Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog: Kafka’s Philosophical Investigations
Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and unfinished. It was Max Brod who named it Forschungen eines Hundes, which could also be translated as “Researches of a dog,” to give it a more academic ring. But the term investigations has its fortuitous resonances in the history of modern philosophy. The dog’s investigations belong to a great line of theoretical endeavors, like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, with its retinue of animals, dogs included; or Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which launched his new science of consciousness, phenomenology; or Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, even more to the point since this is how the dog’s investigations end, with the question of freedom, and the prospect of a new science of freedom. The word translated as “investigations” in these titles, Untersuchungen, is also used by Kafka’s dog, who speaks of his “hopeless” but “indispensable little investigations,” which, like so many momentous undertakings, began with the “simplest things.”
We are not in the standard Kafkian milieu of the trial but the university. The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to Kafka, which concerns knowledge. “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks. But Lacan’s term was meant not so much to target the mismanagement of the modern university as to designate a broad shift in the structure of authority, a new kind of social link based on the conjunction of knowledge and power, the establishment of systems of administration operating in the name of reason and technical progress. And this is where Kafka’s dog comes in, to question this new order, to excavate the underside of its supposed neutrality, to propose another way of thinking, even, perhaps, a way out. The entry for “dog” in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas reads: “Especially created to save its master’s life. Man’s best friend.” Kafka, a true Flaubertian, upends this cliché about canine fidelity to authority. His dog is not man’s best friend, but the truth’s; and he does not save his master’s life, but risks his own in seeking to free himself from domination and reveal the hidden forces at work in his world. Along the way of this fraught quest, some of the questions the dog will grapple with are: Can one actually be friends with the truth? What kind of dissident science might be built around it? and, Who are his comrades in this struggle?
Written in the autumn of 1922, less than two years before Kafka’s death at the age of forty, “Investigations of a Dog” was first published in 1931, in a collection edited by Max Brod, Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China; lit., At the construction of the Great Wall of China). It was translated by Willa and Edwin Muir shortly afterward, in 1933; today there are six other translations in English. Speaking about the canine science of food, the dog remarks that “countless observations and essays and views on this subject have been published,” such that it “is not only beyond the comprehension of any single scholar, but of all our scholars collectively.” One is tempted to say the same about Kafka scholarship. “Investigations of a Dog,” however, was never one of Kafka’s more popular stories, and, despite the attention it has received, it is a work that I believe still remains to be discovered. Critical judgment has been mixed, sometimes reserved; it’s been called “one of the longest, most rambling, and least directed of Kafka’s short stories.” And it has also proved something of a puzzle for interpreters. No less an authority than Walter Benjamin remarked, in a letter to Theodor Adorno, that “Investigations of a Dog” was the one story he never really figured out: “I have taken the fact that you refer with such particular emphasis to ‘Aufzeichnungen eines Hundes’ [sic] as a hint. It is precisely this piece— probably the only one— that remained alien to me even while I was working on my ‘Kafka’ essay. I also know—and have even said as much to Felizitas— that I still needed to discover what it actually meant. Your comments square with this assumption.” The mistake in the title is amusing: Aufzeichnungen means “records” or “notes,” perhaps lecture notes, as if the story were a transcription of the dog’s seminar. Kafka’s dog as educator. In his correspondence with Benjamin, Adorno mentions the story in the context of discussing Kafka’s relationship to silent cinema (incidentally, it’s been suggested that “Investigations of a Dog” was partly inspired by a scene from one of Kafka’s favorite movies), and also the link between language and music, a key element of the dog story. Much of Benjamin’s commentary on Kafka concerns theology; against religious interpretations he insisted that “Kafka was a writer of parables, but he did not found a religion.” But what about a philosophy? Was Kafka the author of a new philosophy, or rather its mythologist or parabolist? Descartes famously wrote, “I advance masked.” What if Kafka advanced philosophically under a dog mask? “Investigations of a Dog” can be read as a picaresque tale of the adventures of theory, but more than that, it’s a speculative fiction-essay that lays out the conditions of philosophy in its relations to knowledge, language, community, and life. In the guise of writing about a lone canine’s attempts to come to grips with his own peculiarities and those of his world— that is, in chronicling the thinker’s dogged pursuit of his alienation, his refusal to “live in harmony with my people and accept in silence whatever disturbs the harmony”— Kafka comes closest to giving us his philosophical manifesto.
