Episode #229 - Kafka and Totalitarianism (Arendt, Adorno)
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Also doing some philosophical writing at Philosophize This on Substack if you're on there. I 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 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 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 going to 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 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 going to 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 Farm eventually and you figure out what all the characters were intended to be, there always becomes a point where someone can just be done with Animal Farm, put it back on the bookshelf, let it start collecting dust, because the thinking by them is they've decoded what the intended meaning of the book was. And now that I know what all the characters mean, well, this one's pretty much solved. Now I can just be done with it.

The problem with this when it comes to Kafka's work, Adorno says, is that Kafka never intended for there to be a specific meaning like this in his work, that there wasn't a single time, place, or set of social conditions that he wanted to depict in his writing. So Adorno, to say that this is just an allegory for the human experience, projects a bit too much of Camus' own interests onto the work of Kafka and misses something important about just how many situations this work has the ability to resemble, which is part of the genius of it.

Adorno says we need to treat Kafka's work as though it's hermetic, as in hermetically sealed. Meaning when he writes a book, think of it as a self-enclosed, more literal universe that exists all on its own. And what gets revealed when we get past this temptation of trying to have this point to some specific thing in the world outside the book

is that Kafka's using his work to paint a picture of a kind of general structure of domination, a social spell that people get put under, where self-justifying power structures of any type or scale eventually lose sight of what they began as. If you've listened to this podcast for a while, then you already know this entire time period, beginning mid-20th century, has thinkers questioning the limits of rationality in a big way. How much can we rely on rational systems to coordinate our lives for us?

At what point do these systems rationally constrict the world to a level that it becomes detrimental to being a human being? Now there's plenty of answers we get to these questions. Some will say that when this much emphasis is being placed on rationality, it demystifies something about what it is to be a person to the point that your existence is flattened. There's others that'll say that this type of thinking naturally leads to thinking of people and things around you in a way where they're just instrumental to some rational goal you have.

That things like colonialism or pollution even aren't bugs of the system. That's just the natural destination of this kind of thinking. They'll say part of the thinking is that enlightenment political thought has produced societies where people are mostly seen as rational cogs that make up a machine. And the question for a lot of these thinkers becomes, what is it like to be someone that's living in the middle of that?

The term that Adorno used to describe what was going on here, he called it "the soothing facade of repressive reason." And while he'd never want to reduce Kafka's work to only talking about repressive reason, he definitely thought that this was of the class of things that Kafka was pointing to in his work. You know, being someone that was alive during the beginning of the 20th century when all this was building.

When Joseph K in the trial for example that we talked about last time, when he is ragdolled through the court system, when rational procedures have turned his life into a situation where he is constantly disoriented, alienated from what's going on and then guilty for something where he doesn't even know what he's being accused of. For Adorno, we don't got to think of this as a metaphor because this is literally what people are going through when they're living in these rationally constrictive systems. Whenever you use rationality to try to over coordinate things in people's lives,

There's a general arc that you can expect to play out, and we can see examples of this arc at all different scales. First, there is a well-intentioned beginning. You know, something bad happens, someone gets hurt, some injustice occurs because of the chaos of how reality unfolds. And then well-intentioned smart people want to use rationality to try to make sure it doesn't happen again. Okay. Maybe they set up a rule or a procedure. Maybe it's a government agency. It doesn't really matter. The point is, this is an effort to make the chaos a little more manageable.

But then inevitably, it feels good to be able to simplify reality down like this. And inevitably, bad stuff keeps happening because there is no perfect set of protocols that can ever predict everything that's ever going to happen.

So, the people in charge of these rules and procedures inevitably start adding more rules and procedures. Given enough time, rational systems like this produce rules on top of rules that eventually accomplish three things once this gets severe enough. People feel guilty all the time, even when they aren't doing anything wrong because they're not sure if they're breaking one of the overabundance of rules there are. They feel alienated from the original well-intentioned purpose of whatever it is they started doing the thing for.

And this leads to a feeling of disorientation, where it feels like this rational system has removed something about what it is to be a full person that's living through it. Couple this with the fact that these rational systems attract the kind of person that wants to be the one making rules and procedures. People that often benefit from there being a sort of gatekeeping where they keep procedures opaque and away from scrutiny. Or how about the fact that it's psychologically easier for someone to follow a rule book than to make a new set of judgments about the world each day provisionally.

How about the fact that, in the interest of being as efficient as possible in this rational world, people are often reduced to numbers on a page, which then goes on to guide their behavior in big ways. Consider all this as a general arc that goes on when human beings organize.

