In Franz Kafka’s enigmatic novel, The Trial, the protagonist, Josef K., has a conversation with a priest who recounts a parable about a man who waits his whole life to enter a door to gain admission to “the Law.” The action is scant: A man from the country arrives at the door to the Law and is met with a rather imposing doorkeeper who tells him he cannot enter at present. The man asks if he may be allowed to enter later, to which the doorkeeper responds by stating that it is possible, but not at the present moment. The man finds the imposing nature of the doorkeeper such that he does not try to gain admission without the doorkeeper’s permission. The doorkeeper gives the man a stool so that he can wait. The man gives gifts to the doorkeeper and asks many questions regarding when he might gain admittance but never receives a clear answer. He ends up waiting for years, until his sight grows dim. In his old age and feebleness, he sees an inextinguishable radiance streaming from the entrance to the Law. Not long before he dies, the man asks the doorkeeper why no one other than himself has sought admittance to the Law. The doorkeeper bellows “No one else could be granted entry here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall now go and shut it.”
It is difficult to know what to make of this parable, particularly in the context of a novel about Josef K., a man who is arrested without knowingly having committed any crime. Nor does K. know the charges, nor anything about the proceedings. K. does, however, have confidence in his intelligence and his station in life (“senior accountant with a large bank”) to secure an acquittal—- if only he could bend the ear of those pulling the strings. K. looks down on the police for their stupidity, just as he does nearly everyone he meets. K. laughs at the examining magistrate, dismissing the importance of the proceedings. Attempting to seduce his neighbor, Fräulein Bürstner, K. points out that their landlord, Frau Grubach, has borrowed a “large sum” of money from K. Despite his arrest, he feels that his position is secure. But his superiority complex doesn’t move him any closer to understanding his position. In fact, he fails miserably in his every attempt to win his case, and, finally, meets his end when he is knifed to death by the very inspectors who originally appeared at his door in the novel’s opening scene, a scene in which he seems more distressed about the prospect of having to miss breakfast than he does about having just been arrested. Or, more distressed by the fact that, as per usual, he had not been served his breakfast in bed.
K. demonstrates an inability to comprehend what truly matters, and consequently, he cannot make sense of anything going on around him. He uses people to get what he wants. And he doesn’t know what he wants. It is to be expected that his life will end badly.
Josef K. is a man who feels anxiety. But he doesn’t feel this anxiety about his choices. He feels anxiety about how he appears to others, since everything is for him a matter of form. Despite his arrest, he isn’t particularly concerned about the final determination because he thinks that he will be able to control the outcome. And in this, he is seriously in error. He feels anxious about his station in life, while neglecting the existential demands of living. He feels anxious about neglecting his duties at work, but he has no problem insulting those around him who he believes to be inferior. He surmises that he can muscle his way out of his legal situation, first by thinking his way out, and then by gaining access to the levers of power such that his exoneration will become a foregone conclusion. He believes that his superiority shields him not only from his legal predicament, but from his existential predicament, a predicament that, while varying in the details, is universal. Even the priest, admonishing K. to exercise humility, notes what the commentators say about the parable: “The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.”
K.’s misplaced anxiety leads inexorably to his untimely death. He is led like a lamb to slaughter. He never considers nor even recognizes his limitations, his deficiencies, the fact that he couldn’t figure it all out before it was too late. He is a failed Sisyphus, who, having defied the gods, is unable to realize his task of endlessly pushing the boulder up the mountain, only to watch it roll back to the bottom. Instead, he is the man waiting at the door for admission to the Law.
In short, Josef K. does not accept the task of shouldering his responsibility, embracing his freedom, and becoming human. At the last, he blames others for their ineptitude and duplicity, failing to recognize his measure of responsibility for his legal and existential predicament. When the officers slay him, his last words are “like a dog,” speaking to K’s utter lack of comprehension, a lack of comprehension possible only in those who are sure that their perspective transcends those of all others. Even in a universe devoid of meaning, hubris has its consequences.
The Trial does not demonstrate that the universe is devoid of meaning, but only that K.’s life seems meaningless. It is meaningless because he is unable to value the things that matter, focusing instead on playing his part in a nihilistic game of money and power that never allows him to become human. To become human, he would have to face his own dread (angst). K. remains on the surface, looking for external solutions to the problem of self-knowledge.
Whether conscious or not, K. exists in a state of what Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, calls despair over failing to become a self. When you fail to become a self, exploitation and manipulation are go-to methods of getting things done. The outcomes of such are never good in any possible universe, not for yourself, or for those who suffer at your hands. Examples include the man in the parable who ingratiatingly waits before the Law until he meets his end, followed by K., who does his best to pull the strings of a series of marionettes until he finds himself on the ground in the coolness of the night, stripped of his shirt, head on a slab of stone, waiting for the knife to be plunged into his heart. His two assailants — ostensibly legal functionaries of a state that has no interest in truth or justice —- perform their duty against a background of bureaucratic obfuscation, K. having failed in his “duty” of taking the knife to kill himself.
One has the distinct impression that even prior to this scene, K. is already dead. Not having embraced his freedom, he is consigned to his fate. He passively refuses the knife — and refuses to defend himself against the knife. He waits to be crushed by a system within which he is himself a noteworthy representative. Even Camus’ stranger cried out at the prospect of his own imminent death. But Josef K. does not even try to claw his existential way to daylight. The priest points this out with the foil of the parable, but K. remains on the level of one-dimensional logic, stuck in his head, uncomprehending. His volitional activities are relegated to playing out the game of death to which he was appointed, rather than choosing his own path of life. He never deviates from the script that has been written for him.