What if Kafka’s dog were an unlikely hero of theory for untheoretical times? What would it mean to philosophize with Kafka’s dog? To research like a dog?
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“Investigations of a Dog” is one of the most accomplished of Kafka’s animal stories, along with “The Metamorphosis” (unidentified beetle-like vermin), “The Burrow” (unidentified burrowing creature, maybe a mole), and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (mouse). It has a special connection to “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor” (missing dog plus two celluloid bouncing balls), which is also one of the less-read stories in Kafka’s oeuvre; before “Investigations,” Kafka called “Blumfeld” his dog story. Its focus on knowledge and the academic world places it in proximity to “A Report to an Academy” (ape), whose protagonist Red Peter narrates his miraculous transformation from ape to human before a distinguished audience of scientists and academics. Yet the talking ape is an object of scientific study, a witness providing evidence, whereas the dog conducts his own inquiries and sets his research agenda; he is an investigator in his own right. Moreover, the dog disavows the scholarly world—he’s not part of the “Honored members of the Academy!” whom Red Peter addresses—in the name of another sort of theory.
The tale is narrated by the dog himself, who is never named, from the vantage point of his later years (we don’t know exactly how old he is). After some preliminary reflections on the nature of dogdom, and the present state of his work, he starts to reminisce about his life in theory, reckoning with his accomplishments and his failures, his colorful encounters and intellectual escapades. We learn of the philosopher dog’s youth, of how his curiosity and investigative instincts were first aroused by a shocking event: a concert by a troupe of musical dogs. Intrigued by this fantastical song and dance show, and especially by the musicians’ refusal to answer any of his questions—a refusal, he pointedly remarks, that contravenes canine law—the dog embarks on a quest to unravel the mysteries of the dog world. From the wondrous concert the young philosopher soon turns to the fundamental preoccupation of canine existence, namely food. Food is the subject of an overwhelming amount of scientific research, but there is one question that science is silent on: Where does food come from? “Whence does the earth procure this food?” The dog conducts a number of experiments to test the food source and probe the mysteries of nourishment. He’s ridiculed by his fellow hounds—when he asks about food, they treat him as if he’s begging for something to eat—yet they are not unmoved by his questions. The dog detects a certain disquiet in dogdom.
Later on, he investigates one of the strangest phenomena of the dog world, the so-called aerial dogs or Lufthunde. These pooches spend their days floating in the air—or at least such is the rumor, for the dog hasn’t seen them himself. They don’t labor like other dogs and are detached from the life of the community, though they claim to be engaged in important, “lofty” matters. Disdaining this self-styled superior breed as creatures that “are nothing much more than a beautiful coat of hair,” the lonesome hound wonders who his comrades might be in his theoretical endeavor. “But where, then, are my real colleagues?” The dog asks himself whether his next-door neighbor might be one of these colleagues. Though he is desperate for fellow researchers, the dog doesn’t care much for his neighbor, whom he considers to be a nuisance. On the other hand, perhaps they are actually devoted to the same cause, sharing an understanding “going deeper than mere words.” What shared understanding—secret, unspoken—unites the dog people? Are all dogs united in theory? The philosopher dog then assumes the role of cultural critic and reflects on the troubled state of dogdom and its history, melancholically concluding against the prospect of any real transformation: “Our generation is lost, it may be.”
