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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810131842 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2015 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
REBECCA SCHUMAN is an adjunct instructor in the Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. She is the education columnist for Slate and a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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Kafka and Wittgenstein
The Case for an Analytic Modernism
By Rebecca Schuman
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3184-2
CHAPTER 1
The Trial and the Law of Logic
If I am to make a case that logical modernism belongs with modernist studies as much as, for example, psychoanalytic modernism, postcolonial modernism, or Marxist modernism does, the primary case I must make is one on behalf of the relevance to literary study, and to Kafka's work in particular, of symbolic or formal logic — "the New Logic" to Kafka's contemporaries. Wittgenstein's early work, taking after Frege and Russell, insisted that all language that made any sense whatsoever did so because it could be pared down to its symbolic equivalent. But how does this relate in any way to Kafka's most famous novel, Der Proceß (The Trial), one that has been held to hundreds of standards in the near century since its publication, but never — and for seemingly good reason — this particular standard? After all, as a work of fiction, and of nonrealist fiction at that, it hardly seems that such a concern would at all be relevant to the search for an answer to the novel's primary and most pressing question: is protagonist Josef K. guilty despite never having a formal charge leveled against him? And, if so (and, as we will soon see, most critics tend toward "yes"), what is his crime? Or, from a more psychoanalytic perspective: what is the origin of his inherent guilt? It is precisely by applying for the first time a new logical standard to this text that we can make a rather astounding discovery: that is, that all these previous questions are not necessarily the right ones to be asking.
This is not to say that they are not interesting or worthwhile, or that the fruits of the labor of ninety-plus years of criticism are not compelling. Indeed, by the time K. allows his executioners to twist the knife twice in his heart, his death seems to be a foregone conclusion ("Sie sind also für mich bestimmt?" he greets them ["You're meant for me?"] [GW 3:236]), and critical interpretations of The Trial largely seek to "solve" why this can possibly come to be, especially given the cause for K.'s arrest and trial, which is never made satisfactorily clear. Historical analyses have focused on K.'s behavior in both his urban and social surroundings; for Rolf J. Goebel, K. is a sort of anti-flâneur whose subjectivity "mirrors" the reality of the city, the "petty-bourgeois conventionality of his lodging house, the strict hierarchy in operation at his bank, the many sexualized scenarios, the crowded proletarian streets in the suburb, and the court's labyrinthine corridors and overcrowded chambers" all counting as "outward manifestations of K.'s inner world," specifically and especially his "narrow mindedness and social pretensions."
Further, for Mark Anderson, K.'s rebellion against the Court is an expression of Kafka's own rebellion against the "typing" of the "born criminal" that was in vogue at the time of Kafka's law studies. Structural approaches have pointed to the opacity of K.'s trial as a literal expression of the novel's textual function: as an expression of the necessary opacity of the text in general. David I. Grossvogel, for example, has called The Trial simply "a text about the confusion of critics and other readers that shortly confuses critics and other readers." Psychological approaches such as Walter Sokel's have focused, understandably, on the notion of guilt (he argues, "The existence of guilt — some guilt — is assumed, but its nature is left undefined and remains unknown both to the protagonist and to the reader"). K.'s guilt in The Trial has no obvious juridical or literal source within the narrative; thus, what is left for the psychoanalytic critic is to determine whether his guilt — and he must be guilty, for he accepts his execution — is predestined (i.e., "Oedipal") or self-inflicted ("existential"). For "the unknown guilt in K.'s trial is identical with his being, not in the sense of original sin, but as a consequence of the silence of the Court as to what constitutes guilt." Sokel also reminds us that "in the absence of any standard definition of guilt and non-guilt, what might appear most innocent to [K.'s] examiner might be precisely the root of his guilt if viewed from another perspective."
The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the seemingly opaque proceedings of The Trial — especially Sokel's crucial revelation about the absence of either guilt or "non-guilt" — do actually adhere to at least one straightforward and rigid internal system, though likely not the one we expect. While the Law (das Gesetz) of the mysterious Court (das Gericht) remains necessarily undiscoverable, there is another sort of law at work in the novel, one that governs perfectly and without exception. This is the law of formal logic, which, as I have mentioned, at the time of Kafka's writing career would have been called "the New Logic." This "new" formal system, a self-contained language of symbols, rules, and formulae, was invented by Gottlob Frege in 1879 to express and assess the validity of arguments in mathematics and the sciences. Forty years later and not quite as new, formal logic then came under Wittgenstein's philosophical scrutiny in the Tractatus, a text that actually offers a surprisingly significant amount of heretofore-unexplored insight to the inner workings of The Trial, despite their obvious differences in form and content.
It first becomes inviting to search for convergence of the texts because of historical confluence: while The Trial, written from 1914–15, details a man's yearlong detainment by an inscrutable authority, the Tractatus was composed between 1914 and 1918, partly while Wittgenstein was himself actually detained by the Italians as a prisoner of war. Along more strictly textual lines, as I have previously mentioned, a more general relationship between Kafka and Wittgenstein has certainly not gone unnoticed in the critical canon, the most canonical examples of which include work by Henry Sussman and Stephen Mulhall. However, this presents only a fraction of what the early Wittgenstein has to offer Kafka's work, and The Trial in particular.
