When I read it back in high school, I didn't understand it one bit. But after having just read the first several parts of Lewis' Miracles, some light has been shed upon the story. Lewis contends that what makes Reason so distinctive in human beings is that it is separate from Nature. Many believe that Reason is natural, that is, the result of an evolutionary process of natural selection. Reason remained in the gene pool because it was useful and helped certain creatures survive better than others. But we have a problem when we claim Reason to be the descendant of Nature. For if this is so, then how can we at all distinguish between them? To say that your reasoning or mine is nothing but the effect of natural causes is to say that we have no 'Reason' at all, but that we are doing just what we have been naturally programmed to do.
I am not trying to lay out the entire treatise here, but I am trying to explain how fascinating Kafka's story is with regards to Reason and Nature. What makes Kafka's "Metamorphosis" so, um, kafkaesque is how a rational, sensible man devolves into an unintelligible and gross carapace with legs. It is a story of a man turning into an animal, while retaining the reason and psychology of a man. And for that matter, it is a horrific story.
He wakes up one morning to find himself metamorphosed into a giant cockroach. If he hadn't had his reasoning powers, he would have never known he had turned into a cockroach. He would just be a cockroach. End of narrative. But he can describe his feelings. He is aware of himself. He has thoughts. But he's just in a body that doesn't quite suit him or the others around him. And his ability to communicate is severely degenerated. He's a rational being in a seemingly irrational body.
But that picture is a picture of humanity, no? Why should it horrify us to find Reason hidden within an animal? Isn't that the picture the evolutionists give us? And who is to say that cockroaches do not have rational powers? After all, they have survived far longer than we have, according to biologists.
All this has been intriguing to me, because what people have considered kafkaesque is actually quite natural according to science and anthropology, except, of course, that it is a caricature of natural. Shocking what you find when you look at a mirror, yes? Furthermore, it is intriguing to me because what Kafka and others have suggested is that when Reason exists within a human body, when a human exercises reason, it is so refreshingly right. It is as if Reason has always existed in humanity, which is indeed what I believe.
Imagine Kafka's reversal: a cockroach becoming a man. Whereas, in the original, there involved a great loss--namely, that of the human body-- this fiction would involve an incredible gain: that of reason, among many other things. The body and the mind fit. Mens sana in corpore sano.
There are days when I wake up and find myself but a little better than a cockroach. David Cockroach Ro. I can't seem to communicate. I dislike the way I look. I get apples thrown at me, and I feel like rot and scum. And the question that buggers me is this: is everything I do simply the product of my natural self? Have I no control whatsoever?
But the fact that I have even written thus, the fact that I know that I am a man stuck inside a cockroach and not just a cockroach with no sense or sensibility at all, is hopeful. For even to long for something like true humanity, a resurrected humanity if you will, is to show that Reason exists outside of Nature. Not everything is fated by my biology or physiology or even my sociology.
Reason, I am finding, is reason enough to hope that there is something more than just Nature.