Returning to his researches on nourishment, the investigator abandons his earlier experiments and adopts a more radical approach, one that goes against every fiber of canine being: he fasts. Fasting, he says, is “the final and most potent means of my research.” The dog dreams of the glory he will win with his daring philosophical project; instead, this new research method nearly kills him. The starving animal vomits blood, blacks out, then awakens to a radiant vision: a beautiful hunting dog is standing before him. The two enter into a cryptic dialogue, the hunting dog warning him that he must leave, the philosopher insisting to stay. Their exchange is interrupted when the hunting dog starts to sing. Or rather, a voice suddenly appears from out of nowhere, as if singing on its own accord. “It seemed to exist solely for my sake, this voice before whose sublimity the Woods fell silent.” What begins with the astonishing concert of the musical dogs ends with an uncanny voice in the forest, singing to the dog alone.
In schematic terms, the story contains six main episodes: the musical concert, experiments in food science, the aerial dogs, the neighbor, the fast, and the hunting dog. It also includes two parables: the parable of the sages, contained within the section on fasting, and the parable of the bone marrow, which presents, in cryptic form, the problem of the philosopher’s relation to the community, and reveals the philosopher’s own “monstrous” desire. The question of community runs throughout the story. However solitary his investigations may be, the dog insists that they implicate the whole of dogdom. Even further, he needs the other dogs to accomplish his theoretical aims: “I do not possess that key except in common with all the others; I cannot grasp it without their help.” What stands in the way of the realization of philosophy is the silence of the dogs, a silence that also afflicts the philosopher himself. This silence is both the greatest barrier to the dog’s investigations and their most formidable object. Canine theory turns out to be a theory of resistance to theory. The problem is ultimately one of language. The true word is missing, laments the dog, the word that could intervene in the structure of dogdom and transform it, creating a new way of life and a new solidarity. Siegfried Kracauer, in the first important commentary on “Investigations of a Dog,” highlighted the theme of the missing word as the crux of Kafka’s oeuvre: “All of Kafka’s work circles around this one insight: that we are cut off from the true word, which even Kafka himself is unable to perceive.”
The final pages summarize the results of the dog’s researches, sketching the outlines of an ambitious philosophical system that might be called, not without irony, Kafka’s “System of Science.” It consists of four disciplines. The two main ones are the science of nurture (Nahrungswissenschaft), which could also be translated as the science of nourishment or food science, and the science of music or musicology (Musikwissenschaft), which might be seen as representing the field of art and aesthetics in general—music, not literature, is the paradigmatic art in Kafka’s universe. Situated between these is a kind of transitional or bridging science, which investigates the link between the realms of life and art, or between physical nourishment and spiritual nourishment, which the dog calls the theory of incantation, “by which food is called down.” This consists of the rituals and symbolic actions performed by dogs for the procurement of food; in these practices of begging and supplication we may find the beginnings of a theory of institutions. Between vital necessity and artistic creativity, there lies the institution. All institutions are, at bottom, the songs we sing, and the rules for singing such songs, to obtain whatever it is we want, our desired “food.” Finally, there is an “ultimate science” (einer allerletzten Wissenschaft), the science of freedom, a prize “higher than everything else.” This is how the story ends, with the dog declaring that freedom “as is possible today is a wretched business,” yet “nevertheless a possession.” If the main canine sciences mirror the classical division between the servile arts and the liberal arts, artes mechanicae and artes liberales, the place of the science of freedom is not immediately clear. In the Dog University there is a School of Agriculture and a School of Music, and there is also a Faculty of Law, dealing in the incantatory arts. Where does the science of freedom fit into this? Is it a separate discipline, with its own object and specialized knowledge? Is it the queen of the sciences, the pinnacle of the system, or is it rather a maladjusted science, without a prescribed place in the whole? Kafka is usually considered an unsystematic or even anti-systematic author, a poet of the fragmentary and the unfinished who warns against the danger of totalitarian systems. So, what should we make of the dog’s philosophical system?
