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Religious Language in Wittenstein and Kafka

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Jorn K. Bramann
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In what follows I would like to interpret one of Kafka's most intriguing pieces (“On Similes,” written around 1922/23, but never published during the author's lifetime), and at the same time point out what seems to me a striking similarity between the ways in which Kafka and the early Wittgenstein thought about religious language. My interest in this paper is confined to investigating how Kafka and Wittgenstein approached the problem of religious statements qua “similes,” although what is known about both authors points to further significant parallels in their thinking.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 23 , Issue 90 , March 1975 , pp. 26 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 "Von den Gleinchnissen" in: Franz Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen, ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt a.M., Fischer Verlag, 1969), p. 359. (My translation. The piece has also been translated as "On Parables.")

2 The Philosophical Review 74 (1965), pp. 9-10.

3 It is possible that Wittgenstein was influenced in this by certain remarks in Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation with which Wittgenstein was familiar. Schopenhauer repeatedly expressed the idea that religious state ments convey truth allegorically: "A religion… has only the obligation to be true sensu allegorico, since it is destined for the innumerable multitude who, being incapable of investigating and thinking, would never grasp the profoundest and most difficult truths sensu proprio. Before the people truth cannot appear naked " (Trans. by E.F.J. Payne, vol. II, p. 166). In this passage Schopenhauer assumes, to be sure, that religious language conveys something indirectly which can also be conveyed directly. Sometimes, however, he seems to conceive of religious language as something entirely without sense: "A symptom of this allegorical nature of religions is the mysteries, to be found perhaps in every reli gion, that is, certain dogmas that cannot even be distinctly conceived, much less literally true" (ibid. My italics.)

4 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, new English translation by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinnes (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 4.024.

5 Revelation to John, 20:11-14.

6 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psy chology and Religious Belief, ed. by Cyril Barrett (Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1966), p. 63.

7 Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, ed. B.F. Mc Guinness (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967), p. 117. (My translation).

8 Synthese, An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science 17 (1967), pp. 233-45.

9 Letter to Ludwig von Ficker, July 24, 1915, in: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. Georg Hentik von Wright and Walter Methlagl (Salzburg, Otto Müller Verlag, 1969), p. 28.

10 Leo Tolstoy: A Confession, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe, trans. with an Introduction by A. Maude (London, Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 55.

11 Ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1967), I, 4; I, 10; I, 12; et al.