Thursday, September 17, 2009

Two Centuries Later, a Forsaken Rousseau Finding Vindication in Kafka

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, along with a slew of other 19th century transcendentalists that formed the face of the movement, were influenced by a Revolution-era Frenchman named Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who aside from being a namesake of a character on Lost, was also the author of one of the most influential political science documents in history, On the Social Contract. But eight years before Rousseau's social contract was written, he published a slightly less known pamphlet, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. 'Discourse' was what the set the stage for the transcendentalist and humanist movements in 19th century American philosophy, becoming a crucial inspiration for Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, and eventually even the French Revolution and the Romantic movement as a whole.

But none of those figures lived out, nor did that movement or that revolution create, a world in which ideals of 'Discourse' were carried out - even to the slightest degree.

Yes, it is true that some people take communism from Rousseau. He was, after all, the first person to say that society "wrongly injects into the savage man's concern for self preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws neccessary." It was these new, unnatural passions, Rousseau argued, that led to crime, suffering, and inequality. In the natural state - the state which writers like Thomas Hobbes believed was one of immorality and anarchy - these passions did not exist. Rousseau used the famous example of the 'noble savage' and claimed that "Nature, in giving men tears, bears witness that she gave the human race the softest hearts." From such worldviews, Marx took various critiques of capitalism, applied them to economic theory and the tremendous suffering of the masses at the time, and came up with communism. Years later, a butchered and severely skewered version of this theory came to be the calling card of the Soviet Union, and ever since, a loosely educated Western world has come to identify communism with evil - an opinion which 99 times out of 100 takes little consideration of the history of thought, and much consideration of popular, albeit ignorant, persuasions.

Yet still, it was Marx who designed communism, not Rousseau. Rousseau put forth his own political ideas in the social contract, ideas such as rule by the general will of the populace, and the separation of the government from the sovereign (which could be the people at large), but he never created anything so intricate as Marx, and moreover, his governmental suggestions were suggested in response to the already regrettable status of human civilization as a developed consumerist society, in which habits of jealousy and greed were developed, thereby making war, crime, and other horrors effectively inevitable. The social contract is far from Rousseau's true utopia; that was implied eight years earlier with the release of 'Discourse' and the implication that the first step down the dark path, away from our naturally ideal state, was the reasoning man.

"Reason is what engenders egocentrism, and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns man in upon himself. Reason is what separates him from all that troubles and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates him and what moves him to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering man, 'Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.' No longer can anything but danger to the entire society trouble the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and yank him fro his bed. His fellow man can be killed with impunity underneath his window. He has merely to place his hands over his ears and argue with himself a little in order to prevent nature, which rebels within him, from identifying him with the man being assassinated."

This crucial, underlining aspect of Rousseau's philosophy is either ignored entirely, or only given lip-service towards in later romantic literature and general thought said to be influenced by the famous Frenchman. It is, after all, a bit more than inconvenient to believe that reasoning, philosophizing human beings are the source of all the world's suffering, and that therefore an ideal world is not only one in which ideas of property rights and owernship and consumerism are absent, but one in which humans are closer to animals, than they are to any kind of supreme being. Instead of idealizing the merits of human accomplishment and achievement, Rousseau views the price of progress to be far too steep.

Even perhaps the most ingenious man in the history of the world, Albert Einstein, questioned the consequences of progress. "I made one great mistake in my life," he says in his biography, "When I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made." Though it is unfair to lump all scientific development into the basket of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the symbolism of Rousseau's original point remains: the thinking human mind, separated from its savage state, is capable of horrors which animals can only gape at. Kurt Vonnegut takes a satirical spin on this idea in Cat's Cradle, when he uses the fictional Dr. Hoenikker to represent a sort of alternative universe Einstein - well-intentioned, but the tool of uncontrollable societal predetermined fate which was set in motion long ago. His son Newt says:

"There are lots of good anecdotes about the bomb and Father ... For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo? After the things went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?'"

Though Hoenikker's existential questioning 'what is sin?' seems to be more of a reflection of the blank nihilism and meaninglessness which envelopes many of the enlightened characters in Vonnegut's fiction (often critically seen as a direct response to the Candide-like optimism which infects the masses in the wake of tragedy), it also highlights the apathy - in this case seen as helplessly inevitable - which progressive science bears towards morality.

I say 'helplessly inevitable', because what is the reality of Rousseau's vision being realized? "The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!'" The damage has effectively been done, and there is little hope for a return to the time before that first man who said 'this is mine.' This is primarily true, however, because of how much the world has changed in the time that has passed since this writing - the industrial revolution and the advent of metropolises have assured that human life will never be so simple on a global scale ever again, barring some kind of massive holocaust. Yet in 1755, it was not too late. But the next generation of philosophers and thinkers supposedly inspired by Rousseau did not carry on the extremism of his legacy.

Emerson and the transcendentalists ignored this bit of Rousseau, I think, not for practical concerns (Thoreau can be seen as a possible exception, as he lived on his own in a tiny cabin for two years - he essentially lived what everyone else could only write about), but rather for theological ones. Emerson especially, and most transcendentalists, were still steeped in a strongly Christian - albeit antinomial - tradition. Emerson was a reverend, even if he was rogue-ish. But the justification for his proposal that humans were naturally good came not from biological or ecological roots like Rousseau, but from a faith in the divinity with which each of God's creatures were created. Yes, both agreed society planted false needs within man, and led him away from himself, but the power of the individual unfettered which both sought to idealize was grounded in opposing scientific and religious ideologies. Rousseau even speaks to this very contrast:

"Instead of the sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, pity inspires all men with another maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than preceding one: Do what is good for you with as little harm as possible to others." This, to Rousseau, was the natural state of man - in the wild, a savage would hunt and kill a deer to feed himself and his family, but he would very rarely kill it for pleasure. He would fight to protect himself and his family, but would very rarely incite violence as a natural impulse. That instinct would have been more than sated by the rigors of life in a world where every day was not a luxury, and each breath was an accomplishment.