Although Kafka left “Investigations of a Dog” unfinished, the story gives the impression of being more or less whole. What is lacking, however, is an elaboration of the system. To take up things where the dog left off, to develop the conceptual architecture of the Cynological System of Science, means to address the following questions of Kafkian philosophy, which reflect the four-fold division of the system: What nourishes us? What is art? How does incantation structure our relation to others and the world? What is freedom?
If we put the story in the context of its times, Europe in the twenties, the dog’s aspirations for a new science resonate with the two new disciplines that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, one dealing with consciousness, the other with the unconscious: Husserl’s phenomenology and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Both addressed, in very different ways, the crisis of European sciences and civilization, at a time when talk of the decline of the West, borne out by the devastation of World War I, was at its height—this acute sense of crisis is echoed in the dog’s lament of his being a lost generation. In the case of phenomenology, Husserl’s new science took the form of a renewal of the ideal of philosophy as the queen of the sciences, capable of providing a rational foundation for the pursuit of truth, through its explication of the essential structures of consciousness. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, constituted a new field, without a clearly defined place in the existing order of knowledge, studying and treating the pathologies of psychic life. Freud showed how these psychopathologies were rooted in subjectivity—a person’s fantasies and drives and singular history—but a subjectivity torn and divided against itself. His investigations were dedicated to uncovering the structures of the unconscious, that which resists the light of truth and makes a hole in knowledge. Mladen Dolar has argued that the dog’s new science is none other than psychoanalysis.
In 1917 Franz Rosenzweig published a two-page manuscript that he had discovered a few years earlier at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, while researching what would become his book Hegel and the State. He gave it the title “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism.” Though the handwriting was undeniably Hegel’s, Rosenzweig thought the text’s tone and content indicated that it had been originally written by Schelling and later copied by Hegel, the facsimile being the only surviving version of the text. Since then, the fragment’s authorship has been vigorously disputed, with different scholars attributing it to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin (it’s even been argued that the text was retroactively penned by Nietzsche). One of the slogans from the heyday of poststructuralist criticism was “What does it matter who’s speaking?” and this seems to apply to “The Oldest System-Program”: perhaps the dispute over authorship belies the fact that it’s Spirit itself that’s speaking. The short manifesto lays out a radical program encompassing ethics, metaphysics, nature, politics, history, religion, and art, culminating in a call for a new “mythology of reason” that would unite theory and practice and make of philosophy a living, popular reality. This is a system for the realization of freedom—for “only that which is the object of freedom is called idea”—through its intimate connection with truth and beauty. There is no evidence, as far as I’m aware, that Kafka knew this text, but the dog’s system-building aspirations, as well as Kafka’s own forays into writing a new mythology (by twisting the old myths, from Odysseus and Abraham to the Tower of Babel and the Chinese Emperor), ought to be understood in light of this odd philosophical fragment, a kind of vanishing Ur-text of German Idealism. What if Kafka’s dog were a fellow traveler of the German Idealists, even their most faithful companion: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, and a woolly, unnamed hound? Of course, 1917 was also the year of the October Revolution, which brought with it the ideal of a communist science dedicated to a total renovation of human subjectivity, the creation of a New Man. Nikolai Zabolotsky, one of the original members of the Russian avant-garde collective Oberiu (Union of Real Art), composed an unorthodox paean to this new society titled “The Mad Wolf”; it was written in 1931, the same year as the first publication of “Investigations of a Dog.” The poem depicts the founding figure of communist science as a visionary animal—not a dog this time but a wolf. “We are building a new forest … utterly wretched only yesterday,” declares the leader of the student wolves, echoing a verse of “The Internationale”: “We will build a new world that is ours.” This is also the dream of Kafka’s dog, to revolutionize canine existence, and, one might say, to usher in the birth of a New Dog: “The roof of this wretched life, of which you say so many hard things, will burst open, and all of us, shoulder to shoulder, will ascend into the lofty realm of freedom.”
From How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, to be published by the MIT Press this October.
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