Franz Kafka is a writer who I think really makes the most of the uncertainty inherent in perception. The Kafkaesque is really all about the failure to understand what is going on around one: situations absurd and nonsensical; strange images that don’t add up; bodies that move in absurd and exaggerated ways; people who act with indecipherable motives.
The main difference between sense-certainty and perception: the former is certain of what it sees, while the latter cannot be certain of anything. Sense-certainty has direct knowledge of objects, while perception’s knowledge is mediated through its “perceptions,” i.e. universals such as the “redness” or “roundness” that it sees before it; it can never know for sure whether there is more information to be had, or whether it has failed to add up its perceptions correctly and got a false impression. The “object” is something dark and mysterious for perception, because all it really has access to is the perceptions of the object, and never the object itself. For example: the oar that seems to bend when seen through the water shows that the same object can take on very different appearances depending on the circumstances. And so the appearance of the object is not the object itself.
There’s a particular story by Kafka that jumps to mind, an unfinished work called “Wedding Preparations in the Country.” It really seems to play with the difference between sense-certainty and perception, between the possibility of certainty and its impossibility.
Eduard Raban is on his way to the countryside to be married. But he is not certain he wants to travel today and after all it’s already getting late. Perhaps he’ll go tomorrow. In fact, Raban is not certain of anything very much, arrives at conclusions about the world around him only very slowly, and seems very glad and grateful when other people are around who can help him by telling him what’s what. For example, he asks his friend “Isn’t it rather late, please tell me?” which could be an eccentric way of asking the time, but on the next page he blames his friend for his lateness saying: “But now I am sure it is too late; you have kept it a secret from me, and I shall miss the train. Why?” And there is no suggestion, at least in the parts of the manuscript we have, that he should ever have been expected to discover the lateness of the evening on his own, without his friend’s help. From his own senses he can only arrive at uncertainty; when he wants certainty he must ask others for it. This impression is reinforced by his friend’s parting words:
“I say, Eduard, can you hear me? Do shut your umbrella; it stopped raining ages ago. I didn’t have a chance to tell you.” Though we’ve all walked around with an umbrella still up after it stopped raining, there’s something about the urgency with which his friend calls back to him that tells us that Eduard Raban might never have discovered it had stopped raining had he not been told so.
So it’s a story about a man who is slow to trust his senses, but seems to trust fully in the certainty of others. How can I know what to believe? If I’m alone, then only through long and careful consideration, and still I will remain uncertain. If others are around then I simply ask and the truth is presented to me.
Sense-certainty in contrast to perception. The dream that an object might immediately give up everything that you could possibly know about it is what makes perception, in contrast, seem so uncertain. Raban believes that others have this gift of immediate insight that he lacks and so he still clings to the dream of sense-certainty. If he could only see that the world is entirely made up of perceptions, that “object-hood” is really just a fiction and there is nothing more to know beyond appearances, then he would be cured. He could behave like everyone else: making judgements based on his perceptions and stating those judgements confidently to give the impression of certainty.
David Hume distinguished between the “vulgar” and the “philosophical” way of looking at the world. To describe something as “vulgar” is a rather outdated way of saying it is common to most people. According to Hume, most people believe they perceive objects directly: I see tables, chairs, and cars before I notice hardness, squareness, blueness, and so on. It’s only the philosopher who sees that this is impossible and our “perceptions” must come first, and we can never be certain any object really exists under the bundle of impressions. We might say that Raban is someone with a philosophical mind who does not know how to return to the “vulgar” or “common sense” view of the world: he remains uncertain while everyone around him just uses their common sense. He can’t shrug off his philosophical doubts the way that Hume would say he must.
Raban’s slowness to arrive at any conclusion about the world and take any kind of action is, as with many of Kafka’s characters, based on a deep sense that things are not what they seem. That there is something beneath that our perceptions of the world cannot get to. Perception does not have the whole picture, a reader of Kafka knows, because if it did I wouldn’t have this constant sense that something dark and unknown to me is going on underneath the surface.
(I’ve been reading “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, found in The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka. I’m also still reading Barry Stroud’s Hume.)