Kafka and the Ethics of the End
‘Ah,
if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.’
(letter to Milena)
This
is classic, counterintuitive Kafka, isn’t it? Like when he says, ‘there is hope,
only not for us’. Most people, when faced with the idea that the world might
end tomorrow, would likely veer into some Dostoyevskian freefall: like, if
there’s no future, then anything goes, all restraint vanishing. In our times,
the absence of a future (at least a future different from the calamitous
present) becomes a license for retreat into self-help mantras, survivalist
mindset, individualistic carpe diem clichés, hollow pleasures...
Not
Kafka! For him, the end of the world doesn’t entail chaos, nor is it a pretext
for selfishness. It is instead a call to solidarity: if the world ends
tomorrow, then today we help each other. There’s something like a quiet
defiance in there, a refusal to abandon collective responsibility in building a
world worthy of the human being even in the face of absolute futility. That one
powerful sentence contains a whole ethical/political stance: not hope in any outcome,
but in cooperative/altruistic collective action, hopeless as they might be.
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