Emerson, like Tolstoy and others, still did not see outside the specter and worldview of Christian religion, regardless of how independently he thought, and regardless of how comparatively free he was from the strictly nomian structure which has dominated religious practice in the Western world for centuries. In a twisted way - in a way which defines the difference between the pure romanticism of Rousseau and the transcendentalist take on self-reliance as the contrast between those two maxims above, the contrast between the noble savage in the wild and self-reliance in the world - in that respect, it was the institution of religion which prevented Emerson from agreeing with Rousseau, that rational, thinking man was the downfall of mankind's good nature. A fact that is of course ironic, both because Emerson was strongly against instutions like the established church, which wrongly influenced the human mind, and because even as he argued this, a bit of that institution had become a part of his own thought process.

This brings us back to the original point of the post: how Franz Kafka's 1922 short story 'A Hunger Artist' serves to vindicate the extremism of the Rousseauian philosophy that was overlooked by even hardened 19th century transcendentalists like Ralphie the W. The story involves a man who makes his living by starving himself for 40 days at a time, placing himself as an exhibit for the public to see.

"I couldn't find a food which I enjoyed," he says, by way of explanation.

Food, in this case, bespeaks the general human appetite for life in society, life in the world. Food, here, is synonymous with unfaithfulness to self. If 'A Hunger Artist' is about fundamental solitude as a part of the human condition, it is about the solitude that is crucial to maintaining an individual identity in the midst of a world which will strip such tendencies away like paint-remover - reckoning of course Emersonian nostalgia for 'Self-Reliance': "A great man is he who can maintain within the midst of a crowd the indepedence and perfect sweetness of solitude."

When the hunger artist explains why his chosen profession - being locked in a display cage for 40 days at a time without food - is the only thing he can do, when he says that he simply could not find a food which he was able to eat, he is effectively saying that there was no part of the outside world which he found acceptable. The man realizes he must suffer immensely to protect himself from this world - to avoid 'eating', or partaking in social, civil living, he must 'starve' himself. So he in turn uses his suffering to create something beautiful, redirecting his pain and agony into an artistic creation which reflects an altruistic ideal - an ideal which almost transcends his own wretched condition.

No one appreciates the hunger artist's work. He quickly falls from popularity and is seen as a joke. Even his admirers seek to limit him, restrain him to 40 days fasting, which they do not realize is an affrontal to his sensibilities. 'Eating' to him is the equivalent of canniabalism to the average person - vile, taboo, unpure. The scene where he is forced to eat is described in stark, revolting detail. The process of eating food, is akin, as an allegory, to selling out - it is an almost Satanical temptation, where the forbidden fruit is actually raw human flesh.

What Kafka seems to suggest is the extreme difficulty, the near impossibility, of maintaining "the perfect sweetness and independence of solitude" - and in the process he sees a darker vision of what the individual must do to avoid the loss of that nearly divine ideal. At the same time, he romanticizes the struggle through portraying it as an art form, making even the sickeningly casual death of the hunger artist at the end seem idyllic. The death is even reminiscent of the death of Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe - a noble sacrifice followed by a anathematic display of disrespect.

As the hunger artist finally dies in pursuit of the perfection of his art of starvation, he is replaced in his cage by an eager jaguar (he had come to be a part of a circus show at the end of his life). The jaguar is shown in sharp contrast to the dying hunger artist. The hunger artist, aware of his condition as a reasoning human being, was cursed by his understanding of philosophy and life, in the way that the secular man is doomed to a life of assuming that there is no afterlife. His self-inflicted suffering came about as a result of his understanding that the world was a vile place. The jaguar, conversely, is ignorant. He welcomes the cage. It is well fed, and that is enough. "It enjoyed the taste and never seemed to miss its freedom," Kafka writes of it.

Rousseau writes: "The people, already accustomed to dependence, tranquility, and the conveniences of life, and already incapable of breaking their chains, consented to let their servitude increase in order to secure their tranquility." He may as well be speaking of the 'jaguar', who is clearly representative of the sated society man, who is well-fed, reassured with lies, and accustomed to the comforts of living out the days of his short life in a cage. Rousseau also describes the hunger artist, who alternatively represents the "barbarous man who does not bow his head for the yoke that civilized man wears without a murmur, as he prefers the most stormy liberty to tranquil subjection."

That his intentions were misunderstood and his art seen as a failure during his lifetime only further cements this reading of Kafka's text. "To be great is to be misunderstood," Emerson famously said in 'Self-Reliance.' Thus, the hunger artist is the epitome of the man who had the strength of spirit to take to heart the extremism of Rousseau, and attempt to live it out in a sincere and genuine manner. And the fact that Kafka had his protagonist brutally starve himself to death to achieve this ideal is far from coincidental.


Song of the Day: None other than the greatest song of all time, 'The Sounds of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel. Though there have been mixed interpretations as to the direct influence for the song, the most popular belief is that the murder of Kitty Genovese inspired the haunting melody and lyrics. Seeing as the apathy regarding her murder is a key point relating to the nature of human nature, and the squashing of natural pity by society as discussed above, the song seems fitting.