[1942] Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Kafka and his Precursors
I once premeditated making a study of Kafka’s precursors. At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a few of these here, in chronological order.
The first is Zeno’s paradox against movement. A moving object at A (declares Aristotle) cannot reach point B, because it must first cover half the distance between the two points, and before that, half of the half, and before that, half of the half of the half, and so on to infinity; the form of this illustrious problem is, exactly, that of The Castle, and the moving object and the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkian characters in literature. In the second text which chance laid before me, the affinity is not one of form but one of tone. It is an apologue of Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century, and is reproduced in Margouliès’ admirable Anthologie raisonnée de la littérature chinoise (1948). This is the paragraph, mysterious and calm, which I marked: “It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being of good omen; such is declared in all the odes, annals, biographies of illustrious men and other texts whose authority is unquestionable. Even children and village women know that the unicorn constitutes a favorable presage. But this animal does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. In such conditions, we could be face to face with a unicorn and not know for certain what it was. We know that such and such an animal with a mane is a horse and that such and such an animal with horns is a bull. But we do not know what the unicorn is like.”35
The third text derives from a more easily predictable source: the writings of Kierkegaard. The spiritual affinity of both writers is something of which no one is ignorant; what has not yet been brought out, as far as I know, is the fact that Kierkegaard, like Kafka, wrote many religious parables on contemporary and bourgeois themes. Lowrie, in his Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press, 1938), transcribes two of these. One is the story of a counterfeiter who, under constant surveillance, counts banknotes in the Bank of England; in the same way, God would distrust Kierkegaard and have given him a task to perform, precisely because He knew that he was familiar with evil. The subject of the other parable is the North Pole expeditions. Danish ministers had declared from their pulpits that participation in these expeditions was beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being. They admitted, however, that it was difficult, and perhaps impossible, to reach the Pole and that not all men could undertake the adventure. Finally, they would announce that any trip ― from Denmark to London, let us say, on the regularly scheduled steamer ― was, properly considered, an expedition to the North Pole.
The fourth of these prefigurations I have found is Browning’s poem “Fears and Scruples,” published in 1876. A man has, or believes he has, a famous friend. He has never seen this friend and the fact is that the friend has so far never helped him, although tales are told of his most noble traits and authentic letters of his circulate about. Then someone places these traits in doubt and the handwriting experts declare that the letters are apocryphal. The man asks, in the last line: “And if this friend were . . . God?”
My notes also register two stories. One is from Léon Bloy’s Histoires désobligeantes and relates the case of some people who possess all manner of globes, atlases, railroad guides and trunks, but who die without ever having managed to leave their home town. The other is entitled “Carcassonne” and is the work of Lord Dunsany. An invincible army of warriors leaves an infinite castle, conquers kingdoms and sees monsters and exhausts the deserts and the mountains, but they never reach Carcassonne, though once they glimpse it from afar. (This story is, as one can easily see, the strict reverse of the previous one; in the first, the city is never left; in the second, it is never reached.)
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.36 In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant. The early Kafka of Betrachtung is less a precursor of the Kafka of somber myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.
—Translated by James E. Irby
Avatars of the Tortoise
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. I once longed to compile its mobile history. The numerous Hydra (the swamp monster which amounts to a prefiguration or emblem of geometric progressions) would lend convenient horror to its portico; it would be crowned by the sordid nightmares of Kafka and its central chapters would not ignore the conjectures of that remote German cardinal ― Nicholas of Krebs, Nicholas of Cusa ― who saw in the circumference of the circle a polygon with an infinite number of sides and wrote that an infinite line would be a straight line, a triangle, a circle and a sphere (De docta ignorantia, I, 13). Five or seven years of metaphysical, theological and mathematical apprenticeship would allow me (perhaps) to plan decorously such a book. It is useless to add that life forbids me that hope and even that adverb.
The following pages in some way belong to that illusory Biography of the Infinite. Their purpose is to register certain avatars of the second paradox of Zeno.
Let us recall, now, that paradox.
Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise and gives the animal a headstart of ten meters. Achilles runs those ten meters, the tortoise one; Achilles runs that meter, the tortoise runs a decimeter; Achilles runs that decimeter, the tortoise runs a centimeter; Achilles runs that centimeter, the tortoise, a millimeter; Fleet-footed Achilles, the millimeter, the tortoise, a tenth of a millimeter, and so on to infinity, without the tortoise ever being overtaken. . . Such is the customary version. Wilhelm Capelle (Die Vorsokratiker,1935, page 178) translates the original text by Aristotle: “The second argument of Zeno is the one known by the name of Achilles. He reasons that the slowest will never be overtaken by the swiftest, since the pursuer has to pass through the place the pursued has just left, so that the slowest will always have a certain advantage.” The problem does not change, as you can see; but I would like to know the name of the poet who provided it with a hero and a tortoise. To those magical competitors and to the series
the argument owes its fame. Almost no one recalls the one preceding it ― the one about the track ―, though its mechanism is identical. Movement is impossible (argues Zeno) for the moving object must cover half of the distance in order to reach its destination, and before reaching the half, half of the half, and before half of the half, half of the half of the half, and before. . .37
We owe to the pen of Aristotle the communication and first refutation of these arguments. He refutes them with a perhaps disdainful brevity, but their recollection served as an inspiration for his famous argument of the third man against the Platonic doctrine. This doctrine tries to demonstrate that two individuals who have common attributes (for example, two men) are mere temporal appearances of an eternal archetype. Aristotle asks if the many men and the Man ― the temporal individuals and the archetype ― have attributes in common. It is obvious that they do: the general
attributes of humanity. In that case, maintains Aristotle, one would have to postulate another archetype to include them all, and then a fourth. . . Patricio de Azcárate, in a note to his translation of the Metaphysics, attributes this presentation of the problem to one of Aristotle’s disciples: “If what is affirmed of many things is at the same time a separate being, different from the things about which the affirmation is made (and this is what the Platonists pretend), it is necessary that there be a third man. Man is a denomination applicable to individuals and the idea. There is, then, a third man separate and different from individual men and the idea. There is at the same time a fourth man who stands in the same relationship to the third and to the idea and individual men; then a fifth and so on to infinity.” Let us postulate two individuals, a and b, who make up the generic type c. We would then have:
a + b = c
But also, according to Aristotle:
a + b + c = d
a + b + c + d = e
a + b + c + d + e = f. . .
Rigorously speaking, two individuals are not necessary: it is enough to have one individual and the generic type in order to determine the third man denounced by Aristotle. Zeno of Elea resorts to the idea of infinite regression against movement and number; his refuter, against the idea of universal forms.38
The next avatar of Zeno my disorderly notes register is Agrippa the skeptic. He denies that anything can be proven, since every proof requires a previous proof (Hypotyposes, I, 166). Sextus Empiricus argues in a parallel manner that definitions are in vain, since one will have to define each of the words used and then define the definition (Hypotyposes, II, 207). One thousand six hundred years later, Byron, in the dedication to Don Juan, will write of Coleridge: “I wish he would explain his Explanation.”
So far, the regressus in infinitum has served to negate; Saint Thomas Aquinas resorts to it (Summa theologica, I, 2, 3) in order to affirm that God exists. He points out that there is nothing in the universe without an effective cause and that this cause, of course, is the effect of another prior cause. The world is an interminable chain of causes and each cause is also an effect. Each state derives from a previous one and determines the following, but the whole series could have not existed, since its terms are conditional, i.e., fortuitous. However, the world does exist; from this we may infer a noncontingent first cause, which would be the Divinity. Such is the cosmological proof; it is prefigured by Aristotle and Plato; later Leibniz rediscovers it.39
Hermann Lotze has recourse to the regressus in order not to understand that an alteration of object A can produce an alteration of object B. He reasons that if A and B are independent, to postulate an influence of A on B is to postulate a third element C, an element which in order to affect B will require a fourth element D, which cannot work its effect without E, which cannot work its effect without F. . . In order to elude this multiplication of chimeras, he resolves that in the world there is one sole object: an infinite and absolute substance, comparable to the God of Spinoza. Transitive causes are reduced to immanent causes; phenomena, to manifestations or modalities of the cosmic substance.40
Analogous, but even more alarming, is the case of F. H. Bradley. This thinker (Appearance and Reality, 1897, pages 19-34) does not limit himself to combatting the relation of cause; he denies all relations. He asks if a relation is related to its terms. The answer is yes and he infers that this amounts to admitting the existence of two other relations, and then of two more. In the axiom “the part is less than the whole” he does not perceive two terms and the relation “less than”; he perceives three (“part,” “less than,” “whole”) whose linking implies two more relations, and so on to infinity. In the statement “John is mortal,” he perceives three invariable concepts (the third is the copula) which we can never bring together. He transforms all concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.
