Seeking Whom He May Devour

Existentialism is not exactly a breed of romanticism, but the two philosophies are connected by their reaction against Enlightenment thought—Descartes and Hume for romanticism, and Hegel for the existentialists. Because of these shared enemies, we should not be surprised to find certain parallels in the two movements, and one of the biggest of these parallels is a focus on uncivilized humanity.

The term noble savage is often attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but the French philosopher never actually used it. But he still—more or less—subscribed to the notion that it is civilization that corrupts human beings and that there’s something freeing about primitivism. We see this idea resurface in Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandanavian Vikings—they all shared this need. (I.11)

Notice, however, that Nietzsche strips away whatever vestiges of Enlightenment thought were lurking around in Rousseau; his blond beast is definitively not moral, is indeed marked by a complete abandonment of morality in favor of raw power. (Also note that the Nazis who took this passage and used it as an excuse for their idea of the master Aryan race are misreading Nietzsche, who loved the Jewish race and hated the Germans, as evidenced by Ecce Homo.)

Martin Heidegger doesn’t go quite as far as Nietzsche in his return to primitivism, but he is always concerned with the feelings and observations that lie at the very baseline of human consciousness—which explains why he uses the word primordial about eight thousand times in Being and Time. He is also adamant about the need for a connection to one’s body—a rejection of Cartesian dualism.

So it’s no surprise that this theme pops up with some regularity in existentialist fiction. Think of Saul Bellow’s Henderson, who is freed from the nothingness of his comfortable existence by his trip to Africa and his becoming a lion and a “rain king.” Or—less successfully—think of Rabbit Angstrom’s complete immersion into his body, be it for sex or sports or overeating. (Updike, perhaps, was critiquing this idea, though it’s always hard to tell exactly what Updike is critiquing.)

But nowhere is the return to animality more clear than in the short fiction of Franz Kafka, where it’s mixed and contrasted with the life of the writer. I am generally not a big fan of critical readings that make everything in a given work of fiction about writing fiction, but it’s difficult to get around it in Kafka’s case—most of his stories either feature a literal artist or a metaphorical one, and much of his work has something to say on what it is to be a writer in a society that can’t possibly appreciate “real” art.

The animals in Kafka’s work occasionally mark dehumanization—the obvious example is poor Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis,” who turns into an insect (a better translation would apparently be vermin, as he appears to have more than six legs), a transformation that demonstrates just how dehumanized he always was, with his terrible desk job and ungrateful family. But in its way, his metamorphosis sets him free—he’s no longer forced to go to work and no longer labors under any delusions about what he really is. And when he becomes a bug, his family is forced to go to work, making the whole thing a sort of tragic grace.

Meanwhile, after the protagonist of “The Hunger Artist” starves himself to death in front of an uninterested audience, he is replaced in his circus cage by a panther, a vast improvement on its previous occupant:

Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary. The panther was all right. The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it; somewhere in its jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away.

Kafka describes this panther in artistic terms—his roaring is a type of storytelling—but the animal is superior to the man because he harbors no delusions; he is what he is, and he’s okay with that. The human artist, then, could be improved by becoming more like this wild animal, less inhibited, stronger, more noble.

Elsewhere, the mole in “The Burrow” is paranoid and neurotic precisely because he’s so much of a human being, eloquent and fastidious. But his human thoughts and emotion lead him only to a state of anxiety, constantly afraid that someone will be able to enter his perfectly constructed home. One assumes that most moles don’t live in this fear but are something closer to the panther, even if they’re less powerful.

It’s not until “Josephine the Singer” that we find an appropriate combination of the artist and the animal. The titular mouse maintains her mouse-ness but manages to create something so beautiful that no one can possibly resist it. Her singing takes her mouse brethren away from their worried lives—away from their resemblance to humanity—and brings them back to their animal natures, to the point where they cannot even look at her but “bur[y their] face[s] in [their] neighbor’s fur”—a connection both to community and to animality, the best parts of the human and bestial worlds.

It’s this expansion of Nietzschean animalism—rather than the introduction of angst into literature—that is Kafka’s true legacy to writers. It is “Josephine the Singer” that will allow Saul Bellow to bring Henderson the Rain King back to the United States, allow him to become an animal and thereby to connect to his fellow human beings and resume his—much happier—life in the suburbs.

