Monday, 14 October 2019


As in Kafka's parable about the man before the gates of the law, all of this is just for you, not for anyone else because there isn't anyone else. This is something that you can't take in until the gates are about to close. You might say that solipsism, like scepticism, represents a false answer, but this is neither of those, they are merely scarecrows posted at the boundaries of reality to keep you from straying beyond certain arbitrary bounds. What is unacceptable or demented about solipsism, is its social implications, but the point here has nothing to do with the social, does not touch it at all - in fact it destroys solipsism in the invidious sense. In creative states there is an intimation of this pure and all encompassing ownness, and the irrationalist positions taken by some who seek to shelter creativity are mediations of this realisation. What would Kafka's man have done if he'd realised before the end that this was all just for him? Would it have made any difference, could he have just walked past the guards? Perhaps not, but the scene may have changed, and a new puzzle have presented itself to him. It is only because it belonged entirely to him that it took the form that it did. He created the structures of his own entrapment, but undoing them does not proceed purely from intellectual understanding, it is and must be as complex as anything that could present itself.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.