The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and LevinasDivinity/TheologyJ. McDade, SJ2010 91002D091This guide was prepared for the University of London International Programmes by:Rev. Dr John McDade, Principal, Heythrop College, University of London.This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that due to pressure of work the author is unable to enter into any correspondence relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject guide, favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.Published by: University of London Press University of London 2010Printed by: Central Printing Service, University of London, EnglandPublications Offce University of London International Programmes Stewart House 32 Russell Square London WC1B 5DN United KingdomWebsite: www.londoninternational.ac.ukContentsiContentsIntroduction .........................................................................................................................1Aims and objectives .........................................................................................................2How to use this guide .......................................................................................................2Reading for this subject ...................................................................................................3Recommendation on study time ......................................................................................4Examination .....................................................................................................................4Sample examination paper ...............................................................................................4Different texts and how to read them ..............................................................................4Readerly/Writerly texts ....................................................................................................5A reminder of your learning outcomes ............................................................................6Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362) ....................................................................................7Essential reading ..............................................................................................................7Additional reading ...........................................................................................................7How to read the Penses ..................................................................................................8Introduction ......................................................................................................................8Textual commentaries on the Penses .............................................................................9Pascals Night of Fire ................................................................................................... 11Boredom and diversion ..................................................................................................13Pascal on the Three Orders .........................................................................................14Some comments on Pascals Three Orders .................................................................15God and revelation .........................................................................................................16Lost in the cosmos .........................................................................................................17Summary ........................................................................................................................18Learning outcomes.......................................................................................................18Sample examination questions ......................................................................................18Chapter 2: Franz Kafka (18831924) ..............................................................................19Essential reading ............................................................................................................19Additional reading .........................................................................................................20Websites .........................................................................................................................21Introduction ....................................................................................................................21Stories and meanings .....................................................................................................23Religion in Kafka? .........................................................................................................25Some stories ...................................................................................................................28On the Tram...................................................................................................................28A Knock at the Manor Gate ...........................................................................................28In the Penal Colony ........................................................................................................29Before the Law ...............................................................................................................31Some interpretations of Before the Law ........................................................................32The City Coat of Arms ...................................................................................................35Some more stories ..........................................................................................................36Summary ........................................................................................................................36Learning outcomes ........................................................................................................37Sample examination questions ......................................................................................37The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and LevinasiiChapter 3: Simone Weil (190943)...................................................................................39Essential reading ............................................................................................................39Additional reading .........................................................................................................39Introduction ....................................................................................................................40The Great Beast and the Cave ........................................................................................41Whats the problem? ......................................................................................................42The task(s) of life............................................................................................................43Necessity, obedience and affiction ...............................................................................45Decreation and necessity ...............................................................................................46Revelation and self-emptying ........................................................................................47Forms of the Implicit Love of God ................................................................................48Summary ........................................................................................................................49Learning outcomes ........................................................................................................49Sample examination questions ......................................................................................50Chapter 4: Emmanuel Levinas (190696) .......................................................................51Essential reading ............................................................................................................51Additional reading .........................................................................................................52Introduction ....................................................................................................................52Love your neighbour as yourself ...................................................................................52Infnite responsibility and God ......................................................................................54Responding to the face of the other .............................................................................55Ethics, religion and transcendence ................................................................................58Human independence, human intelligence and the destructionof the numinous ..............................................................................................................59Doing good is the act of belief itself ...........................................................................61Christianity and Judaism ...............................................................................................61To Love the Torah More than God ..............................................................................63God veiling his Countenance ......................................................................................63Summary ........................................................................................................................65Learning outcomes ........................................................................................................65Sample examination questions ......................................................................................65Appendix 1: The tasks of life: a summary ......................................................................67Appendix 2: Sample examination paper .........................................................................71Introduction1IntroductionWe dont receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.