Papers of BAS

Humanities and Social Sciences

Vol. 3, No 1, 2016

PHILOSOPHY

MYTH, METAPHYSICS AND ETHICS OF THE NEW:

ADORNO, BENJAMIN AND KAFKA

Georgi Iliev

Abstract:The focus of the text are two essays on the work of Franz Kafka – one by
Theodor Adorno, and one by Walter Benjamin. They both look for the significance of
Kafka for the project of critical theory, his potential to contribute to the social critique.
Benjamin and Adorno use the concepts of myth and metaphysics and investigate their
implied critique in some works of the Czech author. Another important perspective is
the epistemological one. Literature is a key field of encounter for epistemological plat-
forms and ethical claims. Kafka acquires his political importance as an unrecognized
critic of the political status quo by means of his elaborate ethical stance.
Key words: Frankfurt School, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, critical theory

This text presents an account of the relation between two readings of the
work of Frantz Kafka – the ones of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. The
most thoroughly considered text by Benjamin here is a letter of his to Gerhard
Scholem from 1938, when the immediate public interest for authors like Kafka
and Robert Walzerwas still present. It is due to the unique combination of mysti-
cal and uncanny elements and social critique. Adorno publishes his major work
on the Czech writer – the hereby considered “Notes on Kafka” – in the sixties of
the 20th century when the fashion of Kafka has already faded away. In the con-
temporary aesthetical consciousness Kafka is mostly related to the category of
the absurd and the question of the day was rather whether his works succeeded
in keeping their place in the critical consciousness or aren’t they a silent support
for the power of the status quo. Such is also the main Kafkian issue in Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory. The conception there is to a certain extent different from the
older texts of Adorno and Benjamin. I mean, what differs is the significance of
the work of art for the ethical encounter with the new, the ethical way to cope
with the unknown and with the things that don’t fit into the network of catego-
ries of our time. Both authors show certain reluctance to recognize the problem
as an ethical one. According to their account, the issues of Kafka are issues of
ideology. Yet coping with the new can be thematized through the way the two

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theorists interpret the coping with the old in Kafka himself. The present text
represents an attempt for such thematization.
Myth and metaphysics have important role not only in the philosophy of
Adorno and Benjamin, but also in their literary critical works. As for their works
on Kafka, in the beginning stands a not very well motivated feeling or even
prejudice that his world is open to very archaic times. Yet it is clear we cannot
attribute to the writer a simplistic version of the dialectic of Enlightenment
that wouldn’t even be dialectic in the true sense. According to such a primi-
tive interpretation, Kafka should be conducting a social critique by comparing
the modern times to the darkest age of myth, while the latter, as it were, stay
unchanged by the false Enlightenment.1 Neither Adorno, nor Benjamin would
choose such approach. They both start from the preliminary question whether
there is anything archaic in Kafka, or not, and if there is what is it ant what is its
significance for us, what does it mean according to the critical social theory. And
here come the differences between the two thinkers. While for Benjamin Kafka
offers to the reader an encounter with a world that is ontologically absolutely
ancient, one having in itself something from the time before myth2, for Adorno
the social relations in the Czech author are rather an example of metaphysics,
i.e. they are a specific interpretation of myth. We will see what type of interpre-
tation is referred later on.
According to the representative of the Frankfurt School the impression of
authentic archaism in Kafka is due exactly to the presence of this metaphysical
core. Does Kafka reach any prophetic conclusions on the rise of the ideologi-
cal consciousness on the scene of European cultural life between the two world
wars? Adorno believes that it is difficult to determine that for any work of art,
yet for Benjamin the answer to the above question is yes, Kafka is a prophet of
his own kind, but again some important suppositions must be considered – for
Benjamin the case of Kafka is also a mysterious one. And finally, does the world
of Kafka have any value for the future? Is this value only the abstract value of a
riddle with a solution independent of our will, or is the reading of Kafka an ex-
ample of education and ethical exercise? The quest for these answers is directed
towards the interpretations of Adorno and Benjamin and that is not a mere
coincidence. They both work in the same tradition and their texts represent
an adequate account of the situation before and after World War II. Yet in the
present study the sequence in which their texts will be examined is anti-chron-
ological – we shall first consider Adorno’s concept of metaphysics and the clas-
sical visions of critical theory and later on – myth and mysticism with Benjamin
maybe from unexpected ethical perspective.

