ABSTRACT
Soren Kierkegaard lauded “the genuine subjective existing thinker” who is “never a teacher, but a learner,” and who “is continually striving”. This chapter discusses the extent to which Kafka was receptive to the spirit of Kierkegaard’s existential-phenomenology. It explores three aspects of Kafka’s reading of Kierkegaard, beginning with Kafka’s comprehension of Kierkegaard’s, and his own, ontological condition of anxiety and despair. The chapter suggests parallels between existential therapy and the experiencing of Kafka who was, in Kierkegaard’s terminology, always in a process of becoming in which he struggled to achieve a synthesis of opposites: a rational, constricted self determined by necessity/finitude, and an expansive self represented by possibility/infinity. It focuses on Kafka’s ethical dilemma. The chapter discusses Kafka’s fraught, uncertain subjectivity, his distrust of religious-socio-political rationalism, his experiencing of temporality contra to a traditional linear conception of time.
