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To Camus, Kafka captures the essence of what it is to be an honest person in the modern world, he just puts it in dramatized form that seems ridiculous to most people. But here's the thing, it's not really any more ridiculous than our world. It's just a different world than the world most of us have found a way to normalize, or to escape from all the time.
Camus would want us to notice how the protagonists in many of Kafka's novels just agreeably go along with the absurdity of the world they're in, much like we do. I mean, sure the character K from the book initially asks why he's being arrested. But look, it doesn't take much for him to forfeit any kind of freedom he might otherwise have to the set of procedures he finds himself living in the middle of. He lives in a state of guilt, accused of something, not really sure of what. And his solution is to just outsource his decision-making about what to do next, to outsource his morality to the officials that always tell him the next place to be, the next thing to do, and the next way he needs to be thinking.
Camus thinks this is the fate of many people that are living in the modern world. Because, substitute the court system in this story for something like a modern-day political party or a cause, and you essentially have the life of how many people frame their whole place in the Universe. They don't know what to think until the officials tell them what to think. Moments that seem like something out of a nightmare happen right in front of them. They're confused for a second, but only until they can get the officials to tell them "Don't worry. All this is very normal. This is all a part of the plan."
To Camus, to outsource your morality and your knowledge to some set of faceless bureaucrats with a clear agenda... this is a recipe for living a life where there is no freedom for you really anymore. There's just compliance to a set of procedures every day, like Joseph K in the book. Decisions become just about following the next procedure. Procedures you either follow, and then get a nice pat on the head for following them that day, or you can deviate from them, and you'll very quickly realize how much control these people have over your thinking.
Camus calls this move at one point, something that happens to people when they "embrace the god that consumes them". And the thinking is, whether it's a political party, or a philosophy, or even an actual god. I guess when it comes to these things that allow us to continue to live without facing our existence head-on, better to embrace a god that consumes you for some people, than to live in a state of true lucid revolt.
You know, one of my favorite lines that Camus ever wrote that's around this same subject is something he says in a famous speech he gave after World War II called "The Crisis of Man".
Some context.
Again, this is after World War II. And he's trying to call for his generation to take responsibility for not only what happened during that whole situation, but for rebuilding the way we think moving forward so that stuff like this doesn't happen again. Now of course, we know at this point in the series where he's coming from with this whole project. You know, finding an alternative to system building has always been a huge part of him.
And one giant area that he thought was massively overinflated during his time is how people in the modern world typically view politics, which was for him at least one small part of the rise of people like Hitler and Stalin. He says in the speech, if he had to give a piece of advice to his generation, he says, he understands why politics is so inflated in people's lives. And maybe you could make a case that it's still necessary, but as soon as we can, he says, we need to bring the role of politics back down to its' proper size, he says. And this is one of my favorite lines by him, "Politics should do our housekeeping. It shouldn't settle our domestic disputes."
And what he means is, politics throughout history generally, has been about certain things: about collecting taxes, building roads, maintaining the order of things. It's about doing the sort of background stuff that then allows for the actual people to go about living their lives, creating what the society is that they live in. But in today's world it's different. Today politics gives you an entire worldview. Politics gives you a theory of love, he says. It gives you a way you think people should be living their lives, what freedoms you think people should be having. It gives you a picture of what you think justice should even be.
But this is not traditionally something that went on in the realm of politics. In the past this has been done wherever people are having their conversations, whether it's philosophical, religious, when people come together to discuss the world they live in.
But when these things get wrapped up under the banner of politics in particular, well, the whole thing invites people to make their positions on these things antagonistic to each other. Every conversation foreshadows to some distant November off into the future, where these ideas are going to go to battle with each other in a giant Super Bowl of politics. Somewhere where your worldview is not just a disagreement we have with each other, where if you disagreed with me I might be grateful that you helped me develop my position like it might work in philosophy. No, in politics now you are my political enemy. Now you're destroying the world I want my kids to live in, in some binary competition where everyone in it has to pick one side or the other.
