FRANZ KAFKA
421
and excitements, and never quite getting enough of them, were the
great men, the geniuses and exceptions who_ in the eyes of this same
world represented the wonderful and mysterious incarnation of some–
thing superhuman which could be called: destiny (as in the case of
Napoleon), or history (as in the case of Hegel),
011
the call of God
(as in the case of Kierkegaard, who believed himself to be an example
stated by God and therefore an "exception"), or necessity (as
in
the
case of Nietzsche, who declared himself to be "a necessity"). The
highest idea of man was the man with a mission, a call, which he had
to fulfill. The greater the mission, the greater the man. All that man,
seen! as this incarnation of something superhuman, could achieve was
amor fati
(Nietzc;che), love of destiny, conscious identification with
w a appened to him. Greatness was no longer sought
in
the work
done but in the person himself; genius was no longer thought of as
a gift bestoweq by the gods upon men who themselves remained
es-–
sentially the same. The whole person had become the incarnation of
genius and as such was no longer regarded as a simple mortal. Kant,
who was essentially the philosopher of the French Revolution, still
defined genius as "the innate mental disposition through which Nature
gives the rule to Art." I do not agree with this definition; I think that
genius is rather the disposition through which Mankind gives the
rule to Art. But this is beside the point. For what strikes us in Kant's
definition as well as in his further explanation is the utter absence of
that empty greatness which during the entire 19th century had made
of genius the forerunner of the superman, a kind of monster.
What makes Kafka appear so modern and at the same time so
strange among his contemporaries
in
the prewar world is precisely
that_he refused to submit to any happenings (for instance, he did not
want marriage to "happen" to him as it merely happens to most);
he was not fond of the world as it was given to him, not even fond
of nature (whose stability exists only so long as we "leave it at
peace"). He wanted to build u a world in accordance
~uman
·needs and uman dignities, a world where man's actions are deter–
mined by himself and which is ruled by his laws and not by mys–
tenous forces emanating from above or from below. Moreover his
os pOignant wish was to l:ie E_art of such a world-he did not care
to be a genius or the incarnation of any kind of
greatn~
This of course does not mean, as it is sometimes asserted, that
Kafka was modest. It is he who once, in genuine astonishment, noted
in
his diaries, "Every sentence I write has perfection"-which is a
simple statement of truth, but was certainly not made by a modest
man. He was not modest; he was humble.
