German Lebensreform was both a ‘way of life’ as much as a pseudo-scientific fashion with gurus like Steiner who promulgated a whole new body and mind praxis that persists to this day. Lost souls like Franz Kafka were strangely attracted to these ideas while at the same time finding no solace or cure for their mind and body problems. Kafka was twice removed from his body with is statements like ‘if I had been I’, thus having no problem in metamorphizing into a beetle, looking at the world from the inside of a third being, or at least entertaining the idea that we can all be transformed into pleading guilty to charges nobody knows of, as in his novel The Trial. The tenuous hold on our mind, less so on our body, is nevertheless expressed through literary language, unique to the likes of Kafka who needs no recourse to any extra-sensory insights gained from the prescription by Steiner and other such shamans – rightly ridiculed by Einstein (he, Steiner and Kafka were in Prague at the time) as ‘rubbish’ since the body’s sensory apparatus has no ‘extra’ dimensions. Kafka’s problem was real: how to position his rational body in a world of mindless contradiction? One can easily change one’s mind, so why not change one’s body? Why is the body so reluctant to heed the entreaties of the mind? Is Kafka’s vegetarianism good for his seemingly ravaged but still fit body until TB struck as the ultimate insult to his tortured mind? Take Shaw’s vegetarianism as the good gospel that ensured him a long and healthy life. Even Steiner profited, so why not Kafka? Nothing makes sense, not even Einstein when he proclaimed that science without religion and religion without science is the ultimate bugbear. Steiner and Kafka at the time in Prague were intrigued by Einstein’s fourth dimension, but in vastly different ways. Kafka correctly understood this fourth dimension to be ‘time’ - whatever that means – while Steiner jumped to the conclusion that if there is a fourth dimension why not a fifth, sixth, etc., what with parallel universes and time travel between them, coming to light at seances (popular in Prague at the time) where such travellers reported, as Kafka quipped, that they were not feeling well. Einstein also quipped that the population in Prague seemed to lack any personalities. Unfortunately, he never met Kafka or his friend Max Brod who -unlike Kafka - by all accounts lacked ‘personality’ (at least according to the biographer Rainer Stach) even though he was instrumental in preserving Kafka’s literary works. Not that Brod didn’t concur with the notion of Prague at that time, being a provincial and boring place, convincing Kafka that Paris was the place to be, pondering why this should be so. Brod concluded that it is the French people who made Paris the place to be. Quite an insight from a young man from Prague whose literary ambitions never amounted to much, at least compared to those of his best friend Franz Kafka who imbued people in general with existential shadows trailing their bodies. Such insights are rare in this world of objectifying bodies as mindless trading currencies, establishing hierarchies of desirability with too many chiefs and not enough Indians, wiping out bodies (people) that have no capital value. Not that it takes a Brod and Kafka to realise that people (with a body and mind intact) are the salt of this earth, as for example noted in a Māori proverb ‘He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata‘ (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people). As such we should always pay attention to real people whose minds and bodies give rise to warnings of disasters to come if we do not heed the proverb’s contention that people (with a mind and body intact) are the most important ‘things’ in this world. If they warn us about climate catastrophes, wars and famines, genocide and epidemics, poverty and degradation, insanity and wealth, etc., etc., then we must pause and say ‘if I had been I’ even in the shape of a big beetle on its back, I would plead ‘please don’t kill me’ as deep inside me there is, as Kafka might have said, a Mensch (a representative of the people). As such there is an alternative to the out-of-body experiences which is the Russian Doll experience, i.e. the sensation of having bodies with a body, having minds within mind – as a pathology often described as the patient hearing voices in his head, commanding him to do things that his other (sane) mind would reject. There are also interesting grey areas that impinge on semantic befuddlement like saying ‘I listened only to what I thought I believed …’, i.e. mixing up ‘thinking’ and ‘believing’ which ought to be mutually exclusive categories but sounds good as a half-hearted (sic) confession of having done something wrong. To show that this is not just an English language problem, here is a German quote ‘Ich will meinen Körper nicht mehr über die Grenzen treiben …’ (I will not push my body over the limit any more), a common enough expression (in English too) by fitness freaks who torture their bodies in the elusive attempt to gain the perfect six-pack muscle package. Equally the German saying ‘Ich konnte nicht ich selbst sein (I couldn’t be myself)’ in playing with the reflexive pronouns gives rise to the split personality – e.g. the more sinister Jekyll and Hyde version in English. In getting back to Kafka writing in German about the body-mind conundrum as a semi-Cartesian shadow play in his novels Der Prozess and Das Schloß – we read that Kafka in the English translations only became famous in the 1940s, especially in the USA, connecting with a certain readership that, while academic to some extent, to this day has a large dose of existential angst, justifiably so, as American society at large is forever on the verge of self-destruction whilst saving the rest of the world from itself (check out the good American in the documentary The Cove). Kafka’s authoritarian father would have revered Trump, not because he would have ‘believed’ in him but because he would have ‘thought’ that he would have believed in him. His wayward son Dr Franz Kafka on the other hand would have contemplated the possibility of being arrested by Trump agents, to be held indefinitely without rhyme or reason until the day of execution - the end of body and mind and the end of America. Kafka’s novel, sometimes called Amerika, might well be the roman à clef as far as the fate of many a European migrant who flees to America is concerned, only to end up as a poor ‘negro’ freed from slavery, getting a job in the theatre business in Oklahoma. Kafka of course only travelled there in his mind, probably just as well, for his imagination was more real than an uncertain, unfathomable reality.