1
In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimerde-
velop the theory of Enlightenment as inherently contaminated with the instrumentalization of
reason. That process starts from myth itself and the Enlightenment is false since the power of
reason is always a masque for the advent of new domination.
2
This is the interpretation from Benjamin’s text dedicated to the anniversary of Kafka’s
death (Illuminations).

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 Metaphysics according to Adorno
The interwoven concepts of metaphysics and of philosophical work with the
tradition of thinking are of crucial importance for Adorno’s work on Kafka. Ador-
no’s concept of metaphysics is specific and is not limited to Friedrich Nietzsche’s
critique where this tradition is only a burden that is to be rejected by thinking,
although his conceptions are definitely an influence upon the Frankfurt thinker.
According to Adorno, metaphysics is a way of thinking that is characteristic for
some philosophers, as early as Antiquity and it is related to tradition in a multifari-
ous way – not only through the book by Aristotle having this same title of Metaphys-
ics long after the death of its author. When speaking about metaphysics, Adorno
generally refers to the relation between two different systems of thinking where
the newer system is replacing the older one but “salvages” or “rescues” something
of the older one – the newer system incorporates that salvaged layer into itself
taking it as a part of its own tradition. That is how each and every versatile and
rich philosophical system was born. The logic of “rescue” preserves something of
the older ideas and it is not lost, it does not die out completely in the refunction-
alization of concepts. Metaphysics proper is the attempt of philosophical concepts
to rescue something inherited from ideas in quasi-Platonic sense. The old layer
acquires the sense of given and is something of a backbone of argumentation.
Yet the idea of “rescuing” has, as a matter of fact, pretty ancient origins and is
definitely marked by the philosophical habit of hypostatizing abstract concepts – it
stems from the borderline of philosophy and mythology. In his dialogue Phaedo3
Plato mentions the said pristine philosophical procedure, while Adorno mentions
Phaedo in his book Against Epistemology: “Socrates in Plato′s middle period already
feels it ′necessary to take refuge in concepts, and use them in trying to investigate
the true essence of things′.” [Adorno, 2013: 99].
By giving the above quote from Phaedo, Adorno refers to the primary sav-
ing of things in the concepts: we rescue things for knowledge by putting them
into concepts so that they can be accessible for our souls – thus we preserve
something from the things. In the dialectical account of Adorno the figure of
Socrates, who is disappointed with the inconsistency of things themselves and
their resistance to understanding, is easily turned into a starting point of meta-
physics. In this dialectical view Socrates does not save himself, but saves the
things. The process in Adorno is opposite to the general notion of overcoming
since everything that is already overcome stays in the tradition nevertheless. The

3
Adorno’s interpretation most probably wouldn’t prove sufficient if criticized by classical
philosophy. In Adorno’s reference to Phaedo (pp. 99, 100 from the dialogue, and the refer-
ence is as above – Against Epistemology) it is written that disappointed Socrates turned away
from studing natural science and decided to save something from the things themselves by
putting it into concepts, since he couldn’t know things directly. Yet it is clear that Plato doesn’t
speak of building an abstraction that is to come after the encounter with the things, i.e. he
doesn’t speak of abstraction through selection of characteristics. If we examine the translation
of Gallop [Clarendon, 2002, Commentarypp: 176 - 181], Socrates turns for refuge not to the
things,neither to concepts, but to the logoi of the things. According to the commentary said
edition, logos in this case means that Socrates will address the existing theories of the thongs,
“their theories”, their being as discourse.

