Illuminations by Hannah Arendt

Author:Hannah Arendt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Some Reflections on Kafka*

Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradition) and, on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller. In speaking of the experience of the big-city dweller, I have a variety of things in mind. On the one hand, I think of the modern citizen who knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with. (It is known that one level of meaning in the novels, particularly in The Trial, is encompassed by this.) When I refer to the modern big-city dweller, I am speaking also of the contemporary of today’s physicists. If one reads the following passage from Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, one can virtually hear Kafka speak.

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