The state of our conversations always existing under the banner of politics allows people to get away with bad philosophy. And you can see this in who's the most successful in political conversations. It's not people actually trying to understand the world better. It's the people best at rhetoric. It's the people who are the best at steel-manning their own side, ignoring the limitations of it, and then framing the other side in the worst way they possibly can.
And for Camus, when you apply this at scale, when this becomes a lane that modern people can use to avoid the existential tensions they'd otherwise have to be navigating, well, you can imagine why he thinks the protagonist of a Kafka novel outsourcing themselves to a set of faceless bureaucrats, how that reflects something important about the condition that a modern person finds themselves born into.
But here's the thing. If everything we've just said here today about living in the modern world is true, then does it really make much sense to be angry at any of the people that take one of these off-ramps as a way to get away from it? I mean look, Camus might say, "As modern people, we are not born into the Mediterranean sun that he talks about so much in his work. This life of eminence and affirmation about things that he's been singing the praises of." Yeah, this is not where most of us get started in our lives. We live in a world generally, that is completely dominated by rational abstractions, transcendence, and ego. Those are basically your choices if you wanted to worship at the altar of something.
And if someone born today, when they have that rare moment of lucidity, and they find themselves living in a world that feels like they're in a Kafka novel, can you really blame people for wanting to escape that somehow? I mean, rather than think of these people as lazy, or stupid, or evil, maybe the better way to think of them might be desperate. Desperately born into a Kafka novel that they'll do anything to find a way out of.
And this is where compassion is going to become such an important piece of what Camus was going for in his book, "The Fall". Because if you remember in "The Plague" when we talked about solidarity, how real solidarity, for Camus, is only a response that starts to make sense when you consider the common existential condition that we share with other people? Well in the same way in "The Fall" this book is Camus saying, that we're all similarly capable of making big mistakes, capable of judging and being judged, and capable of losing sight of the fact that this is part of the kinds of creatures we are.
Clerance, as a character, may be one of these modern people trapped in a cycle of rationalizing their own behavior, all to avoid the difficult task of facing himself head-on. But to Camus, a very important response when we're affirming our reality fully is going to be compassion for people like KZ, who are in a similar state of affairs as we are, that maybe compassion is the equivalent of solidarity at the level of guilt and judgment.
Now Camus has a lot of love for Kafka no doubt but he also disagrees with him and his disagreement with him is similar to his disagreement with most people. It's that Kafka didn't take the absurdity of the Universe as seriously as he could have. And he says, this because when Kafka writes in his books, he always leaves room for some kind of hope that can rescue the protagonist at the end. Camus says, you can see this in his book "The Trial", where he has priests that come in and talk to Joseph Kay when he's about to be put to death telling him that there's a slight hope out there, that there's some aquittal that may come in for him at the last second.
Camus says you can also see this in another book he wrote called "The Castle", which we'll talk about next time, where there's always this mysterious voice that's beckoning and calling to the main character, trying to get them to come to the Castle that's going to save them somehow, again a kind of hope that he leaves in there for people caught in this absurd world.
Now, the first thing to say probably, is that Camus has a certain level of respect for this hope left in there by Kafka. Certainly far more respect than he has for most of the hope that's been peddled in fiction all throughout history. I mean most writers may as well send down Santa Claus on a golden chariot the way they're idealizing the world, he thinks. Second Santa Claus reference by the way. Little, little Christmas in May for everyone.
Anyway, that's not the kind of hope Kafka is offering. In Kafka's books the people never actually get the thing they're hoping for. And this is a key detail to understanding him for Kafka has a line at one point where he says "Oh don't worry. Don't worry. There's plenty of hope out there, just not for any of us, meaning us humans."
Camus loved this line, and it's why he would eventually call this kind of hope that he writes into his books, "hope in a strange form". It's "hope in a strange form" from Kafka, because it always lies outside of what we as human beings could ever actually have access to. It's a kind of hope that exists in a domain that's constantly being deferred or inaccessible to our lived experience.