Josef K. is the prototype of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man, with a form of technical rationality devoid of any embodied sense of living in the world. He cannot comprehend what it means to be human. He participates in an exploitative system almost autonomically. He exploits others to advance an agenda that has been prescribed to him by a system that is both senseless and implacable. His sexual relations with women happen mechanically. Having a narrow sense of agency defined only by his role as petty bureaucrat and functionary of a legal and monetary system that controls the world order, he treats others almost as if they are mannequins. Unable to experience himself as human, he cannot experience others as human. They become Sartre’s Other, a subject who must be turned into an object to advance what K. mistakenly believes is his own agenda. In keeping with this one-dimensional calculus, K. objectifies the Other as he objectifies himself.
When intersubjectivity has been replaced by domination and control, intimacy is not possible. When intimacy is not possible, life becomes intolerable whether one is under arrest or not. Still, K. fails to recognize that agency itself is a choice. One is left with the Eichmann defense—that is to say, no defense at all.
Heidegger tells us in “What is Metaphysics?” that “The very idea of ‘logic’ disintegrates in the vortex of a more original questioning,” — a questioning which awakens the original dread (angst) of Da-sein [Being-there; human reality]. By dread we denote a feeling of anxiety, dread, or unease… intense non-specific anxiety or fear about the human condition or the state of the world in general.
Even given the lengthy discussion with the priest (the longest scene in the book) Josef K. utterly fails to engage in this more original, metaphysical questioning, instead seeking a logico-legal solution to a predicament that is, in essence, existential. “Man’s Da-sein can only relate to what-is by projecting into Nothing,” writes Heidegger. “Going beyond what-is is the essence of Da-sein.” This “going beyond” is metaphysics — an indelible aspect of the human being. Transcendence is the fundamentally nihilating power of consciousness — the ability to negate present conditions and imagine counterfactuals, to imbue what is with meaning, to step back and creatively reinterpret one’s reality so that it becomes a new reality — apersonal reality. This Josef K. did not do.
In the cathedral, engaged in conversation with the priest, K. remains trapped in a bureaucratic logico-rational world that turns out to be none of the things that he thought it was. The last words of the priest to K. — a priest who happened to be the prison chaplain and therefore connected to the court — are unmistakably clear: “The court does not want anything from you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.”
The summon has already been made. What the court wants is for you to show up at the door, and go in. If you wait for permission to enter before the Law, you will be waiting a lifetime. K., however, does not realize that he is waiting, that he has been waiting, like the man in the parable, for a lifetime.
Da-sein means being projected into Nothing (Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts),” writes Heidegger. “Without the original manifest character of Nothing there is no self-hood and no freedom…Nothing is that which makes the revelation of what-is as such possible for our human existence. “Nothing crowds round us in dread.” “Original dread can be awakened in Da-sein at any time.” Prior to the advent of such time, we have the sleeping individual, that individual described by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety as the dreaming spirit. K. dreams to keep the existential anxiety at bay. By doing so, he jeopardizes his very existence. More particularly, he jeopardizes the very possibility of his existence. Even prior to his death, he observes his own life as if a ghost.
Instead of facing his dread and embracing selfhood and freedom, K. hides behind a technical rationality which cannot address his real needs, resulting in hubris and cynicism. But dread and transcendence are linked, for Heidegger: “This projection into Nothing on the basis of hidden dread is the overcoming of what-is-in-totality: Transcendence.” What is the nature of that individual for whom transcendence is not possible? Or made not possible? That individual for whom one-dimensionality has been embraced as a suit of armor against essential dread, essential thinking, against the “soundless voice of being”? It is K. who has failed to become an individual, the man against whom existence itself levels an indictment.
“Nothing is the complete negation of the totality of what-is,” writes Heidegger, but K. does not perform this fundamental negation and so does not assert his existence. Instead he flees his freedom and his anxiety. He fails to carve out his own path. But nothing reveals what-is. K. never scratches the surface of being but instead stands at the door. The experience of Being, Heidegger tells us, comes to us through dread, through the soundless voice which attunes us to “the horrors of the abyss.” The question of horrors comes before us, and which horror, among the ranks of horrors, is greatest: to peer into the nothingness of oneself, while apprehending the immense impossible task of becoming a self, or to observe from the outside a life thought through but never lived, a life of expectations and dreams without serviceable actions taken on behalf of those expectations and dreams, a life observing the last of its freedom as that life slowly trickles into the cold hard ground? In the final scene, K.’s body is propped on a slab as if already a corpse draped on a headstone. It is but one quick stab from there to carrion.
So, too, the overweening pride of the masters of the universe. Not living, they peer jealously at those with even small hopes and dreams and try to destroy them. The masters of the universe appropriate everything in their wake, but they fail in the task of self-possession. Inundated with a surfeit of possessions, they hide from themselves, while flagrantly broadcasting to the world the extent of their depravity. Every sentient being shudders at the hubristic de-enunciations of the masters of the universe, their inverted chorus that lacks awe, their empty verbiage that tramples, without effect, upon the soundless voice of Being.