But also understand that this is one that's particularly amplified when we look at the world that Kafka was depicting with characters inside of his books. Whenever power structures become self-justifying, the rational systems that make them up are no longer calibrated and held accountable. And so they inevitably drift into this direction that leads to experiences like Joseph K.'s in The Trial.

Now, this may be an obvious point when it goes on to the level of government. Like, we all know what it looks like to have a justice system that starts as something truly interested in making the world a better place, but then over time transforms into just show trials and procedures designed to keep people in power. We all know that one.

But now consider how this goes on just as much in the career of an individual politician. They may start their career with the best of intentions, but as the years go on and layer upon layer of things pile up that simplify their decision making, they do this to the point that they drift into a person that doesn't even resemble who they started out as. Consider how this might go on in a workplace or with the faculty at a school. Consider how this might go on in romantic relationships where you have rules you guys set up in the relationship. Right?

Or how about with parents trying to maintain a house with rules in the house? Consider how we even do this sort of thing to ourselves. Say I'm on a diet, something that starts out as wanting to feel better and get healthy. With all the rational protocols, I can start layering onto that experience with all the tools out there and trackers. I can start to reduce my experience and eventually get it to a point where I'm weighing every calorie and caring far more about the number on the scale than about how I actually feel.

In a sense, in the modern world, we are all people trapped in little Kafka novels of our own creation, where things that start with the best of intentions end up transforming into something that flattens your experience of the world. Consider how this might apply to something like social media, where it begins as something that's well-intentioned, you know, just trying to create a space where people can come together and talk about stuff.

But when people's behavior gets reduced to metrics, when it starts to get more about layering on things that keep people on the app as long as possible, but when that happens, it drifts into something completely different than what it started out as. And when you have these incentives set up towards posting about fear or rage bait or something, people end up behaving more in these ways as they find compliance within the rational protocols that govern their behavior.

Opaque, self-justifying systems of power produce this same result over and over again. And to Adorno, it would be a shame to describe Kafka as an author that's just critiquing one of these. By thinking of his work as a self-contained universe, it allows for someone to read his work, take inspiration from it, see repressive reason going on in their own life, and then to pick up the same book ten years later maybe, and use it to see an entirely different situation with a new set of eyes.

This is why Adorno thinks the work of Kafka is so effective. See, because to him, in a modern world where most people live their lives immersed in myth and authority at a level that they can't even see, Kafka shows us characters that passively go along with their myth and authority, and it's an invitation for us to see our own compliance in it more clearly.

He calls this the mute battle cry, or the silent battle cry, of the main characters of Kafka's stories. They stay quiet. They just go along with the way things are. And to Adorno, this then exposes just how ridiculous the fact that they're going along with these rational systems really is. Kafka's stories to Adorno are what he calls a demolition of that soothing facade of repressive reason.

Maybe it's time to give another example though of a famous story from Kafka that we can see this whole dynamic in. This one's called "The Castle" and for whatever it's worth, it was the last full-length book that Kafka ever worked on during his lifetime. In fact, if you end up reading it, it even cuts off mid-sentence because he just never finished writing the ending. The book starts with a guy named K arriving at a village.

And yes, by the way, the main character of this story is also called K by everybody in it, just like in the trial. This is deliberate by Kafka, where part of his goal is to transform what it means to be a protagonist inside of a novel, where typically they always have a strong name, solid identity. We know exactly who they are. Well, Kafka starts us with an identity that's a bit more relatable to living in the modern world. Let's just go with K. Now, K, she

Shows up to this village, there's a blizzard going on outside, and in the distance from this village, up on a hill, he sees a castle. It's a castle that he traveled all that way through the snow to try to get to that day. See, he's a land surveyor by trade, meaning he takes measurements for big pieces of land. And the officials at this castle asked him to come because they got some work for him to do.

Regardless, though, with the whole blizzard going on, anything the castle wanted him to do is going to have to wait until tomorrow morning at least. So he goes inside of the hotel tavern in this little village that he's in, and the people there are instantly suspicious of him and his intentions. They're like, who are you? We don't know you. He says, I'm a land surveyor for the castle. Nobody believes him. He's like, go ahead, call the castle, see what they say. They call the castle, and on the other end of the phone, there's not a conversation going on.

But just this strange bureaucratic white noise. It's a mix between dead silence, shuffling, papers, just a bunch of people talking. It sounds kind of like an office building that's having a very chaotic day doing whatever it is they do there. Finally, somebody gets onto the phone and says, yes, Kay was summoned to be there. He's okay. And then hangs up the phone.