(Marcel Proust)At the start of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, the seventeenth century philosopher Ren Descartes explains why a person should study philosophy (search out the truth of things) and he makes it clear that it is in order that his intellect should show his will what decision it ought to make in each of lifes contingencies.1 In other words, philosophy is to help us fnd our way through life in a constructive way, to enable us to face the challenges which life sets before us. We are to refect in order to live better. An ancient insight, of course, and the term traditionally used to identify this goal is wisdom (Greek: sophia): if we can fnd wisdom, we will know who we are and how we are to live. But how to fnd wisdom?The Jewish tradition of wisdom writings (among them: Proverbs in the Bible, The Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sirach, in the Apocrypha) places this search at the heart of our dealings with God. A single example must suffce: Sirach 24 is a poem in which the female fgure of Wisdom speaks about herself and her role in creation and revelation. It portrays Wisdom, present in the lives of all, as directed by God to take up a particular dwelling place in Israel. Where? In the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the Law that Moses commanded us (Sir 24.23). So, Wisdom comes to be en-bibliated (en-booked) in the Torah, the Law that Israel observes as part of its covenant with God. Jewish religious observance, then, is an existential engagement with Wisdom. The Gospel of John (its Prologue is a Christian variation on Sir 24) will say that the presence of divine Wisdom in the Law has been deepened through being en-feshed (incarnated) in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1.14). Analogous to Torah observance, Christian discipleship is presented as the fnal way in which human beings are to connect existentially with divine Wisdom. If the search for wisdom, however imperfectly attained, is a search for God, then when we inquire into the limits and possibilities available to human life, this can be a path towards God. Wherever truth is acknowledged and the requirements of goodness practised, a contact takes place with God who is the fullness of truth and love in ways that fulfl our nature. This has been recognised since the early Christian centuries: in 390 AD, St Augustine, attempting to relate Platonic philosophy and Christian religion, argued against the separation of philosophy and religion: our faith and teaching have demonstratedthat there is not one thing called philosophy, that is, devotion to wisdom, and another called religion.2 For Augustine, philosophy and religion are conjoined ways in which the human person is brought into contact with God through understanding and faith. In these traditions, the conjunction of inquiry and faith is central, on the one hand, to a humanity searching for God and, on the other, to Gods unsurpassable closeness to humanity in grace and in revelation. Often people ask about whether there is a meaning to life as though it is something discovered rather than created. Terry Eagletons The Meaning of Life,3 for example, is an entertaining, accessible and instructive survey of the range of philosophical and religious answers to the meaning of life. He does not think that a purely theoretical account of human life what he labels a metaphysical solution can work. Instead, meaning is bestowed on humans by the way they live:1 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, I (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.10.2 On True Religion 5, 9.3 (Oxford University Press, 2007).The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas2The meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living which is to say, a certain quality, depth, abundance, and intensity of life. In a certain sense, the meaning of life is life itself, seen in a certain way.(T. Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, p.164) But the meaning of life may be both metaphysical and ethical, and the four thinkers studied in this module bring both of these aspects together. In different ways, they understand the metaphysical (who we are) as the basis of the ethical (how we are to behave) and see the latter as grounded in the conditions and possibilities of the former. They will of course differ on what we can know, even if they may differ about what we should do. This module has been designed to enable you to study four interesting thinkers who, in different ways and with different conclusions, try to work out an understanding of human life, its diffculties and possibilities, and point us, their readers, towards how we should live. Aims and objectivesBy the end of this subject guide, and the relevant reading and activities, you should be able to:discuss each of the four thinkers and their ideas on the tasks of liferelate their views to broader concerns within philosophy and theologyrelate their views to other thinkersdiscuss how we might begin to defne our own ideas about the tasks of life based on the ideas of these, and other, important thinkers.How to use this guideThere are four separate chapters on each of the four thinkers whom we will consider chronologically:Blaise Pascal (162362): a scientifc and mathematical innovator, a literary satirist of genius (his Provincial Letters against the Jesuits are brilliant and bitter) and an incisive analyst of humanity and religion admired by both religious people and atheists since the publication of his Penses in 1670. These are fragments found after his death in which he recorded in a random way ideas, insights, arguments, religious insights, observations of human life, dramatic cameos, and elements of an extended Apologia for Christianity which he intended to compose. Franz Kafka (18831924): for many people he is the characteristic voice of twentieth century European fction whose parables and extended novellas dramatise the characteristic experiences of modern life: a radical uncertainty about identity and purpose, the impersonal exercise of harsh authority, a bureaucratisation that crushes individuality and a world in which what were originally religious themes become distorted and impossible. He seems to write within a world where an absent God has left traces of his presence and to show us what our present situation actually is, rather than guide us positively as to how we should live. He may be, as he said he was, both an end [of a particular culture] and a beginning [of another]. Simone Weil (190943): one of the most original voices in twentieth century religious thought. Brought up atheist in France, involved in socialist activism, she was a religious Platonist and mystic, uncomfortable with organised religion and preoccupied with the question of how we can have access to the Good when the conditions of our life obscure the vision of what is good. She was an austere, troubled woman who died, almost certainly, of anorexia-induced complications at the age of 34.Introduction3Emmanuel Levinas (190696): the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, and a disciple of Husserl whose phenomenology shaped Levinas approach to religion and ethics. Levinas insisted on the priority of ethics both in philosophy and in religion: the encounter with the other makes demands on me which I cannot evade, and this summoning of the person towards moral responsibility is the core of what it means to be a person. I see myself obligated with respect to the other; consequently, I am infnitely more demanding of myself than of others.Before you feel able to compare them, you should make sure that you understand what each of them says. And of course you have to recognise that they are going to say things in different ways: Pascals Penses are in fragments (the reason for this will be explained); Weil, too, often writes short points, only occasionally extending into longer essays; Levinas writes dense, often technical philosophy and Kafka simply writes fction, letters and diaries. They also write in different human and religious contexts which are important factors in how they are to be understood: Pascal in the rigorous Augustinianism of French seventeenth century church reform; Kafka as a German Jew in Prague in the 1910s20s; Weil as an isolated, non-baptised Catholic of Jewish birth in 1930s France; and Levinas as a Lithuanian Jew who spent most of his life in France responding through philosophy to the Shoah (Holocaust). In different ways they deal with the brokenness of human life, each seeing it differently, but they all turn this into something humanly and religiously powerful. Reading for this subjectThis subject guide provides a starting point for your study of the unit. It introduces the main topics of the syllabus, gives you extensive advice on other texts to read and offers some learning activities to help you develop your critical ideas about the subject.There is no single set textbook for this unit; rather, you will need to draw on many different works. Each chapter of this guide starts with a list of reading, divided into Essential and Additional reading. You should read as much of the Essential reading as possible, including especially any primary sources that are specifed as Essential. For some chapters, the Essential reading lists are quite lengthy, mainly because the reading list contains texts which are recommended to help you complete activities. If you cannot obtain some of these secondary sources, you can manage without them, but do try and read as much Essential reading material as you can.Your understanding of the subject should beneft greatly if you can also fnd time to look at some Additional reading. Additional reading lists are deliberately extensive so that you have a good chance of obtaining some material on topics that particularly interest you; you are certainly not expected to read every item of Additional reading.You may well need or wish to purchase some of the Essential texts, especially the primary sources. In addition, in order to encourage you to read around the subject, we are trying to ensure that many other readings are freely available to you. You can fnd some journal articles in the Online Library.4 Other material is available from other online sources such as Google Books. And scans of many other readings will be downloadable from the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for the unit, where you can also exchange your ideas with your fellow students via the discussion forum.Please note that the availability of readings may vary over time. Where material was available in the Online Library or from another online source at the time of going to press in August 2010, this is indicated in the guide. We have also noted items or reading that we are hoping to upload to the VLE. At the time of going to press, some material is still to be uploaded. We expect to make more material available in time, so do please check the VLE regularly for updates.4 The Online Library consists of several separate databases. You can identify which database holds which journal by searching in the Journal fnder on the Online Library homepage.The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas4Recommendation on study timeAs the Student Handbook (available online at www.londoninternational.ac.uk/current_students/general_resources/handbooks/theology.shtml) says: As a very rough guide, you might expect to spend about 300 hours on each module about six hours per week over 50 weeks, or seven and a half hours per week over 40 weeks. However, this depends on how fast you learn, and the depth in which you intend to study each unit. ExaminationImportant: The information and advice given in the following section are