Kafka's Prayer

by Paul Goodman

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.

Reviews

[Seth Benzell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book entered and left my life, like some books do, in a rather strange way. A copy of it caught my eye in a Mexico City book shop in the Condesa, with its intriguing title. I picked it up and read a few paragraphs before noticing the exorbitant price tag and purchasing a copy on Amazon.

A few weeks later I began reading it in CA and then the Poconos. The first half of the book is an analysis of Kafka’s aphorisms, with only occasional references (although the ones that are there are incisive) references to his fiction. The author’s main argument is that Kafka felt trapped between two incompatible modes of being. He doesn’t quite label these in the book, but I’ll call them the “Naive” and the “Sentimental” following Schiller (I’m learning about him for the first time listening to “Psychological Types” by Jung, simultaneously).

What do I mean by these? The naive poet is the one who describes life as it is. She lives “in the moment”. The sentimental poet is the self-reflective one, who writes about experiencing and thinking about the moment, rather than the moment itself. Taken to an extreme, it is a neurotic approach to life.

In this classification, Kafka might be taken to be the essential sentimental poet. He hardly can describe a moment, only his anxious reactions to it. He is "an ego closed to instinct".

The thing that makes Kafka special, is that his neuroticism turns against itself. He can almost see the naive life that he could live in instead. But he’s terrified of this, this potential happiness. In “The Judgement”, one of his most representative short stories, Kafka closes by imagining his protagonist finally happy, subsumed to the will of his father, joyfully jumping off a bridge (showing off the athleticism his father so appreciated) to his death (Is this supposed to be the Karlovy Vary of Pragueish fame?). Heavy traffic, unimpeded, flows by. He said of this moment that he was thinking of a ‘strong orgasm’. And indeed, isn’t it the French who call an orgasm ‘le petit mort’?

So Kafka longs more than anything for an unintermediated authentic relationship with the world. To be like the mouse people, or the chinese, or the sleepy beurocrats of the castle. But this thought also terrifies him, because how is the sleepiness of satisfaction to be distinguished from the sleepiness of death? Won’t the mole’s entire fortress, his entire life’s work, entire existence, immediate collapse if he relaxes his reflexivity even for an instant? One remembers here Kafka’s day job -- paying out disability insurance for careless workers mangled by their monstrous machines.

In Emerson’s “Experience” I think he’s struggling with the same tension. He’s so erudite and wise, he knows the surface level isn’t “true” (and he does want truth) yet he remarks:

“What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.”

And again

“Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere.”

And, most forcefully

“ To fill the hour, -- that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”
In Jung, he says these two ways of life are essentially irreconcilable. Naivate is obviously completely dangerous and potentially disastrous. But neuroticism gives up the potential for happiness before the starting bell is even strung. He remarks that the only possible resolution is religious. I think this is essentially right! Despite there being no possible way to reconcile these two perspectives, the only possible way to live is in the middle. Jung goes on to explain how the psychological device of the religious symbol makes this possible.

Emerson’s reconciliation therefore, you’d be unsurprised to learn, is religious as well. “I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference and shall observe it. One day, I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.” ‘Up again old heart’ he says nature seems to say “there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”

Is this giving up? I don’t know. Kafka certainly was never able to reach this stage. He could enjoy, perhaps, second handedly, the beauty of the caged tiger, but he could find no food he liked for himself. Maybe at the end of Amerika he imagines a possible reconciliation, a grand carnival where there’s a job for everyone. But Kafka stays with us because he is willing to live right in the middle of this tension. That’s why he’s the essential neurotic writer.

I lost this book, having only read the first half, on a flight from OC to Milan. I was pained for a moment, I wanted to beat myself up. But Maybe one thing I can take from Kafka is to forgive myself. Maybe because I can see how his torturing of himself led nowhere I can allow myself to not beat myself up. I only grieve that grief can teach me nothing.

[Jeff]

I tend to agree with Taylor Stoehr's assessment, in his critical biography of Goodman's first 40 years, Here Now Next, that this book, Kafka's Prayer, written just after the Second World War, is first-rate in its pastoral first half, and less brilliant in reading what Goodman himself described as Kafka's "romances."

It should surprise no one that Goodman's critical commentary on Kafka's aphorisms, the first of five chapters here, "The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life," anticipates by 40 years Giorgio Agamben's commentary on Kafka's "bare life" Homo Sacer:

"We can eat of the Tree of Life at any moment, at any moment we stretch out a hand and take the fruit and eat; at any moment, that is, that we can lift a hand to stretch it out, etc. -- What! Do we fail to, not out of fear or indecision, but just because of the weight of the hand. . . ? [Kafka] says 'we have not yet eaten,' not 'we did not eat,' because indeed we shall eat of it [. . . ].

"'Here as elsewhere,' as Kant said, 'the human spirit has tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way.' It is because it is Kafka who says it that this urgency, to mere life, otherwise perhaps somewhat banal, is authoritative and compelling." (30)

Both Goodman and Agamben read Kafka in relation to Aristotle's good v. mere life.