Heidegger and the American Dream

I've been struggling through Heidegger's Being and Time for six months now, with varying degrees of success. The book is nearly impenetrable in its early chapters, even though the second half of the book is almost readable. One of Heidegger's most appealing and resonant ideas is that there is no such thing as a break with one’s history; such an idea is built on the notion that a person is only what he is at the present time—or even that one is what one chooses to be today. No, says Heidegger, a person is what he has always been, including things that happened to him before he had any kind of real agency, that is, his birth and his upbringing:

The “between” which relates to birth and death already lies in the Being of Dasein. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that Dasein “is” actual in a point of time, and that, apart from this, it is “surrounded” by the non-actuality of its birth and death. Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; and death is just as far from having the kind of Being of something still outstanding, not yet present-at-hand but coming along. Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the “ends” and their “between” are, and they are in the only way which is possible on the basis of Dasein’s Being as care. (374)

Such a notion flies directly in the face of the American dream, which is, after all, built on the idea that at any time a person can remake himself into anything he would like to be. We see this in the early history of America—or at least the modern popular conception of it—in which the colonies make a clean break with their mother country, forming something new and beautiful and pure. We see this in the conception of America as the “New Eden,” a completely new society with new rules and new life. We see this in the American idea of the “self-made man,” typified in Benjamin Franklin, who throws off the shackles of his upbringing in Boston to become a cosmopolitan Renaissance man.

(On another note, think of the famed American pasttime, baseball. It's sometimes called a "game of redemption" because a player can strike out three times, but he's newly made a hero if he hits a home run to win the game. Baseball may be the ultimate pop-culture expression of the American idea of secular rebirth.)

Problem is, as everyone knows, that Franklin lies all throughout his autobiography, fashioning himself as self-made when he was anything but. No one escapes his past—you are always what you were, even as you add to that at every moment. Indeed, Heidegger suggests that man is the sum total of his experiences—those that “happened,” those that “are happening,” and those that have “yet to happen.” Dasein does not so much exist in history as it is itself history: “In analyzing the historicality of Dasein we shall try to show that this entity is not ‘temporal’ because it ‘stands in history,’ but that, on the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being” (376). Just look at his stern face up there, as if he's wordlessly telling all us Americans that we're deluding ourselves.

I realized this long before I read Heidegger, when, at the age of 21 or so, I was preparing to leave the South in which I was raised, the South in which my entire family was raised. I had fashioned myself as cosmopolitan, as a person outside my region, outside my upbringing. Then I went to a family reunion, looked at the “hillbillies” around me. (Fun story: My last name is Farmer, and my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Hicks, so my family literally started where the Farmers met the Hicks.) I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I would never free myself of this background. I am to some extent my family, which means, I suppose, that I am ontologically (on some level) a hillbilly.

This was to some extent a freeing realization. It freed me from the burden of trying to escape this past—an impossible task, as Heidegger points out. And when I moved to Nebraska, I began to realize in a practical way exactly how Southern I am. But I shouldn’t over-simplify, since after all I am to some extent a Nebraskan as well, after spending three years or so as one. And my own children will have all of this in their Dasein—they’ll be a Farmer and a Hicks and a Georgian and an Alabaman and a Nebraskan; they’ll be from the suburbs of Atlanta, like me, and the small towns of South Georgia, like my wife. And they’ll be whatever we make them, wherever they are born, and whatever they make themselves.

I think all of this jives completely with the Christian notion of original sin, which after all posits that people are their ancestors, that the sins of the fathers will be passed on to their sons. It jives less well with the Christian notion of the New Being, of Christ’s deliverance of man into a second creation, a second and fuller humanity, one in which the sins of the past no longer hold sway over us. But it’s important to note that we have not quite received that New Being—as Paul Tillich says, we glimpse it only Now and Then, and as St. Paul says, we have received only the first-fruits of the New Creation. So we’re still grounded in time, at least in this life.

What the American dream attempts, in my opinion, is a secular version of the New Creation without waiting until after death. The country reinvents itself apart from England (and apart, depending on whom you ask, from any redemption through God, even as the Founding Fathers couch their ideas in religious language). Heidegger is right to reject this notion, even though Christians have to reject his assertion that there’s no way out of historicality. It just requires something outside the circuit, and even then the circuit will not be broken in this Zeit.