Lotze inserts Zeno’s periodic chasms between the cause and the effect; Bradley, between the subject and the predicate, if not between the subject and its attributes; Lewis Carroll (Mind, volume four, page 278), between the second premise of the syllogism and the conclusion. He relates an endless dialogue, whose interlocutors are Achilles and the tortoise. Having now reached the end of their interminable race, the two athletes calmly converse about geometry. They study this lucid reasoning:
a) Two things equal to a third are equal to one another.
b) The two sides of this triangle are equal to MN.
c) The two sides of this triangle are equal to one another.
The tortoise accepts the premises a and b, but denies that they justify the conclusion. He has Achilles interpolate a hypothetical proposition:
a) Two things equal to a third are equal to one another.
b) The two sides of this triangle are equal to MN.
c) If a and b are valid, z is valid.
z) The two sides of this triangle are equal to one another.
Having made this brief clarification, the tortoise accepts the validity of a, b and c, but not of z. Achilles, indignant, interpolates:
d) if a, b and c are valid, z is valid.
And then, now with a certain resignation:
e) If a, b, c and d are valid, z is valid.
Carroll observes that the Greek’s paradox involves an infinite series of distances which diminish, whereas in his, the distances grow.
One final example, perhaps the most elegant of all, but also the one differing least from Zeno. William James (Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911, page 182) denies that fourteen minutes can pass, because first it is necessary for seven to pass, and before the seven, three and a half, and before the three and a half, a minute and three quarters, and so on until the end, the invisible end, through tenuous labyrinths of time.
Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Mill, Renouvier, Georg Cantor, Gomperz, Russell and Bergson have formulated explanations ― not always inexplicable and vain in nature ― of the paradox of the tortoise. (I have registered some of them in my book Discusión, 1932, pages 151-161). Applications abound as well, as the reader has seen. The historical applications do not exhaust its possibilities: the vertiginous regressus in infinitum is perhaps applicable to all subjects. To aesthetics: such and such a verse moves us for such and such a reason, such and such a reason for such and such a reason. . . To the problem of knowledge: cognition is recognition, but it is necessary to have known in order to recognize, but cognition is recognition. . . How can we evaluate this dialectic? Is it a legitimate instrument of investigation or only a bad habit?
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coördinations, one of them ― at least in an infinitesimal way ― does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others. I have examined those which enjoy certain prestige; I venture to affirm that only in the one formulated by Schopenhauer have I recognized some trait of the universe. According to this doctrine, the world is a fabrication of the will. Art ― always ― requires visible unrealities. Let it suffice for me to mention one: the metaphorical or numerous or carefully accidental diction of the interlocutors in a drama. . . Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.
“The greatest magician (Novalis has memorably written) would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.
—Translated by James E. Irby
On the Cult of Books
In Book VIII of the Odyssey, we read that the gods weave misfortunes so that future generations will have something to sing about; Mallarmé’s statement, “The world exists to end up in a book;’ seems to repeat, some thirty centuries later, the same concept of an aesthetic justification for evils. These two teleologies, however, do not entirely coincide; the former belongs to the era of the spoken word, and the latter to an era of the written word. One speaks of telling the story and the other of books. A book, any book, is for us a sacred object: Cervantes, who probably did not listen to everything that everyone said, read even “the torn scraps of paper in the streets.” Fire, in one of Bernard Shaw’s comedies, threatens the library at Alexandria; someone exclaims that the memory of mankind will burn, and Caesar replies: ‘‘A shameful memory. Let it burn.” The historical Caesar, in my opinion, might have approved or condemned the command the author attributes to him, but he would not have considered it, as we do, a sacrilegious joke. The reason is clear: for the ancients the written word was nothing more than a substitute for the spoken word.
It is well known that Pythagoras did not write; Gomperz (Griechische Denker I, 3) maintains that it was because he had more faith in the virtues of spoken instruction. More forceful than Pythagoras’ mere abstention is Plato’s unequivocal testimony. In the Timaeus he stated: “It is an arduous task to discover the maker and father of this universe, and, having discovered him, it is impossible to tell it to all men”; and in the Phaedrus he recounted an Egyptian fable against writing (the practice of which causes people to neglect the exercise of memory and to depend on symbols), and said that books are like the painted figures “that seem to be alive, but do not answer a word to the questions they are asked.” To alleviate or eliminate that difficulty, he created the philosophical dialogue. A teacher selects a pupil, but a book does not select its readers, who may be wicked or stupid; this Platonic mistrust persists in the words of Clement of Alexandria, a man of pagan culture: “The most prudent course is not to write but to learn and teach by word of mouth, because what is written remains” (Stromateis), and in the same treatise: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child,” which derives from the Gospels: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” That sentence is from Jesus, the greatest of the oral teachers, who only once wrote a few words on the ground, and no man read what He had written (John 8:6).