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theory of rescue most probably originates from a lecture by Max Horkheimer4
[Horkheimer, 1990: 471] who mentions that Kant tried to save metaphysics in
his theory of knowledge. A more detailed version of the “rescue” can be found
in the books of Adorno on Kant’s epistemology and on Metaphysics by Aristotle.5
The following quote exemplifies the view that he is to impose also over his stud-
ies on art:
“All traditional metaphysical systems known to me, that while these systems
have always been critically disposed towards anything they regarded as dogmatic
or fixed ideas, they have attempted, on the other hand, to rescue, on the basis of
thought alone, that to which the dogmatic or transcendent ideas referred. This
tension runs through the whole of metaphysical thinking (…).” [Adorno, 2001: 8].

Adorno, Kafka and Tradition

So Adorno has a problem with the proportion (or interrelation) of what
Kafka “rescues” and what Kafka demolishes by his implicit social critique. The
difficulty becomes even more serious when the theorist tries to outline a dialec-
tical framework of the mythologized ideological consciousness as the write pre-
sented it and to also sustain the presence of truth in the Hegelian sense – where
subject and object are sublated. In Prisms[Adorno, 1997: 247]. Adorno says:
“Far more than for most other writers, it may be said of Kafka that not verum but
falsum is index sui”. In the words of Spinoza Verum index sui et falsi (Truth serves as
criterion for both itself and the false), but in Kafka there is no index, nothing points
directly to the truth. Hence the uneasy road Adorno takes to reveal the work of
art in an environment of signs permeated by ideological references. Kafka’s nar-
rative with epical homogeneity refuses to incorporate anything that differs from
its “reflections on sin, pain, hope and the true way”. Adorno himself quotes this
planned title by Kafka. The only weapon Kafka has against the possibility of him
just recreating the existing status quo is to deprive the narrative of whatever
symbolic meaning it might have. To make the text so strictly literal as to render
the reader incapable of staying at this level and make him work until he finds
something own and socially relevant behind the work of art. Literal reading and
writing is an act of protest and of preservation of artistic value – here value being
used in its literal ethical meaning.
Kafka’s works protected themselves against the deadly aesthetic error of
equating the philosophy that an author pumps into a work with its metaphysical
substance. Were this so, the work of art would be stillborn; it would exhaust itself
in what it says and would not unfold itself in time. To guard against this short-
circuit, which jumps directly to the significance intended by the work, the first
rule is: take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts invoked from
above. Kafka’s authority is textual. [Adorno, 1997: 247].
Adorno and Benjamin give different answers to the question what are the
roots of the strong position of literal meaning in Kafka. And here come the is-

4
Max Horkheimer, GesammelteSchriften, vol. 9: NachgelasseneSchriften 1914-1931, p. 471.
5
The titles are Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Metaphysics: Concept and Porblems.