based on the examination structure used at the time this guide was written. We strongly advise you to always check the current Regulations for relevant information about the examination. You should also carefully check the rubric/instructions on the paper you actually sit and follow those instructions. You will be required to answer four questions in three hours.Sample examination paperThere is a Sample examination paper in Appendix 2. Different texts and how to read themIn his work S/Z, the French literary critic, Roland Barthes, makes a distinction that will be helpful when you read Pascal, Weil and Kafka. (Levinas has his own diffculties.) On the one hand, there are works that he calls textes lisibles (readerly texts). Examples might be classic novels by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens: an omniscient author tells you everything you need to know about how the characters think and feel, and so you understand them perfectly; in this fctional world, everything makes sense. On the other hand, Barthes says, there are textes scriptibles (writerly texts) in which this authorial omniscience is missing and the book requires the reader to enter into its interpretation much more actively, sometimes with diffculty. Examples might be the stories of Franz Kafka or Joseph Conrad, the plays of Samuel Beckett or T.S. Eliots poem The Waste Land: you have to work hard in these diffcult textual worlds. In some ways, the Gospel of Mark, with its open acknowledgement of the diffculty of knowing Jesus identity and why he must die, is a writerly text whose meaning, like Christ himself, is not easy to discern; the disciple or someone who wants to be a disciple, has to do a lot of work to understand the text that is Christ. Table 0.1 might help you to understand what Barthes is saying.Introduction5Readerly/Writerly textsReaderly texts (Textes lisibles)Writerly texts (Textes scriptibles)The text seems to be transparent: we see through it and enter a literary world in which everything can be understood.The text is opaque (thick) and does not claim to explain everything. There are gaps in understanding and so the text resists easy reading.The author guides the reader as to how the work is to be read: hand yourself over to the author and be guided.No defnitive interpretation of the work is offered by the author, but the reader is invited to participate actively in making sense of what the work means. Character and motivation are easy to identify and there is a seamless narrative that can be followed and that makes sense. The characterisation and plot is fragmented, marked by ambiguity and perplexity: how are people to be understood and events interpreted? The reader is given a panoptic perspective in which all things are clearly seen, as it were, from above the action.The perspective offered to the reader is in medias res (in the thick of things): what is conveyed is partial and incomplete, uncertain and messy.The text is marked by authorial omniscience and complete lucidity and so the reader thinks that he/she understands everything.The text is marked by authorial silence on some things, either because things are withheld from the reader or because they are unknown to the author.The work is easy to read because, unlike life, it offers a world that is coherent and makes sense. This may be why we like crime thrillers, romantic comedies, anything with a happy ending.The work is diffcult to interpret and offers an incomplete perspective. Things are often not resolved at the end and there is a sense of brokenness that will not be repaired. Like life itself?Table 0.1: Readerly/Writerly texts (Textes lisibles/Textes scriptibles)You can see from Table 0.1 that the different kinds of texts correspond to different ways of viewing and experiencing life. To live, says a Russian proverb, is not to walk across a feld. Another proverb from the same country says that We are born in an open feld and we die in a dark wood. Comforting? Strangely yes, because it can be consoling to fnd that other people fnd life puzzling, diffcult and not easy to discern. The four writers in this module all have a sense that the task of living is a complex one, not easily worked out, and usually lived out in practical, rather than theoretical, ways. The truth of God is lived not thought is a motif which the four thinkers all explore in different ways:1.Pascal was Catholic, a great student of St Augustine in religious matters and one of the most incisive Christian thinkers.2.Kafka, born Jewish but non-observant, uses religious themes often without telling his readers that he is doing so.3.Weil, of a non-observant Jewish family, was deeply mystical and Christian without ever becoming a baptised member of the Church.4.Levinas was an orthodox Jew who thought and wrote a philosophy inspired by Jewish concerns.The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas6You will fnd that studying their ideas will make you think, and think differently, about what human life is about because they address central, diffcult questions in unusual and striking ways. This guide will present a way of reading them. How you beneft from this study is one of the tasks of life which you may want to address. A reminder of your learning outcomesBy the end of this subject guide, and the relevant reading and activities, you should be able to:discuss each of the four thinkers and their ideas on the tasks of liferelate their views to broader concerns within philosophy and theologyrelate their views to other thinkersdiscuss how we might begin to defne our own ideas about the tasks of life based on the ideas of these, and other, important thinkers.Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)7Chapter 1Blaise Pascal (162362)Essential readingPrimary textsPascal, B. Penses translated by A.J. Krailsheimer (Penguin, 2003) [ISBN 0140446451; 9780140446456]. Read especially: 2526; 44; 47; 11018; 131; 136; 14849; 160; 166; 18992; 198; 199; 20001; 298; 308; 400; 405; 417; 423; 424; 427; 449; 513; 533; 608; 688; 695; 697; 699; 806; 913; 919; 933; 977.Entretien avec M. de Sacy. (Pascals conversation with M. de Sacy at Port-Royal) translated by J. McDade. (VLE)Secondary textsKrailsheimer, A.J. Pascal. (Oxford University Press, 1980) [ISBN 0192875124; 9780192875129]. Out of print, but second-hand or library copies may be available. McDade, J. The Contemporary Relevance of Pascal, New Blackfriars 91 (2010), pp.18596. (Online: PDF available in Wiley Online Library: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-2005.2009.01349.x/pdf)McDade, J. Interpreting Pascals Memorial. (VLE)O Connell, M.R. Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart. (W.B. Eerdmans, 1997) [ISBN 0802801587] (accessible biography and study of main ideas).Additional readingSecondary textsColeman, F.X.J. Neither Angel Nor Beast: the Life and Work of Blaise Pascal. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) [ISBN 0710206933; 9780710206930] [Online: Google books, 14/07/10].Kolakowski, L. God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascals Religion and the Spirit of Jansenism. (University of Chicago Press, 1995) (superb analysis by an excellent philosopher) [ISBN 0226450511] [Online: Google books, 14/07/10].Krailsheimer, A.J. The Origin and Plan of the Penses in Pascal. (Oxford University Press, 1980) [ISBN 0192875124 (pbk); 9780192875129; see above] (VLE).McDade, J. Divine Disclosure and Concealment in Bach, Pascal and Levinas, New Blackfriars, 85 (2004), pp.12132.Miel, J. Pascal and Theology. (Johns Hopkins Press, 1969) (still the best book on Pascals view of grace) [ISBN 0801811015] (VLE).Moles, E. Pascals Theory of the Heart, MLN 84 (1969), pp.54864 (excellent and informative) [Online Library; JSTOR].Morris, T.V. Making Sense of it All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life. (W.B. Eerdmans, c.1992) [ISBN 080280652X (pbk)] [Online: a few pages on Amazon].Rogers, B. The Realist of Port-Royal, Times Literary Supplement (4 Feb 2000), pp.1112 [Online: via subscription only].Simmonds, G. What did Pascal fnd at Port-Royal? (VLE).Steinmann, J. Pascal. (Burns and Oates, 1965) (a classic study) [no ISBN] (VLE).The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas8How to read the PensesPlease note: numbers in this subject guide will be to the Pense number, not the page number, in the Krailsheimer edition of the Penses.It is important that you use the Krailsheimer edition which corresponds to the French edition by Lafuma. Other editions have different numbering of the Penses and you should avoid them; the edition by Brunschvig is earlier than Lafuma, so older books on Pascal often use this. A more modern edition by Sellier, offering a different ordering of the Penses, is translated in Oxford World Classics by H. Levi: avoid this because it is incomplete and sometimes not very good. IntroductionThat Pascals Penses should have had such an impact on European intellectual life is remarkable when one considers that it was never actually composed by Pascal as a book. The title means Thoughts and this is the name given to it when it was frst published in 1670. Pascal had died eight years earlier; such was his reputation as a mathematician, scientist and as an incisive religious thinker that the working notes and fragments which he left behind were assembled, edited and published posthumously by his friends and family. Krailsheimers Introduction to the Penses (pp.xviiixx) describes Pascals working method: he wrote quickly on large sheets of paper which were then torn into smaller pieces; these were then assembled and bound together with thread. Pascal also composed a table of contents with 28 headings corresponding to chapters in an Apology for Christianity which he intended to write in order to counter the intellectual drift towards atheism and indifference which Pascal detected in the emerging scientifc, critical culture of Early Modern Europe. Other Penses are simply working notes or jottings composed at different stages on a range of religious themes. Sometimes ideas are clustered together, and you have a sense of looking at the different aspects of a single topic; the fact that there is no explicit link or argumentative structure means that it is the task of the reader to piece the ideas together into something more coherent. And this can sometimes be an engaging and challenging task. You rarely pick up the Penses without discovering something wonderful that you havent noticed before. Because the ordering of the Penses is somewhat haphazard and random, fnding your way through them can be frustrating: even Pascals collation of Penses on particular themes does not assemble them all coherently. The only solution is to make your own references to the Penses and build them up as you go along. For example: original sin (695; 131); boredom (136; 24; 622, etc). Part of the fun in reading this work is creating your own reading guide to the Penses.Is this fragmented structure a weakness? Well, it means that you cannot read the Penses as you would an ordinary book with a beginning, middle and end, but on the other hand, the broken and succinct quality of the Penses means that they sometimes have a more immediate impact on the reader than if they formed part of a normal text. The directness of Pascals thought comes through with an immediacy and clarity of voice that never seems to lose its freshness. Postmodern readers fnd in the genre of the Penses a refection of the view that we can no longer compose the large, over-arching narratives that were once thought possible explanatory schemes that describe the whole of history and reality: the Penses, they say, offer partial insights that refect the incomplete character of what we are able to know. (See McDade, The Contemporary Relevance of Pascal.)Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)9In many ways, the Penses are a writerly text for two reasons: frstly, they are random, fragmented thoughts imperfectly integrated with one another and so the reader has to do the work of connecting and interpreting them. Secondly, Pascal writes in a way that presses the reader to refect, sometimes radically and seriously, on just what his/her life is about and you are pressed to think things out for yourself. This is part of Pascals overall intention: he wanted people, especially free-thinking atheists who were beginning to appear in European culture, to examine the truth about their condition, and to understand themselves as caught between a high vocation to love God (this is what Pascal will refer to as the greatness (la grandeur) of humanity; and a condition that he refers to as wretchedness (la misre). For Pascal, our human condition requires a dialectical account in which both of these polarities or extremes are true about us. One of his strategies is to draw attention to aspects of human life and experience that illustrate the complexity of human identity. As we will see, he specialises in observation and analysis of the way we are, in order to make us, the readers, aware of the strangeness of life as we live it; what life is and what it could become is only one side of the story; the more powerful part of the Penses are the sections in which human complexity and evasion are brought to the fore. Pascal said, All the good maxims already exist in the world: we just fail to apply them (540). Why might this be? Textual commentaries on the PensesLet us start reading the Penses. Here are some extracts, with a brief commentary as an example of the kind of thinking which the Penses might stimulate in a reader: 166: We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it. Comment: Who exactly are we? What is the abyss spoken about? For Pascal it is probably the nothingness of hell, but it might also have a non-religious application, e.g. cultural decline; moral chaos. Pascal does not tell us, and his silence makes the metaphor open-ended and therefore capable of multiple readings. And why would we want to hide it from our sight, whatever it is? Do we know what we are doing and where we are going?688: What is the self? A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her. And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory, do they love me? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing my self. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul?Comment: This is an acute analysis of diffcult issues about the substantiality of the self. When we love someone, do we love them because of some physical or intellectual quality which they possess; and if this quality goes, what happens to our love? Can we be said to love another person (self) or are we always loving aspects of them which please us but which may be transitory, such as physical beauty? You should read this against the background of Pascals contemporary Ren Descartes attempt to construct the whole of philosophy on a thinking self (I think therefore I am) whose existence cannot be doubted and can act as the foundation for the whole of philosophy. This Pense shows a sharp critique of Cartesianism, as well as a perceptive analysis of what goes on when people love or claim to love someone else.The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas10697: Those who lead disorderly lives tell those who are normal that it is they who deviate from nature, and think they are following nature themselves; just as those who are on board ship think that the people on shore are moving away. Language is the same everywhere: we need a fxed point to judge it. The harbour is the judge of those aboard ship, but where are we going to fnd a harbour in morals?699: When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as on board ship. When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fxed point. Comment: These two related Penses raise the question of relativism in ethics: is there no fxed point by which right and wrong can be assessed? Pascal thinks that there is: Gods guidance in Scripture, Christ and the Church. But if the whole of a culture is going to the dogs, no one will be able to notice if everything changes and deteriorates; no one can diagnose moral decline because we are all on the same ship. Pascal is preoccupied with the instability found in human nature: because we have lost our true good, anything can become our good. Compare 630: Mans nature is entirely natural, wholly animal. There is nothing that cannot be made natural. There is nothing natural that cannot be lost. And what does he mean in 699 by someone stopping and acting as a fxed point? Presumably it is a metaphor for a Christian following moral teachings taught in Scripture. Pascal picks up the theme of relativism, cultural instability and fuidity of personal identity from the Essays of Michel de Montaigne (153392) who was a great infuence on him.806: We are not satisfed with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others and so to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach these virtues to our other existence [our constructed, imagined self]; we prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire us a reputation for bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being that we are not satisfed with one without the other and often exchange one for the other. Comment: Pascal seems here to anticipate the postmodern view that our access to the real is only through an image or version of the real. What does he mean by the real self and the imagined self? How much of our sense of self is borrowed from imagined versions of the way we are or the way we want to appear? Is it possible for a person to invest so much in the imagined self that his or her real self is ignored or marginalised? Think of various aspects of popular or celebrity culture: the way our bodies should be, the way we should behave, the way to reach fulflment. Think of the impact of virtual and digital reality on our sense of identity and life. ActivityAnalyse 779: Children, who are scared of the face they have daubed, are just children, but how can someone who is so weak as a child become really strong when grown up? Only our imagination changes. Everything that grows progressively better also declines progressively. Nothing that was once weak can ever be absolutely strong. It is no good saying: He has grown, he has changed: he is still the same. Analyse 44, Pascals great Pense on imagination, the dominant faculty in man. (Surely this is against the view that our dominant faculty is reason; Pascal thinks our nature is ruptured by sin.)I hope these extracts show how the Penses give rise to thoughts about the way we are. Before we go further, we should attend to the central event in Pascals life, the occasion when he was touched by divine grace and the holiness of God. Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)11Pascals Night of FireReadingPense 913; McDade, J. Interpreting Pascals Memorial; O Connell (1997), pp.95105.This Pense is called Pascals Memorial and it records his religious experience on 23 November 1654. This is often called Pascals night of fre because the word fre is the word that begins the account of the experience after Pascal has set the experience in the context of the Churchs liturgical life. The text comes to us because when Pascals body was being prepared for burial, they noticed that his doublet (waistcoat) had something inside it and, undoing the stitching, they discovered a piece of paper and a parchment on which Pascal had recorded his experience of God and the emotions and thoughts which came to him. (McDade and OConnell will introduce you to the differences between the paper and parchment versions, the Biblical sources which Pascal quotes either directly or indirectly and some of the issues surrounding the nature of this experience which has fascinated commentators across the centuries.) One of the important points it makes is the sharp distinction between God as revealed and God as thought by philosophers and scholars. On the one hand, there is the Old Testament formula by which God presents himself to Moses (the God of Abraham, etc (Exod. 3.15) a revelation which culminates for Pascal in the God of Jesus Christ and on the other hand there is the God of the philosophers and scholars. God can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels, a phrase which is repeated later when, in the middle of Pascals distress that he might be cut off from Christ, he writes: He can only be kept by the ways taught in the Gospel. (Pascal was afraid that God would withdraw his favour from him and abandon him to perdition; his dying words were, May God not abandon me.) This experience seems to teach Pascal that God cannot be found by intellectual argument. It is signifcant that one of the insights Pascal takes from this religious experience is that when God makes himself known and Pascal understands this as taking place in the life of ancient Israel, in the person of Jesus Christ, in the New Testament, in the prophecies and miracles by which God speaks well about God, in the life of the Church and in experiences of consolation effected by divine grace this is different from, and superior to, all our attempts to reach or think God through reason. He is quite clear that there is a disjunction between reason and the heart: by reason he will mean the way we use our minds to follow arguments and prove scientifc conclusions; by heart he will mean the way in which we are attentive to God. The heart is the core of identity, open to Gods action but also our capacity to intuit frst principles and axioms in science: we sense that they are true. By heart he does not mean an emotional intuition, but rather a direct quality of attentiveness. For example, think of what it is like to listen to music and to be completely caught up in the fow of sound. For Pascal, attending to God is closer to that experience than to following a logical sequence by which we establish Gods existence. (Weil will say that prayer is an attentiveness to God.) Pascal would probably have agreed with the statement that a God who can be proved, by defnition cannot be God, because God is not in a category of things that can be handled by analytic reason. Remember that Pascal was a world-class mathematician and scientist, highly skilled in the use of reason, but he was clear that its competence was in things of the world, not in dealing with God. According to Pascals Augustinian theology, God alone could bring people to faith; arguments and reasoning could not be generative because the movement is from the heart to the mind and not from the mind to the heart. Arguments addressed to the mind could only be aimed at making human beings aware of what they are like, of their misre and grandeur. See the programme he sets for himself in 130. Pascal was teaching The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas12people how to be lucid about themselves, to induce a sense of human truthfulness;God would do the rest, and only God could do the rest. But what he was trying to do was give an account which could both embrace and transcend the human condition by positing a saving way centred on Jesus Christ: Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness. (192)His characterisation of what a person should see about him/herself is equally dialectical:He must not see nothing at all, nor must he see enough to think that he possesses God, but he must see enough to know that he has lost himWhatever course he adopts, I will not leave him in peace.