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'd 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 philosopher's

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 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 it 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 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 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

...