In his book Varieties of Presence, Noë refers to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), the story of Gregor Samsa, who wakes up as an insect, lying on his back, unable to move. Noë uses the story to illustrate the upshot of his philosophy of understanding. “We are not only animals”, he says, but we “achieve the world by enacting ourselves. Insofar as we achieve access to the world, we also achieve ourselves” (Noë 2012, p. 28).
On the presented alternative, the actionist nature of self-achieved understanding is only half of the story. I have suggested that our minds and selves are genuinely social and thus transcend the limits of our bodily existence. The human self vitally depends on others and is achieved together with them, through negotiating a permanent tension of maintaining a sense of individuality while not losing the connection to others (distinction and participation).
From this perspective, the point of Kafka’s story is therefore not so much to deny that we are animals, but rather to claim that we are social animals that achieve ourselves together with others. Reflecting the basic insight of this paper, the story thus illustrates the fragility and social nature of human existence. It is an expression of desperation and of the suffering that can come when others refuse or are unable to comply with our basic needs: being recognised as individual and as someone who belongs to others. Having lost contact with himself as a human subject in the bureaucratic machinery of his professional life, Samsa awakes as an insect, his new embodiment an imprint of alienation and loss of recognition. But the loss cuts even deeper. With his alien embodiment Samsa the insect is rejected by his family, so that he finds no salvation in his private life. Samsa dies from social isolation. From an enactive view of the self as a joint achievement, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis captures (like much of his other work) the consequences of our deep vulnerability and limited freedom and the drama of the loss from which we can suffer precisely because we are social beings.
The social structures that we depend upon empower our ways of understanding; yet for the same reason they can also enslave us, and seriously limit our mental capacities. This, I suggest, is not merely the case for institutions and their bureaucratic apparatus but also applies to our direct intersubjective relations, be they with lovers, friends, family, or co-workers.
Presence is therefore not simply availability—since this would suggest the subject’s unwarranted access to the world. Presence is rather a joint achievement, and the nature of doing things together is that there will always be leaps and limitations. In this way, failure and limited control over the ways we understand the world are not entirely the responsibility of the individual and its techniques and skills, but also a deeper expression of the genuinely social and co-constructed nature of understanding.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Gabriel Levy and Mike Beaton as well as two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. My gratitude also goes to the editors and organisers of the MIND group, Jennifer Windt and Thomas Metzinger. The MIND-group has been a unique source of inspiration and support. This work is supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, “TESIS: Toward an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity” (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828) and by the "Science Beyond Scientism" Research Project at VU University of Amsterdam.