Now the people at this bar are a little more tolerant of him being there after that, but they don't give him a room or anything. They just tell him he can sleep in the tap room where people drink on top of a pile of straw, like some kind of livestock. That's his first night that he spends in the book, sleeping on a pile of straw.

He wakes up the next day, and all of a sudden two dudes show up named Artur and Jeremias, who apparently are supposed to be his own personal helpers that have been assigned to him by the castle. Except, here's the thing, they're not that helpful. They don't do anything. They crawl around on the floor sometimes, spy on him. Sometimes they'll just vanish into nowhere for days at a time. Really all they do is confuse Kay more than anything. Not really that helpful.

Eventually, Kay finds out indirectly through the mayor of the town that apparently there's been a mistake. That they don't need any land surveyed at this castle, sorry. And that yeah, he was summoned, but that it must have been some kind of clerical error or a scheduling mistake. Either way, it's really no one's fault if you think about it. Not even really something worth telling him directly. So have the mayor tell him, and I guess he can be on his way after that.

But Kay says no. No, he's going to get to the bottom of the real reason why he's there. He knows there's got to be a better explanation. It can't just be some random mistake. So he tries to walk up to the castle, but the paths that go to the castle just loop back in on themselves in a really confusing way. Or it seems like the second he starts to get close to the castle, the castle just recedes so that he can never get to it. He tries to get in contact with one of the officials, but they're always unavailable, just out of reach. That strange kind of hope we talked about last time with Camus.

Kay realizes he's gonna be there for a while as he's waiting to find out the answers. So he gets a job as the janitor at a school. He lives in one of the classrooms of the school with some woman he met at a bar. And as they're living in this classroom together, in the story it's like being in their bedroom at home. They'll be having arguments like they're in a relationship, cuddling, sleeping, right in front of all the kids that are watching them in the classroom.

Then when school starts, they gotta move all their bedding out of the way so the teacher can start teaching class. It truly is like Kafka got this scene out of a dream he had one night. There's a sense in which in this story, The Castle, the more and more that Kay tries to find meaning to the absurdity of his situation, the more he's trying to make sense of things within the arbitrariness of the system, the more entrenched into the bureaucracy he becomes. He starts to have a job that he doesn't like, a girlfriend he's not too sure about. He even gets himself trapped into an uncomfortable living situation.

Does any of this sound familiar to anybody out there?

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And the philosopher Hannah Arendt is writing her work right around the year 1950. Now a lot changes over the course of that 35 years in terms of what it's like to be a person. Stuff Hannah Arendt thinks is crucial if you want to understand what Kafka was doing as he was writing these stories. See to her, there's no reason to think any of this we're reading is an allegory for the human condition.

There's no reason to assume this is about self-justifying power and how it gets out of hand. People will even say sometimes that Kafka was something like a prophet for the events that went down during the 20th century. But Hannah Arendt says, okay, okay, fine. But why do we even got to say that? To her, we don't got to be looking any further.

than what is clearly going on in this writing that's about the actual world he's living in. What Kafka's doing in his work, she says, is giving a real analysis of the underlying structures of modern life and where the lives of people are headed if it keeps going this way.

Now, Kafka's living during a time where these things he's writing about are still a bit under the surface. But Hannah Arendt is living during a time where these things have been brought out right into the open, she says, and they've essentially become pieces of what a normal life is for a modern person. In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt's writing what would become one of her most famous books called The Origins of Totalitarianism. Where in it, she talks not only about the mechanics of how a totalitarian situation emerges in the world, but also

but also about how these movements sustain themselves by dominating the experience of the individual. And to her, Kafka's books are blueprints that strip our reality down to its core structure in a way that reveals the patterns we start to accept as normal when living in one of these totalitarian setups. I'll give a few examples here today. Let's start with one of her big ones though, from the origins of totalitarianism: the way bureaucracy is used to control people in the modern world.

See, it's easy to think of bureaucracy as something that's just an unfortunate but necessary thing about the modern world. I mean, sure, you gotta wait in line at the DMV sometimes. Gotta let the fine people at TSA, you know, take their childhood out on you every once in a while. But generally speaking, look, bureaucracy is a necessary evil. Modern society is very complex, and bureaucracy is the price we gotta pay sometimes for all the benefits. But this whole thing we're doing here, where we're justifying it, is part of the game that gets played with bureaucracy to Hannah Arendt.

See, bureaucracy often gets thought of as though it's a civil service that's just trying to help people, keep everything equal. But what it actually does sometimes, she says, is become a place that bad actors can enforce what she calls a kind of rule by nobody or tyranny without a tyrant. She has a few different phrases she likes to use here.