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sues of, on the one hand, what leads to the characteristic writing of the Czech
author where symbolic thought is replaced by a mythic literalness of the world,
and on the other – what does this writing make for in aesthetical sense. Adorno
says Kafka saved himself from the danger of lapsing into writing of “philo-
sophical literature”, while this danger is, as a matter of fact, a double one – it is
impending both over the writers and the readers who take the literary work as
a philosophical one. To put it shortly, if we read and write the “philosophical”
way, we are going to ignore the temporal foundation of literary thinking and
thus ignore its hidden social embededness. This historical aspect of literature
according to Adorno is akin to metaphysics since the work is a part of the tradi-
tion and inevitably measures the contemporary condition with that measure.
The work of art reveals and acquires its aesthetic meaning in time, thus Adorno
seems to be close to the tradition of hermeneutics, but, if we look upon his Aes-
thetic Theory, he has mainly Hegelian reasons for the historicity of art, namely
the necessity of mediation between the social and the individual. Adorno insist
we should not comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects [Adorno, 2002:
118]. This is only one side of the historicity Kafka saved by refraining from sym-
bolic thinking. But what did Kafka actually save, what did he rescue? In order to
give an answer to this question, we shall again turn our attention to the concept
of metaphysics and Kafka’s attitude to tradition.
Adorno does not deal with Kafka’s being a part of the German or Jewish
tradition in particular. What is far more important for the theorist is the figure
of tradition in general as maintaining the status quo, as an eternal masque of
newer ideologies. The important thing is to trace how the detailed presenta-
tion of false consciousness in Kafka might turn out to be an indispensible part
of his critical potential. “He (Kafka) himself contributed to the spread of the
untruth”, Adorno says [Adorno, 1997: 247]. The work of the writer with the
images of power and civilization – the last one is best fit for his stories and para-
bles – is a dangerous adventure, it is the only way for revealing power in its true
dimensions of totalizing language. Yet the ability of artworks to incorporate the
untruth of ideology and to turn it into their own immanent truth is a part of
their dialectic and it is characteristic of the peculiar way in which only artworks
can be critical [Adorno, 2002: 129-130]. The enigma of the work is exactly to
presuppose that it can either be a critique, or an unequivocal glorification of the
existing – the answer of this enigma of ambivalence does not exist or, to be more
precise, it is ontologically located in the future. The present being of the work
contains the characteristic that the work is “suspended”. Enigma and silence are
constitutive principles of Kafka’s storytelling.
The enigma of artworks is their fracturedness. If transcendence were pre-
sent in them, they would be mysteries, not enigmas; they are enigmas because,
through their fracturedness, they deny what they would actually like to be. Only
in the recent past–in Kafka’s damaged parables–has the fracturedness of art be-
come thematic (here we might spot a hidden reference to the text from Prisms)
[Adorno, 2002: 125].
Such is the metaphysics of art – through its damaged present image it is to
negatively give something regarding the future, that is the meaning of the meta-
physical movement for preservation of the traditional element in art. It points

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towards things that are absent for thinking. Art does not contain testimony and
yet it bears witness. It is a daring journey to places unreachable for knowledge; it
bears witness of that through mimesis, but does not bring about depictions. And
yet the process of art is social, says Adorno in his Hegelian account. We, on our
part, when having in mind the deontological nature of witnessing without form-
ing any testimony, we can add that this process is ethical – presupposed by our
duty to be ready and vigilant for the future. Here lies the implicit connection
between the conceptions of art in the texts of Adorno and Benjamin on Kafka.

The Witness Mission of Kafka according to Benjamin

I am going to introduce in a large quote a remarkable allegory by Walter
Benjamin who uses it as an analytic instrument in order to define the param-
eters of Kafka’s world. To put it simply, the idea is as follows: an epistemological
issue is put in the fundamental structure of the contemporary ideological blind-
ness, while an ethical issue of witnessing for the invisible ideological evil is our
only chance to oppose it. The quote is from a letter by Benjamin to Gerhard
Scholem:
“Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined,
on the one hand, by mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradi-
tion) and, on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller. In
speaking of the experience of the big-city dweller, I have a variety of things in
mind. On the one hand, I think of the modern citizen who knows that he is at
the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom(…) When I refer to the modern
big-city dweller, I am speaking also of the contemporary of today’s physicists.”
What follows is a comparison between Kafka’s thinking and the account of
the condition of being in physics. The problem is the unknowability of the many
laws that govern nature that render humans incapable of proper reasoning.
“Therefore, if one says – as I have just said – that there was a tremendous
tension between those of Kafka’s experiences that correspond to present-day
physics and his mystical ones, only a half-truth is stated. What is actually and
in a very literal sense wildly incredible in Kafka is that this most recent world
of experience was conveyed to him precisely by this mystical tradition. This, of
course, could not have happened without devastating processes (to be discussed
presently) within this tradition. The long and the short of it is that apparently
an appeal had to be made to the forces (Benjamin says Krafte – both force and
power, authorities, but also natural forces. He doesn’t say Macht (power) of this
tradition if an individual (by the name of Franz Kafka) was to be confronted
with that reality of ours which realizes itself theoretically, for example, in mod-
ern physics, and practically in the technology of modern warfare.(…)The experi-
ence which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably
not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away
with”. [Benjamin, 2007: 141-142].
Before I try to interpret the elaborate allegory, let me rush forward a bit
prematurely with a preliminary assumption since I think that the literary writ-
ing of Benjamin can elucidate at least the kernel of the argument even better
than theorization. When epistemology fails to speak of the present being and of

