The Inner World and Outer Representation

I am currently reading a ‘psychological’ biography of the Czech writer Franz Kafka. The book attempts to shed light on, and expose the seeming idiosyncrasies of Kafka, and it does this formulating a hypothesis and then making the evidence fit, a common flaw in psychology, philosophy and other disciplines.

The book, Franz Kafka’s Loneliness,stipulates that all of the aspects of Kafka stem from the singular notion that he was born Jewish.  Fear of sex? Jewish (note: Kafka slept with prostitutes but rarely, if ever, consummated his engagements or relationships), fear of marriage? Jewish, and so on and so forth. For those familiar with the writings of Kafka will know that Kafka is a singular writer and few, if any, other authors can write as he does, although many, many claim to. Kafka is almost as unique as one can find in his writings, as with Proust, Dostoyevsky et al. The very notion that Kafka is not the only Jewish person to ever live, and write, starts to bring into question the hypothesis that it was Kafka’s happenstance of birth which created the writer who he was.

As with the other two named above, Kafka’s brilliance is not confined to his  writings, rather, if one was to read his diaries or letters then one can see that the Kafka of the fictional world bears a remarkable resemblance to the Kafka of the ‘real’ world. This is not to claim that Kafka’s works, or Dostoyevsky’s or Proust’s et al, work is autobiographical, as in a memoir, rather that it is the inner world of these people which shaped not only their fictional worlds but also their ‘real’ worlds. (note: when Leonard Cohen was asked by the CBC if his book of poems The Book of Longing was autobiographical, Mr Cohen replied that, yes that was fair to say but one must remember that the imagination has its own history).  

When it comes to how we view the world, it is often the inner world which dictates how we see it and how we exist within it. Michael Burry (the first man to notice that the sub-prime mortgage market was a bubble) wondered why he was a swimmer who was scared of the sea and a socially awkward child. The later her put down to having a false eye. Later, after his son was diagnosed with autism, Mr Burry realised that he had Asperger’s Syndrome. Suddenly the social awkwardness was no longer put down to having a glass eye, many people have glass eyes, but rather to his Asperger’s. The inner world of Michael Burry was one of one with Asperger’s and this impacted the world he saw without. If we are to ask, what must this world be like? Luckily, we have our own Virgil to lead us though the Inferno, Franz Kafka.

Many books about Kafka deal with the symptoms but neglect the cause, mistaking the cause for the symptom.  The seeming inability to accept the absurdity of the social world, unable to follow or understand or even see its dictates (think, maybe, marriage?) are common in those with Asperger’s. The response to this, seen by others as abnormal, is, in fact, a healthy reaction to an unhealthy situation (i.e. society) (‘An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour’.’ – Victor Frankl (in his book about the psychology of him surviving in Nazi camps)).

This then leads us back to the critic who wrote the book. If she is dealing with the symptoms of Kafka and ignoring the underlying cause, then can what she writes about Kafka be true? The answer to this is ‘yes…but’. Yes, what she writes is true of herself and her own inner world shapes her view of Kafka (subjective), but, what she writes is not true of Kafka. What do I mean by this? Well, if we take an old punching bag of mine, Sigmund Fraud (tee hee- to be fair, when asked about me, he feigned ignorance), Freud’s work focused on the causal aspect of many of his patients’ illnesses being sexual and filial. Is what Freud wrote/diagnosed true? Again, we go to the ‘yes…but’ answer. Yes, what Freud wrote was (likely) true of him, but, it is unlikely that it would be true of all of his patients too (some, maybe).

Although we live in the world, we are, for the most part, removed of the world. A person’s insecurities often dominate their world view, and even their lives, for as the philosopher John Locke wrote, ‘What worries you, masters you’ and as we have oft noted, it is very hard, possibly impossible, to transcend our subjectivity and so we impose upon others, and upon the world itself, our own insecurities and biases, unnatural states and illusions which obscure, as Plato notes, truth. With this in mind, the next time we read Kafka, we should not read him as we are, but attempt to understand the books from his inner world and if we can understand some (not all, probably very few) with Asperger’s being people who have a greater understanding of the world and the absurdities which it entails then maybe we will be able to gain a greater understanding of those with different inner worlds than us, but also gain a greater understanding of our own inner worlds and how they shape us and is represented in the world without.

‘till next time