(449)Activity What is the difference between experience of God and thought about God? Pascal seems to oppose them. Is he right? Read and summarise the article by Moles on how Pascal thinks of the heart and then comment on the following Penses:423:The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.424:It is the heart which perceives God and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.110:We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart.298:The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out the causes of love; that would be absurd.Read and Analyse 449, one of the most important Penses. Here you will fnd:a.Pascals distinction between a misguided version of Christian faith (worshipping a God considered to be great and mighty and eternal, which is properly speaking deism, almost as remote from the Christian religion as atheism); and the true God of Christianity (a God of love and consolation, a God who flls the soul and heart of those whom he possesses). Surely there is here an echo of the Memorial. Notice the distinction Pascal makes between God seen by heathens and Epicureans, God seen by Jews and God experienced by Christians. Should these different approaches be set in opposition to one another, as Pascal seems to do, or should they be more positively related to one another?b.His doubts about the value of arguments from reason about Gods existence or the Trinity or immortality: he does not think that they will be enough to persuade someone to believe. Is he right to say that you cannot reason towards faith?c.His assertion that Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the centre towards which all things tend. See 212. Why does he say this and what does it mean?d.The dialectic of knowing both that there is a God and that humans are wretched through their participation in the history of self-destructive sin. It is of equal importance to know each of these points, but it is dangerous to know one of them without the other. Note the centrality of Christ here: It is perfectly possible to know God but not our own wretchedness [Pascal thinks that this is one of the things wrong with the attempt to deal with God through reason] or our Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)13own wretchedness without God; but it is not possible to know Christ without knowing both God and our wretchedness alike. Christ reveals both of these necessary truths and so we cannot understand God without him and we cannot understand ourselves without him. Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything. See 18992. Pense 608 is a wonderful, thoroughly Biblical, description of the offces of Christ, what Christ does for humanity. Boredom and diversionSome remarks by the American novelist Walker Percy echo Pascals view of boredom as a symptom of something seriously wrong with us: Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.for the last two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever-heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels more imprisoned in itself no, worse than imprisoned, because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him and the world to be openBoredom is the self being stuffed with itself.(Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self-Help Book, pp.7176: The Bored Self: Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored.)Walker Percy has learned from Pascal that boredom is an important symptom of our inner life. His observations and analyses of boredom have been appreciated by readers through the centuries as small masterpieces: 24: Mans condition is inconstancy, boredom and anxiety. 622: Man fnds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair. Pascal thinks that our natural state, as a consequence of the history of sin which we inherit and in which we are disposed to share, is disorientation: 400: Man does not know the place he should occupyHe searches everywhere, anxiously but in vain, in the midst of impenetrable darkness. Through sin we have lost our true good: 397: Since mans true nature has been lost, anything can become his nature: similarly, true good being lost, anything can become his true good. In the absence of a true good that satisfes us, we are irremediably bored: 136: Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament, and he is so vain that, though he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be enough to divert him. Even someone who loses his son and is caught up in lawsuits and quarrels, Pascal says and he may be thinking of a particular person he knew will give all his attention to hunting with his dogs for six hours. That is all he needs, says Pascal. And as a way of avoiding the truth about ourselves, we give our attention to activities which divert us, compulsive displacement activities that can take our mind off things and give us temporary relief from facing up to the mess we are in. Pense 136 is the most extended description of this and you should read it with enjoyment and self-criticism. Enjoy too his evaluation of the bored king in 137. The human heart may be hollow and foul (139), but it is also extremely superfcial. See his account of dreams in 803 and the confusion of what is real and what is imagined. The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas14ActivityAnalyse Pascals account of seeking happiness in 148.Analyse how he views true religion and what it must teach us in 149. It is commonly held that the opening words of this Pense, APR, stands for Port-Royal (at Port-Royal), and that this may be part of an address he gave there on how to persuade free-thinkers of the truth of Christianity. Why does he divide humanity into three sorts of people in 160? Is he right? Pascal on the Three OrdersReadingPenses 25, 26, 308, 513, 533, 933, 977; Krailsheimer (1980), p.48 and the following; I Cor 1.31; 2 Cor 10.17.Begin by reading 533, Pascals cynical, but very serious, description of politics and power. Plato and Aristotle, he says, directed their political philosophy towards a madhouse where deluded people imagine they are kings and emperors. This is not a harmless joke: Pascal is a sharp analyst of the mechanism whereby political power imposes itself on people through display, by the visual impression of greatness. Read also his comment on lawyers in 87, 89, 90 and 104; see also 25, 26, 44 and 60 for accounts of how doctors and lawyers try to impress us. His analysis of power, inheritance and imagination in 828 is devastating. In other important Penses, he distinguishes between what he calls the three orders of physical display, intellectual power and holiness.Read 933, one version of the distinction: The frst order is that of the fesh, the body, the eyes: the carnal [= those dominated by the senses] are rich men and kings. Things of the fesh are properly governed by concupiscence. Understand concupiscence not sexually (Pascal does not highlight sexual desire as the key to what is wrong with us) but as a disorder, inconsistency and selfshness through all the dimensions of the self. We would now include the world of celebrity in which looks determine fame and fortune. The second order is that of intellectual inquiry, science, mathematics and conceptual understanding: inquirers and scholars: their interest is in the mind. (The word for scholars here is savants, the same word used in the Memorial: not the God of the philosophers and learned (savants). Things of the mind [are governed] by curiosity.The third order is that of the wise: their interest is in what is right. Wisdom is the only thing one can take pride in not in a selfsh way because wisdom comes from God. (Compare St Paul in I Cor 1.31; 2 Cor 10.17.)When he reworks this distinction in 308, he gives a fuller account of the third order, that of grace and holiness (note also 298). These are three orders differing in kind. The following table outlines his ideas: Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)15Some comments on Pascals Three OrdersIf you are in the order of the body, you will fnd it hard to see the greatness of Archimedes because you expect to be dazzled by beauty, power and display; greatness in argumentation will mean nothing to you. If you are in the order of the mind, you may fail to understand why people are taken in by vacuous displays of glamour, parades, physical beauty (or strangeness!). But because youre human, you cannot fail to be in some measure susceptible to impressions made in the order of the body because Pascal thinks that imagination is the dominant faculty in man, master of error and falsehood (44). The senses deceive reason through false appearances (44); we are prone to being misled because there is no consistent centre to our identity and we can be thrown in every direction by views, sights, feelings, etc. The power of kings is founded on the reason and the folly of the people, but especially on their folly (26). Pascal is clear that there is a greatness in the order of the body; but those who are attuned only to the dominance of display, appearance, image, will fnd it impossible to appreciate the greatness that there is in the second order, that of the mind, and that found in the third order, that of holiness. Equally, those whose dominant mode is in the second order and who understand greatness as primarily intellectual, rational argument will fnd it hard to appreciate the greatness of Jesus and the saints who make an impression through their humility, and not through intellectual