Episode #229 - Kafka and Totalitarianism (Arendt, Adorno)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Also doing some philosophical writing at Philosophize This on Substack if you're on there, like to read. Hope you love the show today. So Kafka didn't just influence Camus with his work. There were several other major thinkers from the twentieth century that took these images from Kafka's work and then changed the world with their work after having read them. Couple of the most exciting were the philosophers Theodore Adorno and Hannah Arendt. Two very different takes on the exact same work. And we'll talk about both of them today and how Kafka inspired them to develop some of their biggest ideas. Good place to start is probably to talk about how Adorno's take on Kafka differed from Camus's take that we talked about last time. And one way that Adorno says it as he's explaining it, is that Kafka is someone whose work has to be taken literally when you read them. And this can be weird to hear at first. I mean, you think about Kafka's writing, and you think about crazy stuff. Random moments coming out of nowhere, people getting whipped in a closet by a dude in a meat helmet. You don't really know what's gonna happen next. You think of nightmare fuel at times, you know, children laughing, running around from tree to tree behind you. You think of things going on in these books that can never actually happen if you were in real life. And if this is the kind of stuff Kafka is putting out there, then how can Adorno say anyone should be taking this stuff literally? Well, if Camus interpretation is that reading Kafka makes you feel the same way as when you confront the absurdity of existence head on, then Adorno's gonna say that reducing Kafka to just a guy that's trying to depict the human condition crucially misses one of the big things that makes Kafka's work so strong in the first place, that there isn't a single neat allegory that can explain his work away. Let me give an example of what he's trying to avoid here. A lot of people out there may have read George Orwell's Animal Farm at some point. Fun little story about some animals on a farm, pigs, chickens, cows. It's a rural extravaganza for the whole family to enjoy. And it's common knowledge that this story about a farm is actually a story for George Orwell about totalitarianism. The boars represent Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, and the like. The horse represents the proletariat. Sheep are the masses. The fence represents Stalin's prostate problem he was having at the time. Point is, there's all sorts of symbolism that someone can decode while reading Animal Farm. And there's nothing wrong with this, Adorno would say, but what we can't do is treat Kafka's work as though it's the same kind of thing as this. Because what happens, he says, when you read Animal …