Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms
No. 50
Man cannot live without an enduring trust in something indestructible within himself; though both the indestructible thing itself and that trust may remain forever hidden from him.No. 69
Theoretically, there is a perfect possibility of happiness: to believe in the indestructible within oneself and not to strive toward it.No. 70
The indestructible is one; each individual human being is it, and at the same time it is common to all. Hence the incomparably indivisible connection among human beings.
I have been troubled for a long time by Kafka’s idea that “everyone has something indestructible.”
From a physics perspective, the sentence feels almost too literary to me. You mean a newborn baby, whose personality will still be shaped in large part by everything that happens afterward, and every single one of the 8.3 billion people on Earth—every single one—has something indestructible?
But my own experience makes it difficult for me to simply dismiss the idea. No matter how different the circumstances of my life become, I somehow end up troubled by the same few familiar questions. It feels like archaeologists discovering the same pattern in different geological layers. You still don’t know what the pattern means, but it becomes difficult to keep pretending it is accidental. Something really does seem to run through the different layers.
The problem is that this “indestructible thing” is extremely difficult to catch, and even harder to name. The older I get, the more strongly I feel that it exists, while becoming less and less certain that I could tell you what it actually is.
To some extent, I have always fantasized that if one day I finally figure out what my indestructible thing is, maybe my life will just proceed happily from there. So I keep writing and leaving records behind. I even have this very naive idea: maybe if I leave enough data, even if I am not smart enough or wise enough myself, there will still be enough evidence for me to find whatever is hiding in there.
This is probably also why I am still so obsessed with the idea of Mind Identity. I even think the real human value of blockchain has yet to be developed. What we should really be giving immutable timestamps to is our own minds. We need Mind Identity to establish that our past, present, and future minds belong to one continuous person, and also to prove that a certain belief, a certain version of the self, really did exist—existed in a way that cannot simply be denied away.
But there is a huge hole in this obsession of mine: why do people need to record themselves so obsessively in order to establish cognitive continuity, and from there, personal continuity? If our inner worlds are constantly changing, then what is it that allows all these states that contradict, overwrite, and deny one another to still be called the history of the same person?
I can’t help wondering whether whatever runs through all of them might be Kafka’s “indestructible thing.” But I also know that this thought itself may simply come from how badly I want to find it.
I got curious. Out of all the intelligent humans who have existed, has anyone found it? I asked ChatGPT, and it gave me some answers from religion and philosophy. I summarized them very roughly into four categories. Note: my undergraduate university wasn’t even a 211, so my intellectual credibility is highly questionable. The following is absolutely not a serious classification of world religions. Please proceed with caution!
The first answer: there really is something that does not change.
The Hindu ideas of Atman/Brahman, along with certain theories of the soul, come close to this. Everything flows, but there is some reality that does not change.
The second answer: there is something imperishable, but it is not your private property.
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism tell you that even if such a thing exists, you don’t exactly have sovereignty over it. You cannot keep digging inward until you possess it; it connects you to a reality larger than yourself.
The third answer: why are you so determined to preserve a self?
Buddhism thinks the search for permanence may itself be a source of suffering.
The fourth answer: stop insisting on permanence and learn to understand change.
Zhuangzi is one of the most “beautiful” examples of this. Continuity does not necessarily require something that remains forever unchanged.
My impression is that Hinduism is the most mysterious. It seems to answer the question, but somehow also makes me feel that it has simply repeated the question. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are like humble, hardworking students who thought seriously about the problem and then gave the answer they believed was the most correct; Buddhism is the most rebellious (I don’t know who thinks Buddhism is gentle. I have always found Buddhism extremely rock-and-roll and extremely slippery. It dodges every definition and nobody can catch it. The second you think you have finally achieved enlightenment and reverently say, “Maybe this is the Buddha,” the Buddha immediately comes out and tells you that you are wrong, there is no Buddha at all; vs. Christianity—Christianity is honestly so straightforward. You say, “God exists. God loves people.” Christianity immediately says: My dear, come join us!); Taoism fascinates me the most, but I can’t explain why. I can’t get hold of whatever it is.
At the same time, I am also terrified of actually finding Kafka’s “indestructible thing.” I know very well that something like this cannot be so easily found and named. No matter how intelligent someone is, once they slip from discovering the self into maintaining the self, it becomes very dangerous. This is especially true for people with power and status in the world; once they fall into this kind of trap, they can end up taking the world down with them.
Even “I always pursue the truth” is dangerous, because it gives you an image of yourself that is almost impossible to falsify: I do something well → I really am someone who pursues truth. I realize I did something badly → look, I’m even willing to face my own ugliness, I really am someone who pursues truth. I realize that I’m narcissistic about “pursuing truth” → look, I can even notice this layer, my metacognition is amazing. Keep going upward like this and somehow that “I” survives every time.
So what about always negating yourself, always refusing to name anything? If I say, “I am the person who will never define herself, who will always observe herself,” then that is just another name, possibly a more sophisticated one and even harder to dismantle.
Writing this, I suddenly thought: maybe I don’t need to figure out what my indestructible thing is at all? Because if it really is indestructible, then we don’t need to protect our definition of it. It will exist anyway, regardless of what we want.
But wait, that doesn’t seem right either. If a person gives up on the investigation from the beginning, is that life still worth living? This made me a little wary, and I thought of a boy. I don’t know if he is still trapped in this particular problem, but once he saw a mother and daughter he didn’t know sitting at a train station, and simply because he could not make their existence intelligible, he suddenly felt a kind of isolation that seemed almost impossible to escape. It is strange that a person can just see two other people sitting at a train station and somehow think all the way from there to whether the world has any meaning at all.
Someone might live an entire life without ever constructing a complicated model of herself, while still seriously loving her children, cooking, working, taking care of her parents, drinking with her friends, having sex with her husband, and then dying at eighty. She doesn’t know what her “indestructible thing” is. She has never even heard of Kafka. Is her life therefore less valuable than mine, when I write in my journal every day, constantly engage in metacognition, and keep trying to understand myself? Of course not. Somewhere inside me I even suspect the opposite might be true: maybe she has a gift that I don’t have, because she doesn’t need to know that thing exists to already be living it. But this feels very unfair to me. It’s not like I read a few books and suddenly decided, “Starting today, I’m going to become a person who thinks too much.” I’ve always been like this, I didn’t exactly get to choose. Writing this, I started to feel like Taoism would attack me very aggressively: have I been treating “intelligibility” as a prerequisite for “existence”?
Then I thought, if Kafka had actually given people an answer, maybe that would have been what truly damaged the thought. Because once an answer is given, it is like laying down a railway track through a wilderness: people are suddenly forced onto platforms on either side, boarding whichever train they believe in. But this is supposed to be a wilderness, and people never had to board any train in the first place. Maybe Kafka simply didn’t want to lay the tracks for us.
Sigh. Sometimes I think maybe my indestructible thing is just this: when the universe made me, it gave me enormous bandwidth for thinking about nonsense, but not enough wisdom to actually figure anything out. I deeply resent this particular configuration of myself.
(Right as I got here, a violin suddenly started playing on the main street in downtown Mountain View. He was ridiculously good! I didn’t start wondering who this person was, what kind of life he lived, what his friends were like, how many years he had been playing the violin, or why he happened to come out and play today. I just listened until he finished and then clapped. Except my clapping was so loud and my movements were so big that I somehow ruined the very classy atmosphere the violin had created. I really wanted to walk closer and see what pieces he was playing, but suddenly I got so shy. I was too embarrassed to go any closer. I was even too embarrassed to take a picture.)