persuasion or visual display. Why does Pascal separate these orders and why does he think that they are discontinuous and incommensurate with one another? In part, in order to allow that the dimension of Gods action in revelation and grace has its own autonomy: it is not a product of human thinking and energy. As we saw in the Memorial, he makes a radical disjunction between using rational argument to deal with the God question and Gods action in revelation which Pascal thinks is self-authenticating. (But note the place of OrderFeature Exemplifed inMakes an impact on Impression Effect on us Who is affected?The body (le corps)extended in spacekings, rich men, captains(les charnels)the eye we are visually dazzled by displays of power and beautywe become excited, impressed or frightened probably everyone, but philosophers to a lesser extent, and saints even less, if at allThe mind (lesprit)thought (a non-physical process)Archimedes (Ancient Greek scientist)the mind we are convinced by rational argument in philosophy and sciencewe gain intellectual conviction and clarity of understandingintellectuals, philosophers, scientists. Not those dominated by the order of the body and displayHoliness(la saintt)invisible grace and divine actionJesus Christ and the saintsthe heart: centre of identity and contact with God and intuition of truthwe are moved by the signs of holiness and humilitywe are given gentleness of spirit, wisdom and spiritual giftsonly those touched effectively by grace (and Pascal did not think that everyone was); but those dominated by the eyes or by the mind would not recognise greatness hereTable 1.1: Pascals Three Orders The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas16reasoned arguments in how God deals with us in 172 also a sharp counter to force and terror in religion. Remember that Pascal himself was outstanding in the second order of intellectual and scientifc inquiry. He is also following Descartes in holding that the property of bodies (extension in space) is distinct from the property of mind (thought), and of course the third element he introduces is that of divine grace which is infnitely superior to the two other orders and is radically discontinuous with it. Pascal affrms that there is greatness in three orders which are discontinuous with one another and which are incommensurate. They are three orders differing in kind. Pascal sees a threefold division in our present condition between the heart (the locus of Gods action), the mind in its rational discursiveness and the senses. He judges that our senses do not see the level of greatness associated with the operations of thought: so for those attracted to worldly glory, the greatness of Archimedes means nothing; analogously, the reason cannot see the greatness associated with the work of grace and holiness. So, philosophy will be unable to appreciate the greatness of Christ and the saints who have their own level of greatness. In 308, he develops this at length as a way of showing that the heart has its order of greatness which is beyond the grasp of the reason. In this way, Pascal, while insisting on the greatness of thought, places limitations on its scope of judgement and leaves a space for faith and the knowledge of God which is brought about by Gods action in the soul. ActivityCan the heart, mind and senses be distinguished in this way? Is this too schematic?Understand its value in relation to the distinction between faith, intellectual inquiry and sensory impression.Appreciate its basis in Pascals view of the heart as the seat of charity and grace and in his scepticism about the capacity of reason to deal with God.Evaluate his argument that there is a gulf between the action of grace and human thought. Comment on 118: mans greatness even in his concupiscence. He has managed to produce such a remarkable system from it and make it the image of true charity. God and revelationPascal is a highly original writer on religious matters. One of his most remarkable writings is a letter he wrote to a young woman, Charlotte de Roannez, whom he was directing spiritually. In it, he argues that Gods revelation is in fact simultaneously a progressive concealment. The text of the letter and a brief commentary on it can be found in McDade (2004). ActivityIs Pascal right to say that it is more diffcult to recognise God in Christ than before God revealed himself in this way?Is revelation a process of God making himself more easily known? Or is Gods revelation in Christ accompanied by a concealment? What if, as Pascal following Augustine seems to say, God deliberately reveals himself only to some (probably a small number) and not to most human beings? How is this compatible with believing that God wills all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2.4)?You may not like the conclusions Pascal comes to here, but is there an element of truth in it? Does God reveal himself equally to all? Consider the issues.Chapter 1: Blaise Pascal (162362)17Lost in the cosmosReadingPenses 198, 199, 2001. The fnal sections we will consider briefy are the extended descriptions Pascal offers of human beings lost in the cosmos, caught between two infnites whose limits they cannot see: the infnitely vast extent of the cosmos and the infnitely minute elements that compose matter. Remember that Pascal writes this at a time when telescopes and microscopes were becoming instruments of scientifc investigation of nature. He tries to evoke a sense of humanity set between physical poles that cannot be accurately determined, and he wants to use this to induce a sense of metaphysical vertigo among unbelievers who think they have gone beyond religion. He wants them to feel unstable in what they know and to feel too unstable in the world they inhabit so that they can be shaken to their toes with anxiety. You can decide whether he succeeds or not when you read 198 and 199. His writing here is magnifcent he is a great prose stylist. The famous Pense 201: The eternal silence of these infnite spaces flls me with dread, probably records not Pascals own thought, but an idea he wants to place in the mind of his free-thinking reader. He is guided here by St Augustine who had written in his commentary on the Psalms: Why do you contemplate the world with astonishment, and not the maker of the world? You lift your eyes to the heavens and you are struck with fear...You consider the whole of the earth and you shiver (Augustine, On Psalm 145, n.12.). Augustine had taught that the contemplation of the world gave the believer an immediate evidence of the Creator while others stumble in the dark, and he pointed to the infnitely small scale of insect life in ways which show that Pascal had learned from him:who organised the limbs of the fea and of the midge, so that they have their place in the creation, that they have their own lives, that they have their own movement? Examine a small animal, as small as you wish...who gave a snout to the midge to suck blood? How small is its snout by which it drinks it! Who organised, who performed these wonders? You are seized with astonishment and you should therefore praise the greatness of their Maker. (Augustine, On Psalm 148.10)The psalmist may say that the heavens proclaim the glory of God, but Pascal does not treat the heavens in that way quite the reverse: the world is silent. Where Augustine used these wonders of the minute and also vast world as a proof of God, Pascal does not treat it as a means by which people would come to know God. His treatment of the cosmos is that its scale is meant to terrify us, not persuade us that there is a loving God. This is a signifcant and original feature of how he views the triad of God, the world and us. In a sense, the description of this kind of French seventeenth century religion by the French Marxist Lucien Goldmann has something to commend it: it offers a tragic view of existence characterised by a triple alienation, from the world, from the self and from God: all three are problematic and we are unable to situate ourselves comfortably in relation to all three. Notice, however, the signifcance of Pense 200: the world may be large but through thought humans can encompass it: the physical order is transcended in the order of mind, and as we saw in his account of the Three Orders, mind is transcended by grace and holiness.ActivityEvaluate Pascals treatment of the infnites in 199. Does it achieve its desired effect? Comment on 200: man is a thinking reed, etc.The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas18SummaryPascal gives a dialectical account of our human condition, in which our capacity for greatness (grandeur) is balanced by our subjection to frustration (misre). It is not a simple task, then, to fnd our way towards fulflment. He thinks that human life outside the work of grace exhibits the effects of sin (see 131 and 695). This makes it very diffcult for us to fnd our way towards our true good and our true fulflment. For him, one of the major symptoms of this is our capacity for boredom and our endless desire for diversion. He thinks too that the three orders of body, mind and grace, make it diffcult for human beings to be unifed in relation to God: we are impressed by visual appearances and reasoned arguments, often at the expense of responding to God through the heart. He holds that God makes his presence felt by human beings, but he seems to think that this happens only to some and not to others. But he wants human beings to recognise the truth of their condition so that we might know better just what our position is in relation to God and fulflment. Learning outcomes By the end of this chapter, and having completed the relevant reading and activities, you should be able to:discuss why Pascal distinguishes between the God of Abraham, etc and the God of the Philosophersappreciate the signifcance of his Memorialdiscuss what he means by the three orders and its valueevaluate the merits of his argument about the two infnites in which human life is setdiscuss the distinction between reason and the heartdiscuss the signifcance which Pascal sees in boredom and diversion.Sample examination questions1.God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Discuss this distinction and why it is important for Pascal.2.Is it helpful to distinguish between the three orders as strictly as Pascal does?3.According to Pascal, why do we get bored? 4.The eternal silence of these infnite spaces flls me with dread. Discuss. 