Before the Law
Crime and Punishment, Existentialism, State Terror June 18th, 2009A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through a doorway. The doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that is possible. The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them “so you won’t think you’ve neglected something.” The man waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers “No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I am now going to shut it.”
This is a condensed version of Kafka’s “Before the Law“, taken from Wikipedia.
September 9th, 2009 at 10:30 am
As the group Rage Against the Machine once said:
November 5th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
[...] Meaning the metaphysical world is inhuman. But the metaphysical world cannot be known except by excepting (tacitly or otherwise) the testimony of our senses. So where does the expectation that the world should be “reasonable” originate? In our nostalgia i.e. ourselves? But with the rejection of metaphysics, we reject the a-priori idea of reasonableness of the world. Of course, Camus does not claim that people generally share his view. He spends effort distancing himself from Kierkegaard when I perhaps would have been interested in a constrast with Nietzsche (surprise surprise!) The appendix discusses Kafka’s work and interestingly rejects it as absurdist. The possibility of K reaching The Castle is, according to Camus, retained. I don’t see the stark contrast he draws between that and The Trial. The protagonist tenaciously seeks access to The Castle or acquittal from The Trial. Both are predicted by other characters to be impossible. And even if he does access the Castle, which is never described since the author abandoned the work, he probably would find another layer of bureaucracy and another and another – in the same fashion as Kafka’s parable Before The Law. [...]