Abstract

In the summer of 1922 Franz Kafka wrote a short story entitled Investigations of a Dog wherein the investigating dog reflects:“Consider us dogs, on the other hand! One can safely say that we all live together in a literal heap, all of us, different as we are from one another on account of numberless and profound modifications which have arisen in the course of history. All in one heap! But now consider the other side of this picture. No creatures to my knowledge live in such wide dispersion as we dogs, none have so many distinctions of class, of kind, of occupation, distinctions too numerous to review at a glance; we, whose one desire is to stick together — and again and again we succeed at transcendent moments in spite of everything — we above all others live so widely separated from one another, engaged in strange vocations that are often incomprehensible even to our canine neighbours, holding firmly to laws that are not those of the dog world, but are actually directed against it. How baffling these questions are, questions on which one would prefer not to touch — I understand that standpoint too, even better than my own — and yet questions to which I have completely capitulated.”Today in 1996 the questions we humans harbour about ourselves, about our living together, and whatever sense there might be to “human solidarity,” may not be alltogether so different from those of Kafka’s dog who was investigating the dog world