5.Is it helpful to think of the Incarnation as a concealment in which only some can recognise God? Chapter 2: Franz Kafka (18831924)19Chapter 2Franz Kafka (18831924)Essential readingPrimary textsKafka, F. The Complete Short Stories. (Vintage, 2008) [ISBN 9780749399467]. For the purposes of this module, you should read the following stories: Longer stories 1.Metamorphosis2.In the Penal Colony3.A Hunger Artist.Shorter stories1.Before the Law2.An Imperial Message3.The Knock at the Manor Gate4.The City Coat of Arms5.On the Tram.Kafka, F. The Trial. (Penguin, 2000) [ISBN 9780141182902] or The Trial in The Complete Novels. (Vintage, 2008) [ISBN 9780099518440]. (Note: the chapter from The Trial, In the Cathedral, which includes the story Before the Law is available on the VLE).Kafka, F. Refections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way (The Zrau Aphorisms), ed. M. Brod (VLE).Secondary textsBuber, M. The Knowledge of Man. (Allen and Unwin, 1965) [no ISBN], p.140 and the following.Feuerlicht, I. Kafkas Chaplain, The German Quarterly 39 (1966), pp.20822 (Lucid exposition of Before the Law in its setting in The Trial).Grzinger, K.E. The Trial and the Tradition of the Gatekeeper in the Kabbalah in Kafka and Kabbalah. (Continuum, 1994), pp.1532. Grzingers book is a superb study relating similarities in imagery of The Trial and Jewish mystical traditions (Kabbalah) (VLE).Idel, M. Kabbalah: New Perspectives. (Yale University Press, 1988) [ISBN 0300038607].Neumeyer, P.F. Franz Kafka, Sugar Baron, Modern Fiction Studies 17 (1971), pp.516, followed by Neumeyers translation of Chapter 14 of Oskar Webers The Second Home that, he argues, infuenced Kafkas In the Penal Colony, (op. cit.), pp.1719 (persuasive account of possible sources).Peters, P. Witness to the Execution: Kafka and Colonialism, Monatshefte 93 (2001), pp.40125.Robertson, R. Kafka: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford University Press, 2004) [ISBN 9780192804556] (excellent, informative study).Robertson, R. Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) [ISBN 0198158149 (pbk)], pp.10530 (on The Trial and Before the Law) (VLE). Note: please be aware that the quotations from Kafka are in German in this superb study of Kafka and Judaism. The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas20Robertson, R. Edwin Muir as Critic of Kafka, Modern Language Review 79 (1984), pp.63852 (interesting on Kafkas style of writing too).Satz, M. and Z. Ozsvath A Hunger Artist and In the Penal Colony in the light of Schopenhauerian Metaphysics, German Studies Review (1978), pp.20010.Steinberg, E.R. The Judgment in Kafkas In the Penal Colony, Journal of Modern Literature 5 (1976), pp.492514 (religious reading of this story).Zilcosky, J. Savage Travel: Sadism and Masochism in Kafkas Penal Colony, in Kafkas Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism and the Traffc of Writing. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) [ISBN 0312232810; 1403967679 (pbk); 9781403967671], pp.10321 (sado-masochism and colonialism).Other recommended readingReference will be made throughout to Kafkas The Trial. A good way into it is Orson Welles 1962 flm of The Trial, outstanding in its own right and a powerful interpretation of the novel. Also recommended is the German director Michael Hanekes flm of The Castle (1997). Both are available on DVD. Read too, J.L. Borges short story, The Library of Babel and his essay, Kafka and his Precursors in Labyrinths (Penguin, 2000) [ISBN 0141184841 (pbk)]. Borges is inspired by Kafkas fctional style. Additional readingPrimary textsKafka, F. The Blue Octavo Notebooks. (Exact Exchange, 1991) [ISBN 1878972049].Kafka, F. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. (John Calder, 1978) [ISBN 0714537012].Secondary textsAlter, R. Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem. (Harvard University Press, 1991) [ISBN 0674606639].Fowler, D. In the Penal Colony: Kafkas Unorthodox Theology College Literature (1979) 6/1, pp.11320: a very Christian reading of the story, challenged by P. Neumeyer, Do not teach Kafkas In the Penal Colony, College Literature 6/2 (1979), pp.10312 (Fowler is probably wrong but worth considering).Gross, R.V. Kafkas Short Fiction in Preece, J. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. (Cambridge University Press, 2002) [ISBN 0521663148], pp.8094.Horowitz, R. Kafka and the Crisis in Jewish Religious Thought, Modern Judaism 15 (1995), pp.2133.Janouch, G. Conversations with Kafka. (New Directions, 1971) and (Quartet, 1985) [ISBN 070433481X] (probably an embellished, fctional account but highly regarded by Max Brod and Dora Diamant who knew Kafka well (extracts on VLE)).Kelman, J. A Look at Franz Kafkas Three Novels in And the Judges Said: Essays. (Polygon, 2008) [ISBN 1846970520 (pbk); 9781846970528 (pbk)], pp.266336.Mairowitz, D.Z. and R. Crumb Introducing Kafka. (Icon Books, 2007) (Crumb is a master artist in the genre of graphic novels; the images of Kafkas stories are very striking).Moses, S. Gershom Scholems Reading of Kafka: Literary Criticism and Kabbalah, New German Critique 77 (1999), pp.14967 (opens up interesting Jewish perspectives).Norris, M. Sadism and Masochism in In der strafkolonie [In the Penal Colony] and Ein Hungerkunstler [A Hunger Artist], MLN 93 (1978), pp.43047 (theory-guided comparison of two stories of publicly observed pain: useful in parts).Oates, J.C. Kafkas Paradise, The Hudson Review 26 (197374), pp.62346 (an excellent creative reading of Kafka by a modern American novelist).Robert, M. Franz Kafkas Loneliness. (Faber and Faber, 1982) [ISBN 057111945X].Chapter 2: Franz Kafka (18831924)21Robertson, R. In Search of the Historical Kafka: A Selective Review of Research 198092, Modern Language Review 89 (1994), pp.10737.Robertson, R. Kafkas Zrau Aphorisms, Oxford German Studies 14 (1983), pp.7391.Ryan, M.P. Samsa and Samsara: Suffering, Death and Rebirth in The Metamorphosis, The German Quarterly 72 (1999), pp.13352 (a possible Schopenhauer infuence in this story).Stach, R. Kafka: The Decisive Years. (Harcourt, 2005) [ISBN 0151007527 (hbk); 9780151007523 (hbk)] (important study of Kafkas life and work between 191015 when he wrote Amerika, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and The Trial).Stern, J.P. and J.J. White Paths and Labyrinths. (University of London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1985) [ISBN 0854571248].Wagenbach, K. Kafka. (Haus Publishing, 2003) [ISBN 1904341020 (pbk); 1904341012 (hbk)] (a short biography with fne insights into the stories and their relation to Kafka himself).WebsitesThe Kafka Project by Mauro Nervi: www.kafka.org/index.php?project for some Kafka short stories online, including translations into English. IntroductionFranz Kafka is for many people the characteristic voice of twentieth century European fction, but because he is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, why study him in this module? As we shall suggest later, there is good reason to think of him as an unusual and original religious thinker characteristic of post-religious European secularity. Alter writes: What Kafka sought to do was to convert the distinctive quandaries of Jewish existence into images of the existential dilemmas of mankind as suchhis stories are repeatedly and variously concerned with questions such as exile, assimilation, endangered community, revelation, commentary, law, tradition and commandment. These themes are often made to refect the neurotic obsessions that tormented Kafka, but not necessarily with a diminution of their universal implications, and sometimes Kafka articulates them as general refections on culture and theology, especially in the shorter pieces. (Alter, 1991, p.53)His parables and extended novellas dramatise the characteristic experiences of modern life: radical uncertainty, the impersonal exercise of harsh authority, a bureaucratisation that crushes individuality and a world in which originally religious themes become distorted, inevitable and impossible. While a Biblical parable points to some defnite meaning, Kafkas parables point to a world without defnite values (Feuerlicht (1966), p.216). Stach writes about The Trial: Here Kafkas private dream merges with the nightmare of modernity: the virtual expropriation of life taking place behind all our backs. No matter what choices we make, we remain a case for whom rules, regulations and institutions already exist. Our most spontaneous stirrings remain within the cage of a world that is thoroughly organized and determined.(Stach, 2005, pp.47677)Kafka seems to capture the anxious vulnerability of an individual struggling under the presence of an inscrutable authority that governs them and from which they cannot free themselves. Organised and oppressive bureaucracy; excessive demands made on individuals; family life which damages its members: these are some of the themes Kafka deals with. He seems to many people to offer in his stories insights into how The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas22structures and systems act against the human good, even positive institutions like the family. Robertson writes that the family, for Kafka, is the place where power, guilt, law and punishment originate (Robertson, 2004, p.72). In a letter to his sister Elli, Kafka writes about the dynamics in family life:The family is an organism, but an extremely complex and unbalanced one [in which there is] the monstrous superiority in power of the parents vis--vis the children for so many years Thus tyranny or slavery, born of selfshness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery. Tyranny can express itself as great tenderness (You must believe me, since I am your mother) and slavery can express itself as pride (You are my son, so I will make you into my saviour). But these are two frightful educational methods, and likely to trample the child back into the ground from which he came. (Letters to Friends, 1978, pp.29596)If forms of manipulation can be instilled into us from an early age by those who love us, no wonder human beings fnd living complicated. The modern Scottish novelist, James Kelman relates Kafkas preoccupation with authority and guilt to what we experience as children growing up in a world whose rules are opaque:An individual is confronted by authority from birth. One reason why children have such a highly developed sense of injustice is because they are frequently breaking rules of whose existence they are unaware. In general they know these mysterious rules may exist, it is particular cases that present problems. This is why many children go around as though expecting a sudden retribution, a sudden strike of the hand from an adult. In a sense growing up is an exercise in hermeneutics [the science of interpretation]. (Kelman, 2002, p.272)If we remember too that themes of authority, retribution, rules, justice and injustice, and related ideas in Kafka about guilt, innocence, power, incomprehension and judgement, are also powerful ideas in the Jewish and Christian religions, you can begin to sense that there are at least implicitly religious themes foating around the issues which Kafka raises often in a non-religious way. He will give us questions about the reality of our lives rather than answers about how to live better, and that is no bad thing. Truth and honesty are the basis of a proper life, even if they cannot be determined easily. If Kafka does not give us clear answers, he certainly points us to