For whereas the mysterious juridical Law in K.'s case seems designed entirely to preclude him from understanding it, and serves to make the action of The Trial seem to diminish in validity as it progresses, the "unshakable" laws of logic deliver an entirely different verdict (GW 3:241). This is due in large part to the unique logical status of what Wittgenstein will call one of the two "extreme cases" of logical proposition: the contradiction, which we will recognize in The Trial at vital junctures in the story. Wittgenstein, as we will also see, grants a special status to the contradiction and its logical partner the tautology: these are without sense (sinnlos) but not nonsensical (unsinnig); they tell us nothing while still belonging seamlessly to the larger system of formal language (TLP 4.461). Here I will use Wittgenstein's logic to show that K.'s chargeless arrest, quest for tautological innocence, contradiction-filled trial, and perplexingly expected death actually comprise a progression that is, at least according to one law — that of formal logic — wholly valid.
"How True It All Is": Truth Conditions in a Fictional World
The clearest way to introduce a logico-philosophical inquiry into The Trial is to unearth a common thread between the foundational element of Kafka's novel, K.'s arrest, and the foundational concept of logical argument: truth conditions. During K.'s arrest, the warder Franz tells K., "Sie werden bald sehen, wie wahr es alles ist" ("You'll soon see just how true all of this is") (3:11). The remarkable thing about this statement is not its ominousness but its ambiguity. This is not just because wahr can be read as, among other things, "true," "real," "verifiable," and, fittingly, "just," but also because it is entirely possible to quantify how true, or how real or how just something is — only to conclude that the answer to this investigation is: not true, real, or just at all. This interaction underscores a fundamental issue not only in this scene, but also in logical analysis: in order to proclaim a judgment to be the opposite of wahr — be that "unjust," "unreal," or "false" — the ability to judge "wie wahr" is necessary. After all, at the climax of K.'s interaction with the Priest, as K. is proclaimed "thought guilty," he rebuts: "Wie kann denn ein Mensch überhaupt schuldig sein" ("How can a person be generally guilty?") (3:223). It is, as Jean-François Lyotard has expressed in The Differend, "impossible to establish one's innocence, in and of itself. It is a nothingness." Therefore, in order to see "wie wahr" his situation is, K. must have the ability — the conditions present — to judge "wie wahr" altogether. This is apparently the premise inherent in Franz's threat, but its power as both a threat and a promise remains in question because of the very absence of the condition necessary to judge the (juridical) justness of the situation: a named charge.
This ability to judge "wie wahr" once again signals the necessity of truth conditions (Wahrheitsbedingungen or Wahrheitsmöglichkeiten [TLP 4.4 1]). In a logical sense, we might thus begin to recognize Franz's apparent threat as empty because the truth conditions necessary to make such a judgment never materialize. Instead the "threat" tells K. nothing threatening, because it tells him nothing at all — rather it simply misleads him into expecting the presence of truth conditions (this never-materializing named charge) down the road. But this is only part of the exceedingly complex state of affairs. As The Trial progresses we realize that Franz's statement was simultaneously empty and prophetic, depending on how one reads wahr: if it is "true" or "just" then the statement is (perhaps intentionally) misleading, because K. never does learn how true or just his arrest is, since for that to happen the truth conditions of his charge would have to have been named. If we read wahr as "real" or "actual," however, then Franz was indeed making a threat, and a true one at that: the outcome of K.'s trial is an actual, rather than metaphorical, death.
However, most disputes concerning The Trial are not about the actuality of K.'s death, but rather about its justice. Thus, using the more juridical meaning of wahr, the fact remains that because K. is not charged, he is also not provided with the truth conditions necessary to pronounce said charge "true" or "false." This in effect means that K.'s trial does not take place in a system in which he can be found guilty or not guilty of something. This system either lacks truth conditions altogether or they are hidden. Though in the end it does not really matter — if there was ever a charge, it remains "hidden" the whole time and thus might as well not exist — at the early stage of K.'s trial he seems to presume a system that can and will offer him a charge if only he unearths it: after his disastrous first interrogation, he professes "kein[en] Zweifel, daß hinter allen Äußerungen dieses Gerichtes, in meinem Fall also hinter der Verhaftung und der heutigen Untersuchung eine große Organisation sich befindet" ("There is no doubt that behind all appearances of this court — in my case, behind my arrest an the investigation today — there is a massive organization") (3:56). This may be true, but it is not the sort of organization whose criteria for innocence and guilt are manifest. For example, inside the books he presumes contain the Law he may or may not have flouted, K. instead finds amateurish pornography:
Ein Mann und eine Frau saßen nackt auf einem Kanapee, die gemeine Absicht des Zeichners war deutlich zu erkennen, aber seine Ungeschicklichkeit war so groß gewesen, daß schließlich doch nur ein Mann und eine Frau zu sehen waren, die allzu körperlich aus dem Bilde hervorragten, übermäßig aufrecht dasaßen und infolge falscher Perspektive nur mühsam sich einander zuwendeten. (62–63)
A man and a woman sat naked on a sofa, the crude intention of the artist easy to discern; however, so substantial was his lack of skill that in the end one could only make out a man and woman dominating the picture, sitting exaggeratedly upright and, due to the artist's false perspective, merely leaning toward each other in a belabored fashion.
