The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Neither Kafka, as Dr. Brod knew him, nor any of his heroes show a trace of spiritual snobbery nor do they think of the higher life they search for as existing in some other- world sphere: the distinction they draw between this world and the world does not imply that there are two different worlds, only that our habitual conceptions of reality are not the true conception.

Perhaps, when he wished his writings to be destroyed, Kafka foresaw the nature of too many of his admirers.

PART FOUR

The Shakespearian City

THE GLOBE

Physiological life is of course not "Life." And neither is -psychological life. Life is the world.

ludwig wittgenstein

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to form a complete pic­ture of life because, for that, we have to reconcile and combine two completely different impressions—that of life as each of us experiences it in his own person, and that of life as we all observe it in others.

When I observe myself, the I which observes is unique, but not individual, since it has no characteristics of its own; it has only the power to recognize, compare, judge and choose: the self which it observes is not a unique identity but a succession of various states of feeling or desire. Necessity in my world means two things, the givenness of whatever state of myself is at any moment present, and the obligatory freedom of my ego.

Action in my world has a special sense; I act towards my states of being, not towards the stimuli which provoked them; my

action, in fact, is the giving or withholding of permission to myself to act. It is impossible for me to act in ignorance, for my world is by definition what I know; it is not even possible, strictly speaking, for me to be self-deceived, for if I know I am deceiving myself, I am no longer doing so; I can never believe that I do not know what is good for me. I cannot say that I am fortunate or unfortunate, for these words apply only to my self. Though some states of my self are more interesting to me than others, there are none which are so uninteresting that I can ignore them; even boredom is interesting because it is my boredom with which I have to cope. If I try, then, to project my subjective experience of life in dramatic form the play will be of the allegorical morality type like Everyman. The hero will be the volitional ego that chooses, and the other characters, either states of the self, pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, for or against which the hero's choices are made, or counselors, like reason and conscience, which attempt to influence his choices. The plot can only be a succession of incidents in time—the number I choose to portray is arbitrary —and the passing of time from birth to death the only neces­sity; all else is free choice.

If now I turn round and, deliberately excluding everything I know about myself, scrutinize other human beings as ob­jectively as I can, as if I were simply a camera and a tape- recorder, I experience a very different world. I do not see states of being but individuals in states, say, of anger, each of them different and caused by different stimuli. I see and hear people, that is to say, acting and speaking in a situation, and the situation, their acts and words are all I know. I never see another choose between two alternative actions, only the action he does take. I cannot, therefore, tell whether he has free will or not; I only know that he is fortunate or unfortunate in his circumstances. I may see him acting in ignorance of facts about his situation which I know, but I can never say for certain that in any given situation he is deceiving himself. Then, while it is impossible for me to be totally uninterested in anything that happens to my self, I can only be interested in others who "catch my attention" by being exceptions to the average, exceptionally powerful, exceptionally beautiful, ex­ceptionally amusing, and my interest or lack of it in what they do and suffer is determined by the old journalistic law that Dog-Bites-Bishop is not news but Bishop-Bites-Dog is.

If I try to present my objective experience in dramatic form, the play will be of the Greek type, the story of an exceptional man or woman who suffers an exceptional fate. The drama will consist, not in the choices he freely makes, but in the actions which the situation obliges him to take.