important questions in the simplest form possible, namely through stories and parables that anyone can read but which refective readers will enjoy more than others. Jewish story-telling is alive and well in Kafkas fction, and you should be aware that in this style of religious discourse, parables can be remarkably creative instruments of religious teaching. The philosophical and theological scaffolding that supports Kafkas stories is not visible, but it is there to be investigated and his stories do raise issues that are of ultimate concern to human life. Read the stories; attend to their details; do the work of interpretation and think of what the wider signifcance of the story might be. Re-reading the stories after reading the interpretations of them by critics is important: you will see things which you did not spot frst time round. Welcome to the world of Kafka.ActivityWhat quandaries of existence does Kafka address? Analyse his account of the dynamics in a family and Kelmans development of his ideas. Chapter 2: Franz Kafka (18831924)23Stories and meaningsKafka is a writer of highly imaginative fction, neither a philosopher nor a theologian, but it is what his stories suggest as interpretations of human life that draws philosophers, religious and non-religious thinkers to his work. You may decide after reading him that you dont like him, but you will fnd that his unusual perspective will stay with you and you will be aware of traces of Kafkas ideas in the way you subsequently think; obviously this will depend on the scale of imaginative involvement you foster. Edwin Muir (who frst translated Kafka into English) said:The problem with which all Kafkas work is concerned is a moral and spiritual one. It is a twofold problem: that of fnding ones true vocation, ones true place, whatever it may be, in the community; and that of acting in accordance with the will of heavenly powers. But though it has those two aspects it was in his eyes a single problem; for a mans true place in the community is fnally determined not by secular, but by divine, law, and only when, by apparent chance or deliberate effort, a man fnds himself in his divinely appointed place, can he live as he should. (Introductory note to The Great Wall of China (Secker, 1933), p.xii)But what if divine law is not available to us now? It might have been available in the past: Kafka was very interested in the pre-modern Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe which he came into contact with. But as Muir pointed out, In The Castle and The Trial [Kafkas two greatest novels], the postulates [Kafka] begins with are the barest possible; they are roughly these: that there is a right way of life, and that the discovery of it depends on ones attitude to powers which are almost unknown (Introductory note to The Castle (1930), emphasis added; compare Robertson, 1984). Now if there is a right way of life and fnding it depends on how one regards powers, it will be diffcult to fnd that way of life if those powers are unknown. Muirs own comment on Kafka is eminently Kafkaesque: He is a great story-teller because there is no story for him to tell; so that he has to make it up (Robertson (1984), p.650; the whole article is very informative about the kind of writer Kafka is). Perhaps our situation, as Kafka sees it, is that there is a right path but it is not given to us to know what it is. Or, as he put it in one of his aphorisms: There is a goal, but no way. What we call the way is hesitation. A strange remark, but it encapsulates Kafkas sense that our condition is one that is not capable of fulflment. One can compare this with a similar remark by Weil: This world is a closed door. It is a barrier, and at the same time it is the passage-way (Notebooks II, 1991, p.491). ActivityWhat might Kafka mean by hesitation here? Well, we often hesitate before we do something because we dont know what we are to do or how we are to do it. But we know that something is to be done, whatever it is and however it is to be done. And so our way is marked by uncertainty. Does this tell us something about what our condition is? Possibly. It is certainly characteristic of Kafka: Kafkaesque, as wenow say.Weve already started interpreting Kafka, and you will have seen that the interpretation depends upon the work that you do as the reader. Kafka, as well see below, is not an omniscient guide, illuminating all aspects of life and its puzzles. How Kafka might have understood hesitation might be illuminated by a diary entry he made on 24 January 1922, two years before his death from tuberculosis: Hesitation before birth. If there really is such a thing as the transmigration of the soul, then I have not yet attained the The tasks of life: Pascal, Kafka, Weil and Levinas24lowest stage. My life is the hesitation before birth. It gives a sense that Kafka did not think that his life was substantial or signifcant, at least not yet. But you as a reader are interested not only in what Kafka might have meant by it, but how in its denseness (opacity) it might be interpreted by you in a way that throws some light on the way you are and what tasks your life has to face. Compare this aphorism with another statement he makes: I was not lead into life by the sinking hand of Christianity, like Kierkegaard, nor did I catch the last tip of the Jewish prayer-shawl before it few away, like the Zionists. I am the end or the beginning. (Quoted in Wagenbach, 2003, p.viii) In this remark, Kafka presents himself as drawn neither to Christian faith (sinking hand is not a compliment) although Kierkegaard was one of his favourite Christian writers nor to the revisionist, land-centred version of Judaism offered by Zionism. (See Robertson, 2004, p.107 and the following for Kafka on Christianity and Judaism; Wagenbach, 2003, pp.2427.) Precisely because Kafka was an original religious thinker, one needs to grasp his thought on its own terms before relating it to other systems (Robertson, 1994, p.119). Partly through his contact with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and through his contact with East European Hasidic communities and Yiddish theatre groups, he became interested in Judaism. His Zrau Aphorisms, composed towards the end of his life are probably the closest he came to working out rules for living and accessing truth. (Robertson (1983) will introduce them to you.) Although drawn towards the end of his life to Jewish traditions, if not to Jewish religious observance and belief his fnal lover, Dora Diamant, was a strong infuence on him in these matters Kafka retained the secrecy of an inner sanctum of personal identity that did not open itself to an identifcation with the social aspects of religion. (You might see a parallel with Weil who also shared this sense of isolation.) By describing himself as end or beginning, Kafka seems to sense that he is at the last stages of a particular cultural development (before and after World War I) and at the start of something different. What he will do in his stories is to draw upon inherited traditions of popular and direct story-telling (he draws upon powerful Jewish themes from central Europe but was not himself religiously Jewish) and at the same time to cast an individual light on central questions of identity and meaning. The danger which interpreters face is that they may read too much into the stories, making Kafka more of a systematic thinker, either culturally or religiously, than he actually was. But there is no denying the incisiveness of his attempt to say where we are, humanly and culturally. Occasionally, the sharpness of his imagery takes your breath away as he tries to describe the state of human life:Seen with the terrestrially sullied eye, we are in the situation of travellers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties. Round about us, however, in the confusion of our senses, or in the supersensitiveness of our senses, we have nothing but monstrosities and a kaleidoscopic play of things that is either delightful or exhausting according to the mood and injury of each individual. What shall I do? or: Why should I do it? are not questions to be asked in such places.(The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1991, p.15)Chapter 2: Franz Kafka (18831924)25ActivityAnalyse Muirs interpretation of Kafkas central idea and how he thought of Kafkas fction (see Robertson, 1984).Is hesitation a useful way of characterising our condition? Can be religious without being personally involved in the practice of a religion. What then would be the meaning of religious? What might Kafka mean by saying (above) that we are in the situation of travellers in a train crash and therefore ethical questions cannot be asked? Why not?Religion in Kafka?ReadingMoses (1999); Grzinger (1994).Kafka instructed his friend Max Brod to burn all his writings after his death; only a small number of short stories by Kafka were published during his lifetime. Brod refused to obey Kafkas instructions, and became responsible for publishing the rest of his work, including his three large novels, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika (The Man who Disappeared). He then promoted an image of Kafka as an explicitly religious teacher, making Kafkas writings serve his own aim of revitalising modern Judaism in association with Zionism and insisted on deriving from them a positive message that other readers failed to fnd (Robertson in Wagenbach, 2003, p.viii). Brod promoted a religious reading of the stories which are viewed as religious allegories: for example, Joseph K. in The Trial is portrayed as being pursued by a divine justice that he does not understand, and the Land Surveyor in The Castle is searching for Divine Grace; these are too glib and programmatic to be satisfactory readings of these subtle texts, but you may fnd this perspective attractive. Another friend of Kafka, Gustave Janouch, offered a hagiographical account of Kafka in his Conversations with Kafka, portraying him as a mystical sage delivering masterly judgements on a range of issues; although Brod thought it was authentic, modern scholars doubt the accuracy of this portrayal. (An interesting extract is on the VLE.) Against this, Scholem and Benjamin, two great Jewish scholars, make him a post-religious writer portraying a world in which God is absent, or where there are still traces of a (now absent) God (Robertson, 2004, p.111; Horowitz, 1995). This has much to commend it. It is worth reading Stphane Moses words carefully:Gershom Scholem had a lifelong fascination with Franz Kafkas oeuvre, in which he saw a paradigmatic image of the spirit of our age: the meticulous presentation of a world void of the idea of the divine, yet one in which immanence itself must be read as the inverse of a lost transcendence. A theological reading of Kafka? Not, in any case, in the sense Max Brod had in mind in his attempt to understand Kafka using positive religious categories. For Brod, The Trial and T