If this is a weird thing to picture, like, have you ever been in a place in life where you're completely nihilistic, like no hope whatsoever for anything beyond, or any sort of meaning to anything you ever do?
Then, have you ever gone through some kind of mindaltering experience, whatever it is, where for just a minute you genuinely get the feeling like you're connected to something that's larger than you and it, and it makes sense to you in that rare moment that you're a part of it? Okay. But later, when you're back in your normal life, just doing routine day-to-day things, you may feel like you're pretty much the same person. But now since you've had that experience, there's this kind of glimmer that exists there in your thoughts now that you just didn't have before? It's not that you feel like you've accessed something, or like spoken to God, but then there's also the possibility that maybe you just did. I mean what was that, that I just experienced? And aren't I ultimately just a bipedal primate walking around on this planet like everyone else anyway? Wouldn't there be limitations to what I can possibly have access to And for some people even just having a glimmer of hope like that can be worldshifting for them.
From Camus's reading of Kafka, at least, this is something that he thought he understood quite deeply. See, this is why Camus can have this kind of respect for this "hope" that Kafka leaves in. Cuz to even get to this glimmer of hope that Kafka leaves room for, he had to take you through a labyrinth of absurdity and completely obliterate all other forms of hope from history that so many people get trapped in Camus has respect for this. But still we know Camus by this point. Even this small glimmer of existential hope for him is going to be a bit too much.
Remember at the beginning of the series when we said that Camus said he wanted to imagine what it would be like to live without hope? Well, this is the context that that line makes sense in. No matter how small, no matter how inaccessible, Camus wants to affirm everything he thinks we can know about the world. And that doesn't include a mysterious "hope", that we really have no reason to be believing in, as well unintentioned as this may be, from Kafka. Camus, this is still a hope that he thinks, "traps people in an infinite search for grace". They cling on to this hope, and it prevents them from facing exile, or once again, this is them embracing the god that consumes them.
But here's the question to ask about this that you're probably already thinking right now. Which one of these two options is truly accepting the limitations we have as beings? Is it to accept the total silence of the Universe and the limitations of meaning? Or is it to accept the limitations of my own phenomenological experience, and the possibilities that may lie beyond that that I may catch weird glimpses of in strange moments?
Anyway, as I've been talking about this whole series, Camus often thought of his work as being divided into five different cycles, or series. And as I alluded to towards the beginning of this, it's fun to speculate about what he was planning to write about in cycle five of his work. Things we really have very little information about, only the titles of the book written in margin notes. As I said, one of the essays was going to be called "Creation Corrected". Another book he planned on writing was going to be called "The System". And knowing as much as we do know about Camus, it's interesting. What could these titles have meant? Both of them share some kind of an irony as to what he was going for in the rest of his project, though to be fair, both "The Rebel" and "The Fall" as titles would probably be kind of confusing too, if we didn't already know what they were about.
Maybe one possibility, if I had to give one, is that Camus would have went in a more anarchist direction later in life. Though obviously not grounding any of this system of his in the rights that people have to self-organization. Obviously he's not into rights, but maybe self-organization would have just been another of these almost universal human tendencies we've been talking about, and that maybe the system, or creation being corrected, is just the way this blossoms out of a society that lucidly confronts reality and the people around them. It's one possibility, right?
And if this was right, wouldn't this have also served for him as a pretty great culmination to this whole project of finding a way to live that isn't constantly mediated by abstractions? Wouldn't whatever this "system" looks like, have to at least resemble the sort of Mediterranean lifestyle he's alluded to with the sun all throughout his work? Wouldn't he have given us away there, at the end of his career? A way to live among each other in a way that doesn't rely on abstractions about the world as much as our current societies do?
And I guess, wouldn't it be destined to sit for a while on a bookshelf, like anarchism often gets treated, as something that yeah, sounds great, but that can never work now, people have to change into the kinds of people that could implement a system like that. Would this have been Camus's fate? Well again it's one theory you could come up with. But seriously, if you made it this far into the series you've done the work right and I'm genuinely curious what you think these could have meant.
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