To understand what she means, consider what it's like to be K in one of Kafka's novels. He exists in a world where government bureaucrats have total control over major aspects of his life. In the castle, he gets someone to do some land surveying, right? And then completely lives at the mercy of these people that he can't even get in contact with. In the trial, that K just gets sent from procedure to procedure, showing up, explaining himself to yet another group of unelected officials that never explain anything to him, where they eventually have the power to put him to death.

Hannah Arendt says in The Origins of Totalitarianism, quote, Because consider the two agents from the beginning of his book, The Trial. These agents tell Joseph K. that he's under arrest, and

And then they start making him feel bad for asking questions. Look, it's not our job to explain to you what's going on here. You'll find out at your hearing. But then the hearing comes a little bit later, and he's told he'll find out more at his actual trial. At the trial, it's then deferred to some future date. And this goes on and on until he's dead one day.

What she would say is at no point does Joseph K. ever know exactly what's happening to him. And there's a situation that she thinks totalitarian systems purposefully generate in people to control them. Because if you can flood people with new decrees every day and a landscape that they can never really predict, then you can keep people in a kind of paranoia and uncertainty that's great if you want people to never be able to organize against the present state of things.

See, it'd be one thing if there was somebody Joseph K. could get in contact with, some person who's handling his case that could then be held responsible if they made a mistake. But in a bureaucracy, responsibility is so spread out, and there's so many agents that are carrying things out that are unelected. When it's set up this way, you'll often hear things said like, well, look, this bad thing did happen to you, but it really wasn't anyone's fault individually, just unfortunate. It had to be done, but how can you ever really go after anyone for what went wrong here?

In other words, for a would-be totalitarian setup, for Hannah Arendt this becomes a perfect tool for administrating control over people while never needing to have anyone that looks in charge. It becomes a sort of rule by nobody, where no matter how deep you go into the labyrinth of bureaucracy, you can never quite find the person responsible.

In her section on imperialism in the origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt points out how this tactic was used by European governments in their different attempts at colonial administration. I mean these governments that had real accountability going on when it comes to the home front. When it came to these satellite governments that they set up in an area they were colonizing, these were not administrators that were held to the same level of scrutiny. The colonized people were often treated horribly.

And it was justified by the governments at home by saying, "Well look, look, these people are non-citizens. These people aren't entitled to the same legal protections as people living back in France, for example." So what they got to Hannah Arendt was a very Joseph K-like living experience, where they don't get clearly defined laws for living their life. They just get decrees handed down to them in a moment that change from week to week. They don't get good information to live their life with,

No, they flood them with bad information so that they're in a spot where they really never know exactly what's happening to them or who to even appeal to if they wanted to make it go away. In a sense, their life becomes just at the mercy of a group of bureaucrats that are constantly funneling them into the next procedure that they have to comply with or else face horrible consequences. Then they're left to face the inevitable abuse that comes when people that have power aren't held accountable and can more or less treat them however they want.

Consider another similarity between the life of Kay and the lives of people immersed in totalitarianism. All of these commands that they're getting, that are coming down from on high, are framed in terms of them being necessary and automatic, as Hannah Arendt calls them. What does she mean by that?

Well see, it'd be one thing if a group in power came along and said, "Look, we're in charge now. We believe in an ideology where this is how the world needs to be set up. And if you don't like it, well, we may not listen to you, but you can always disagree with us." In other words, in certain ways things can be set up, there's at least room for people to disagree and for some kind of conversation to be had.

But what totalitarian regimes do, she says, is they often frame the stuff they're doing as though this isn't a matter of preference or political ideology. What we're doing here is just the reality of the universe. It is necessarily true, they will say. It should be automatic, they will say. In fact, it's really all the people caught up in their own political ideology. Those are the only people that would ever deny the obvious reality that's going on here.

Stalin did this, she said, by claiming the historical necessity of the classless society emerging. They said this isn't a political move, this is just the end of history. To deny this is to deny history. The Nazis did this, she says, with the divine providence of the German people and how it was their destiny to ascend to their rightful place as one of the pinnacles of human civilization. Either way, the move is the same here for Hannah Arendt. This is masking political domination and pretending this is just a reality that nobody has control over.