8
the subject (that failure can appear not as a part of the history of science, but also
as ontologically inherent in the models of cognition), than ethics incorporates in
itself epistemological conclusions and in the complex situation it gives the stance
of a new way of thinking. The deindividualized modernist voice has its episte-
mological foundation – the way it is generated and talked about. The two above
mentioned fields – epistemological and ethical – in the allegory of Benjamin
function as communicating vessels. What is implied is the idea, and it is not a
new one6 but modified, that the cognitively oriented discourse is always an ethi-
cal choice. A choice of that kind is the witnessing of the world of the two ellipses
– we are going to call them ellipse of mythology and ellipse of technology. The
block7 between them is the beginning of ideology. This allegorically described
failure of categorical thinking that opens the gates for lies and delusions is also
present in Adorno.
The more densely people have spun a categorical web around what is other
than subjective spirit, the more fundamentally have they disaccustomed them-
selves to the wonder of that other and deceived themselves with a growing fa-
miliarity with what is foreign. [Adorno, 2002: 126].
In order to save ourselves from the danger of making a simplistic interpre-
tation of this statement, it is necessary to posit the situation in an ethical horizon.
What is also necessary is to develop certain understanding of the epistemologi-
cal status of what is absolutely new. Because what is meant here is not any kind
of romantic Platonic prejudice, like how categorical thinking would blur the
visibility of ideas. Some lines after the above quote, Adorno says that transcend-
ence is not present in artworks. What is present than so that categorical thinking
is not enough to suit the human condition of the need of art, what is the lack
causing this need? My claim is that in the works of art what is present is not the
transcendent, of course, but rather something that shall be called transcenden-
tal.8 The meaning of the just used term here does not coincide completely with
Kant’s use. The transcendental is what ontologically and epistemologically pre-
cedes the categorical, it precedes the categorical not only as principles on which

6
it is presented in Kant‘s Critique of Practical Reason.
7
Here I use the concept of Kantian block coined by Adorno. Its most detailed elabora-
tion Adorno’s book Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and it expresses the discrepancy between
the epistemological and sociological endeavors of idealistic philosophy. On the one hand it is
a discrepancy in the inability to infer social being from neither the synthesis of perception,
nor from the transcendental deduction of the concepts of pure reason. On the other hand
the concept is used as critique of schematism as form of interest subservient to domination,
thus schematism is not knowledge but mastering. Adorno says that sociological schematism is
impossible to emerge. He starts with the chapter “Society/Block” and the analysis of the subject-
object relation: “This transcendental subject also contains, if I may risk a rather bold statement,
the untruth of society. That means, the abstract characteristic of this transcendental subject is
nothing but the internalized and hypostatized form of man’s domination of nature” (Adorno,
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 173). In Aesthetic Theory one of the ways of exposing and
criticizing the block is art (the chapter “Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics”).
8
These ideas of the transcendental are mainly characteristic of the medieval thought. I
use the concept here without any detailed references and without complete accordance with
any philosophical conception. My purpose is to outline the relation between the mystic attitude
to art and the feeling of an impending epistemological crisis.

