Category Archives: Kafka

He was no longer able to get the thought of the trial out of his head. He had often wondered whether it might not be a good idea to work out a written defence and hand it in to the court. It would contain a short description of his life and explain why he had acted the way he had at each event that was in any way important, whether he now considered he had acted well or ill, and his reasons for each. There was no doubt of the advantages a written defence of this sort would have over relying on the lawyer, who was anyway not without his shortcomings. K. had no idea what actions the lawyer was taking; it was certainly not a lot, it was more than a month since the lawyer had summoned him, and none of the previous discussions had given K. the impression that this man would be able to do much for him. Most importantly, he had asked him hardly any questions. And there were so many questions here to be asked. Asking questions was the most important thing. K. had the feeling that he would be able to ask all the questions needed here himself. The lawyer, in contrast, did not ask questions but did all the talking himself or sat silently facing him, leant forward slightly over the desk, probably because he was hard of hearing, pulled on a strand of hair in the middle of his beard and looked down at the carpet, perhaps at the very spot where K. had lain with Leni. Now and then he would give K. some vague warning of the sort you give to children. His speeches were as pointless as they were boring, and K. decided that when the final bill came he would pay not a penny for them.

— Kafka, The Trial, (tr. Wyllie)

The ulterior motives [Hintergedanken] with which you take Evil into yourself are not your own, but those of Evil.

— Kafka, aphorism no. 29, 1917

Doing the negative is imposed on us; the positive is already within us.

— Kafka, aphorism no. 27, 1917

If there aren’t countless opportunities for liberation, and especially opportunities at every moment of our lives, then perhaps there are none at all.

— Kafka, letter to Brod, 1917

How are you going even to touch on the greatest task… if you can’t collect yourself so that when the decisive moment comes, you hold in your hand the entirety of yourself like a stone to be flung.

— Kafka, Octavo Notebook, 1917 (tr. Frisch)

Casually and imperiously, as if at home, the racket of the world streamed in and out through the bars, the prisoner was actually free, he could take part in everything, nothing that went on outside escaped him, he could even have left the cage, after all, the bars were yards apart, he was not even imprisoned.

— Kafka, Diary, 1921 (tr. Frisch)

Belief in ‘the indestructible’ is not intellectual. It is expressed in
action. ‘Belief means freeing the indestructible in oneself, or
rather: freeing oneself, or rather: being indestructible, or rather:
being.’ It bridges the gulf between consciousness and being. And it
enables Kafka effortlessly to surmount a problem that worries
many people who reflect on religion, namely the fact that the
majority of people feel no need to reflect on religion. William
James in The Varieties of Religious Experience borrows from a
Catholic writer the division of humanity into the once-born and
the twice-born. The latter are the minority who feel anxiety about
their relation to something beyond themselves. The former are
unreflective, uncomplicated, and largely content to get on with
their lives. For Kafka, both classes of people arrive by different
routes at the same goal, that of being; the twice-born like himself
have a very much longer and more arduous journey, the others can
be ‘dans le vrai’ already.

— Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: A Very Short Introduction

Alle menschlichen Fehler sind Ungeduld, ein vorzeitiges Abbrechen des Methodischen, ein scheinbares Einpfählen der scheinbaren Sache.

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing. (tr. Kaiser/Wilkins)

All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object. (tr. Hofmann)


Commentary by Michael Cisco

Impatience is the only cause of human error. This means no human error cannot ultimately be traced back to anything but impatience. Impatience is a topic Kafka returns to throughout the aphorisms.

Why be impatient? It suggests the desire to be done and to move on is greater than the desire for the correct result; and that, as a method becomes more thorough, and therefore presumably more accurate, it becomes correspondingly more exasperating to use.

Method is designed to exhaust the possibilities, to miss nothing; taking absolutely everything into account is the key to reasonable planning and understanding, and at the same time it’s a maddening exercise in frustration. You begin to realize people don’t use words like “exhaust” just by chance when they talk about this.

But then, doesn’t the thinker care at all about the result? He must, and yet he seems too content to plod methodically on — unless of course he really only loves the method, and is disinclined to set much stock in results.

Ostensible objects — they may be illusory or they may be able to be constituted in a variety of ways: the flower and the bee may be two objects from one point of view and only one object from another. It isn’t just a matter of labelling an object, but of distinguishing the boundaries of each object.

Kafka seems preoccupied with methodical procedures, especially with all the ways they can go wrong, but nothing ends. The error isn’t an end nor does it finish anything, but it marks the point in the development of a line of inquiry beyond which nothing useful can be expected.

The method defines what constitutes an error, but in general, error is abandoning method (usually without noticing, like falling off the rope in Number One). But how well does the method do when it comes to providing a satisfactory notion of success? The method is designed to identify and avoid error, and it may be that it can only define success in terms of scarcity of error; that minimization of error (accuracy) is equivalent to truth is taken for granted.

Error is breaking off method prematurely, but how do you know when to break off method maturely?

Error arises when one breaks off method prematurely, because this leads to an inessential understanding based on mere appearances. One settles for what seems to be true, and then reasons from that appearance. Kafka’s fiction is replete with examples of this.

From this, we may infer that truth, for Kafka, is less a result and more a way of remaining true, by patient application of method.