Something the character K in Kafka's novels knows all too well in his experience. In the book The Trial, the priest that he talks to right before he gets put to death tells him, you know, don't worry so much about accepting all this as true. The real thing to focus on here, my friend, is accepting all this as being necessary and

And Hannah Arendt says, in the real world, when this is put into practice in a totalitarian situation, the way this often shows up is through what she calls technical administration. Think of a person that's been given a position of power within a government, but they're not someone who's elected. They're someone who's appointed because they possess some kind of expert opinion that gives them immense power over other people for a period of time. And they're not marketed in the media as someone who's using this power in a political way. Now,

No, they're just someone who's an expert about some aspect of reality. Anything they do with this position of power, well that's just them calibrating society to the reality of the world. Their job is really just a matter of efficiency more than anything. Nothing to do with politics, that's for sure.

To Hannah Arendt, when technical administration gets away with claiming to be neutral or apolitical, when you play into the hands of bad actors and accept their claims that things are just necessary like this, then it robs people of the ability to ask questions or to resist anything that's being done. This is why the experience of someone like Joseph Kay is exactly the kind of experience that a totalitarian setup wants their citizens to have.

Now, one of the biggest things that Hannah Arendt thinks Kafka's work gives a voice to is something that would become a fundamental condition of the lives of modern people. It gives voice to a deep sense of loneliness or feeling placeless or statelessness, as she says at other points in her work, being a Jewish refugee living in the United States herself.

Because think of how Kay feels when he arrives at that village at the beginning of the castle. He's a stranger to everyone there. He's lonely, uprooted. His whole existence is superfluous, she says, to everything that's going on around him. His whole life becomes a struggle to prove to the people around him his legitimacy for even being there, to find his rightful place in the world.

But he never finds it. Throughout the whole story, he just always lives with this constant dull undercurrent of being lonely and superfluous. Of being the kind of person where he's never capable of fully feeling at home. Hannah Arendt says that totalitarian setups absolutely thrive when there are tons of people in a society that feel this way. It serves them in a number of different ways, she says. When people feel utterly abandoned, they're much more likely to take on some ideology that gives them at least some kind of feeling of community that they can feel a part of.

I mean, in a world where you're being flooded with bad information, there's a feeling like, well, at least if I go along with the people in power, not only am I on the winning team, but at least there's some sort of tangible reality for me to believe in now. More than that, for the underclass of people that are often treated poorly by totalitarians, having people that feel isolated, like they can't ask for help from anyone around them or else they're going to be turned into the bureaucracy, this is a perfect place to keep people if you always wanted them living in a sort of Kafkaesque haze that makes their life miserable.

Hannah Arendt compares Kay to the stateless person fighting for recognition in the world. As she says, Kay, quote, demands no more than the essentials of life, but those essentials are bestowed only at the arbitrary whim of bureaucrats. Kay's struggle is a struggle for the inalienable rights of man, end quote. In a sense, what he's missing, you know, as well as many of the refugees Hannah Arendt's talking about during her own time, what he's missing is what she calls, quote, the right to have rights, end quote. Very famous line by her.

See, it's popular to think of refugees as people that just need charity from the locals around them or something. These people just need a little help getting some food, maybe a place to stay for a while. But Tejana Arendt is deeper than that. Much like Kay and Kafka's novels, what refugees really lack is the basic right to belong to a political community that guarantees any rights for them at all. And Kafka captures this feeling for her decades before this became such a widespread crisis.

So bureaucracy and a rule by nobody, necessity and technical administration, and a deep feeling of loneliness that cripples what it means to even be a person, all three of these are things that Hannah Arendt developed strongly in her later work after being inspired by the blueprint Kafka laid out and the images that he produced in his. And consider how all three of these things can seem from one perspective like it's just the endgame of Enlightenment and classical liberal thinking. You know, we'd expect a certain amount of bureaucracy if we were aiming for individual freedom.

We'd expect for our world to be governed by scientific reality when we place so much more emphasis on it. And of course, a bit of loneliness is to be expected if individual identity is seen as so much more important than group identity. But notice how all three of these things can become weaponized from within a political movement.

I hope it's clear by this point that there doesn't seem to be a single way to read Kafka if you were going to pick him up. And honestly, I think he probably would have liked that this is how his work was received. You know, Kafka died in relative obscurity after having written all of his work. I mean, he had some people that knew about him, but essentially, this is a guy that died not even knowing the impact his work was going to go on to have on the world after he was gone.

But anyway, let me know what you think about bananas down in the comments. If you've read Kafka, which one of these three takes that we've talked about in the last two episodes resonates with you the most? Is there maybe a different take you have that you think is missing from these three? Selfishly, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks, by the way, for all the interesting messages on Patreon. It's been really fun replying to them lately. I've been enjoying it, so thank you. Hope you enjoyed this one. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.