The difference between Einstein and Kafka, both sons of middle-class middle-European families, both of whom found life in the ordinary world intolerably dreary:
Einstein escaped the world by science, that is, by transcending not only the world but the Cosmos itself.
Kafka also escaped his predicament — occasionally — not by science but by art, that is, by seeing and naming what had heretofore been unspeakable, the predicament of the self in the modern world.
The salvation of art derives in the best of modern times from a celebration of the triumph of the autonomous self — as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — and in the worst of times from naming the unspeakable: the strange and feckless movements of the self trying to escape itself.
Exhilaration comes from naming the unnameable and hearing it named.
If Kafka’s Metamorphosis is presently a more accurate account of the self than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, it is the more exhilarating for being so.
The naming of the predicament of the self by art is its reversal. Hence the salvific effect of art. Through art, the predicament of self becomes not only speakable but laughable. Helen Keller and any two-year-old and Kafka’s friends laughed when the unnameable was named. Kafka and his friends laughed when he read his stories to them.
The community of art is not the elect community of science but the community of the artist and all who share his predicament and who can understand his signs.
The impoverishment? It comes from the transience of the salvation of art, both for the maker of the sign (the artist) and for the receiver of the sign.
The self in its predicament is exhilarated in both the making and the receiving of a sign — for a while.
After a while, both the artist and the self which receives the sign are back in the same fix or worse — because both have had a taste of transcendence and community.
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.
Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
In fact, a catalogue of the spectacular reentries and flameouts of the artist is nothing other than a pathology of the self in the twentieth century, much as the fits and frenzies of Saint Vitus’s Dance were signs of the ills of an earlier age.
What account, then, can a semiotic give of the paradoxical impoverishments and enrichments of the self in the present age?
Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor?
The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.
The organism is needy or not needy accordingly as needs are satisfied or not satisfied by its environment.
The self in a world is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying its otherwise unspeakable self, e.g., mythically, by identifying itself with a world-sign, such as a totem; religiously, by identifying itself as a creature of God.
But totemism doesn’t work in a scientific age because no one believes, no matter how hard he tries, that he can “become” a tiger or a parakeet. Cf. the depression of a Princeton tiger or Yale bulldog, one hour after the game.
In a post-religious age, the only recourses of the self are self as transcendent and self as immanent.
The impoverishment of the immanent self derives from a perceived loss of sovereignty to “them,” the transcending scientists and experts of society. As a consequence, the self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services. Failing this and having some inkling of its plight, it sees no way out because it has come to see itself as an organism in an environment and so can’t understand why it feels so bad in the best of all possible environments — say, a good family and a good home in a good neighborhood in East Orange on a fine Wednesday afternoon — and so finds itself secretly relishing bad news, assassinations, plane crashes, and the misfortunes of neighbors, and even comes secretly to hope for catastrophe, earthquake, hurricane, wars, apocalypse — anything to break out of the iron grip of immanence.
Enrichment in such an age appears either as enrichment within immanence, i.e., the discriminating consumption of the goods and services of society, such as courses in personality enrichment, creative play, and self-growth through group interaction, etc. — or through the prime joys of the age, self-transcendence through science and art.
The pleasure of such transcendence derives not from the recovery of self but from the loss of self. Scientific and artistic transcendence is a partial recovery of Eden, the semiotic Eden, when the self explored the world through signs before falling into self-consciousness. Von Frisch with his bees, the Lascaux painter with his bison were as happy as Adam naming his animals.
I say “partial recovery of Eden” because even the best scientist and artist must reenter the world he has transcended and there’s the rub: the spectacular miseries of reentry — especially when the transcendence is so exalted as to be not merely Adam-like but godlike.
It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.
It is even more difficult for one god to get along with another god. Freud not only could not get along with the Jewish God but frothed and fell out when rivaled by a fellow transcender like Carl Jung.
Two gods in the Cosmos is one too many.
Thus, transcendence, like immanence, has its own scale of enrichment and impoverishment.
Different Reentry Problems of Artist and Art-Receiver: Mainly QuantitativeIt is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning meaning in the madness of the twentieth century, then to finish it, then to find oneself at Reed’s drugstore the next morning. A major problem of reentry, not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol.It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart’s Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come to the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderately sustained exaltation; at worst, a mild letdown.
Question: In the light of the above description of the semiotic predicament of the self — its unspeakableness in a world of signs — and in the light of the need of the self to become a self and, under the exigency of truth, to become its own self, that and no other — and in the light of the forces of impoverishment and enrichment as well as self-deception, which of the following self-identities would strike you as being (1) the most impoverished, (2) the most enriched?
(a) An Archie Bunker type who lives in Queens
(b) A mathematical physicist working as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
(c) An Alabama Baptist
(d) A New York novelist removed to a pre-revolutionary Connecticut farmhouse where he is living with his fifth wife
(e) A Japanese Zen master recently removed from Kyoto to La Jolla
(f) An American Zen postulant recently removed from Chicago to Kyoto