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the latter shall be founded, but also as limitation to categories posed by mind
independent being. Through art the inaccessibility of the world is no longer a
Kantian block (Adorno) between the transcendental subject and the nominal or
perceptional, but a source of false consciousness. This is exactly the double sense
– epistemological and ethical – of Benjamin’s allegory. The individual under the
name of Franz Kafka shall take as his duty to become a witness of that world fo-
calized too far apart. It is his only chance to be a thinker, to comment on things.9
For that purpose he should acquire new experience which is not categorical.
The above quoted allegory has as its hidden foundation the possibility of
a complete separation of lived experience (e.g. in Dilthey) – what leaves marks
upon us in an idealistic and romanticist sense – and the substances of com-
municable achievements of the efforts of soul and reason, what is called just
experience (in German experience – Erfahrung has a plural form – Erfahrun-
gen). The Kafkian subject is constituter from certain combinations that appear
strange to Benjamin. The sources of Kafkian thought would prove as enigmatic
to Adorno too, they both quote extensively passages from texts not belonging to
Kafka that resemble him strongly, according to their critical sense these are the
most Kafkian quotes. What are the philosophical reasons of the presumption for
the uniqueness of this writer? Many things are known as truisms, others belong
to the characters as their own assumptions, thirdly come some common rules,
on the fourth place we may have things given contingently, etc. Nevertheless,
the lived experience (Erlebnis) as a source of stored experience and as forming
the character (Bildung) is impossible here. According to Benjamin, the main
reason for that is the sole constitution of the world, the world of Kafka but not
one made by the writer, but as an idea – between him, experience and history.
Kafka inhabits a world with two centers of idea. Benjamin writes on the inhabit-
ant of the modern city many times. The city is at the same time a potential scene
of crimes and a place of political fermentation, here I refer to the Bemjamin’s
work on Baudelaire The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire: The Boheme, The
Flaneur, Modernity. In the book mentioned and in the study “A Short History of
Photography” Benjamin analyses the photographs byGasche depicting empty
streets and makes assumptions on the ethos of the city. Even at the time they
first appeared those photographs were considered to show a place for evil deeds,
like crime-scenes. The freedom and the debauchery of the city are above the hu-
man dimensions. It is no mere accident that the city gives birth torevolutionary
atmosphere – that all-enveloping conspiracy talk that is referred in the chapter
“Boheme”. The processes are of an other-dimensional order in Kafka’s worlds
too, the world of the inhabitant of the large modern city. The world founded
upon the idea of bureaucracy cannot be looked upon by the individual, it is
inaccessible for him in its totality. Yet the epistemological case is a bit different.
A subject of a modified cognitive structure shall be able to witness the advent of
the new. Benjamin and Adorno promote Kafka as a founder of a social critique

9
The expression is used by Adorno many times and usually as critique of that philosophy
which limits itself in striving for pure knowledge – it appears incapable of “commenting on
the things”.

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the initiating point of which is achieved through a reduction of the epistemo-
logical value of the subject. The figures of this critique are the unsolvable par-
able and the noncodified gesture (these are present in both the text of Adorno
and Benjamin), as if to challenge and refute the whole theory of knowledge
as method. That is, to my opinion, the complex way of turning Kafka from a
“philosophical” author into an ethical one – at least according to the tradition
of critical theory.

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. London: Continuum.

Adorno, Theodor. 1997. Prisms. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Adorno, Theodor. 2001. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Adorno, Theodor. 2001. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
Adorno, Theodor. 2013. Against Epistemology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Illuminations, New York:Schocken Books.
Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Writer of Modern Life, Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Plato. 2002. Phaedo (Translated with notes by David Gallop). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Horkheimer,Max. 1990. GesammelteSchriften (1914 - 1931). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fis-
cher Verlag.

Correspondence address:
Georgi Iliev, PhD student
Institute for Literature
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,
52 Shipchenski prohod, blvd.
1113 Sofia, Bulgaria
Tel. (+359) 892222406
E-mail: joro.s.iliev@gmail.com

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