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

Stephen West· Host0:00

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!. Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Also doing some philosophical writing @philosophizethis on Substack if you're on there and like to read. Hope you'll love the show today. So Kafka didn't just influence Camus with his work. There were several other major thinkers from the 20th century that took these images from Kafka's work and then changed the world with their work after having read them. A couple of the most exciting were the philosophers Theodor 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' take that we talked about last time. And one way that Adorno says it as he's explaining it is that Kafka's someone whose work has to be taken literally when you read him. And this can be weird to hear at first. I mean, you think about Kafka's writing and, and you think about [laughs] 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 could never actually happen if you were in real life. And if this is the kind of stuff Kafka's 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