The crude picture K. encounters presents a poor but nevertheless recognizable approximation of the actual state of affairs of a man and woman in coitus, and it offers us our next opportunity to gain insight from the Tractatus. The ability this picture has to represent an actual "state of affairs" also happens to be the sole criterion Wittgenstein presents in the Tractatus for how our language makes sense to us. In Wittgenstein's theory, a proposition (Satz) creates a logical picture that can be compared with the totality of possible actual states of affairs (Sachverhalten) in reality — with all possible truth conditions (TLP 2). A proposition thus presents a relationship between objects in logical space, and the hearer or reader compares that state of affairs with the true state of affairs in the world ("was der Fall ist," or "what the case is" [TLP1]). If the picture in the proposition matches reality, the proposition is "true"; if not, it is "false" (3.24). However, what if neither is possible, because the conditions are not present in either the picture or reality to make that comparison? This seems to be the state of affairs K. finds himself in, a world — pornography aside — whose sacred texts either do not exist or do not present a logical picture with which he can compare the state of affairs around him. It is a scheme whose conditions he cannot discern, and thus cannot deem wahr (true, just) or its opposite.
K.'s Contradictory State of Affairs
Instead, what we see is a juridical system where there seems to be no need for a formal criminal charge. This K. has no way of understanding, however, so one of his earliest reactions to the arrest is to ask why ("Und warum denn?"), and then for the "Legitimationspapiere ... und vor allem den Verhaftungsbefehl" ("identification papers ... and most importantly your arrest warrant") (3:11, 14). When K. learns that a warrant is not necessary, he attempts to impugn such an alleged law: "Dieses Gesetz kenne ich nicht," he informs Franz and Willem ("I don't know this law") (3:14). To this Franz makes a succinct and perceptive (if peremptory) point: "Sieh Willem er gibt zu, er kenne das Gesetz nicht und behauptet gleichzeitig schuldlos zu sein" ("Look here Willem, he claims he doesn't know the law and the same time claims he's innocent") (3:15). To maintain innocence but not know the law that defines it is to be neither guilty nor not guilty.
K.'s new presumed state of affairs can be thus expressed in formal logic as follows: if the situation "guilty" is G, the act of negation the symbol "~", and the state of conjunction "&" then Josef K. is: ~G & ~~G. This is a logical contradiction, one of the extreme cases ("extreme Fälle") of propositions whose characterization the analytic philosopher of language Max Black argues is "of decisive importance for Wittgenstein's philosophy of logic," and which Black described in 1964 as "original and illuminating, even for those who cannot accept [Wittgenstein's] analysis of the essence of representation and symbolism." Contradictions, "unter keinen Bedingungen wahr" (true under no conditions), are one extreme, and their partner, tautologies (true under all conditions), the other (TLP 4.461).
To illustrate this extremity, Wittgenstein calls to mind the simple tautology "It is raining or not raining." This tells us nothing, for after hearing it, we have no idea whether we need an umbrella (4.461). And because the tautology imparts no information that matches (or fails to match) with the real world (tautologies and contradictions are not pictures of reality [4.462]), in Wittgenstein's terminology it is senseless (sinnlos). This is because, as with the aforementioned pornography, a linguistic "picture" makes sense only when it can be compared with, and judged to match or not match, a real state of affairs (4.461). The contradiction also tells us nothing (fails to represent a picture), but in the opposite way: if someone were to tell us "It is raining and not raining," that would be utterly useless to us no matter the actual situation outside.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kafka and Wittgenstein by Rebecca Schuman. Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction: Why Kafka and Wittgenstein? 3
Part 1 Logical Modernism: Kafka and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Preface to Part One: Logic, Skepticism, and Mysticism 15
Chapter 1 The Trial and the Law of Logic 39
Chapter 2 The Metamorphosis and the Limits of Metaphorical Language 55
Chapter 3 "The Judgment," Ethics, and the Ineffable 85
Part 2 Analytic Skepticism: Kafka and the Philosophical Investigations
Preface to Part Two: Wittgenstein's Transition and a More Analytic Kafka 109
Chapter 4 The Castle and the Paradox of Ostensive Definition 113
Chapter 5 Rule-Following and Failed Execution: "In the Penal Colony" 137
Chapter 6 The Private Language Argument and the Undermining of "Josefine the Singer" 167
Concluding Thoughts: The Problem with (Critical) Progress 193
Notes 197
Works Cited 213
Index 219