Abstract
Waismann’s “A Philosopher Looks at Kafka” issued in 1953—the same year that Wittgenstein’s literary executors published the Philosophical Investigations for the first time, as Géza Kállay notes in what is also the very first evaluation of Waismann’s literary piece. It appeared in the Oxford literary journal Essays in Criticism that was founded only two years earlier and is to this day one of the most distinguished British journals in literary criticism. Kállay points out that the journal’s editor-in-chief at the time, the Wordsworth-scholar Frederick Wilse Bateson, would never have published any nonsense. Waismann analyzes the different layers of meaning in The Trial that can be accessed by following a trail of ambiguities. The very title, he notes, in German Der Prozess can mean a trial in the legal sense as well as a pathological process in a medical sense. Kállay provides us with a discussion of three points he highlights from this essay: Waismann’s rejection of the psychoanalytic reading of the novel because he fears that such an interpretation would reduce what Kafka tells us. That at a certain point, Kafka reaches the ineffable, the limits of language and that for Waismann this results in a curious attitude taken towards reality. Linguistic meaning seems to exceed what is said in any particular statement—an outlook reminiscent of Waismann’s later views in “How I See Philosophy”.
After Géza Kállay’s passing, the manuscript was finalized and proofread by his wife, Katalin G. Kállay.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. § 123 of Philosophical Investigations: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’”, “Ich kenne mich nicht aus”, Wittgenstein (2001, 42).
- 2.
It is not unusual in Kafka that a dramatic turn occurs when one wakes up: in the Metamorphosis (1912–1915), Gregor Samsa wakes up, from “unsettling dreams” [unruhige Träume, ‘restless dreams’], to the fact that he has turned into a “monstrous vermin” [ungeheueres Ungeziefer]; in The Castle (1922–1924), which starts not in the morning but “late evening”, K. is woken up by a “young man in town clothes, with a face like an actor’s – narrowed eyes, strongly marked eyebrows” and the landlord (Kafka 2009, 5) to hear that he has no permission to stay at the inn.
- 3.
Waismann mentions only Stendhal (204).
- 4.
I of course have the last, famous sentence of the Tractatus in mind: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muβ man schweigen” (TLP 7) (Wittgenstein 1961, 150–151).
- 5.
Cf. e.g.: “Now the point which I want to make is that the idea of causality is tied up with a certain way of describing things. And as there are different ways of describing things—or, what comes to the same, different languages—the idea of causality adapts itself to the particular type of language. Thus scientific language has its own conception of causality, different from the idea we meet in common speech. To put it slightly differently: the idea of causality is a function of language, and varies when you pass to a language of a new logical stratum” (Waismann 2011b, 143).
- 6.
Quoted by Cooper (1990, 110).
- 7.
The German text is from Kafka (1958).
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Kállay, G., Kállay, K.G. (2019). “I Wanted to Hear Your Judgement”: Waismann, Kafka and Wittgenstein on the Power and Powerlessness of Language. In: Makovec, D., Shapiro, S. (eds) Friedrich Waismann. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25008-9_15
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