Page 50 - GALIET KAFKABEL JOB, KANT AND MILTON: Omnipotence, Impotence and Rebellion IV+

Galiet & Galiet
children were nearby, and his honor and riches and his “steps were washed in milk, and the rock poured out streams of oil” (29:1-6). Indubitably, Job’s prosperity depends on Yahweh’s blessings, which depends on Job’s righteousness.
If Job’s wealth and estate confer on Job honor and power to grow and to alleviate the suffering of others, it also empowers him to use others “as means” to advance his prosperity. Thus, servants remain servants, and outcasts, outcasts. Thus, they are never equal in a Kantian (Kingdom of Ends), or a Miltonian, or a Republican way (Commonwealths). Thus, to be an outcast, to be mocked by the rubble in the mire; to be dust and ashes; to be repudiated, is mortifyingly shameful (30). It signifies the loss of divine blessing and kingly honor that originates in the loss of Yahweh, of household and of wealth. It signifies the loss of power to use servants as “means” to succeed, and to do charity to treat the suffering as “ends.” In Job’s and antiquity’s master-servant politics, there is little room for Kant’s Formula of Humanity.
Yahweh and the Judge, the Supreme Lord of History, in his pain and redemption moral order, treats Job and Josef K as “means” to assert his omnipotence. In Judaism’s moral dis-order, He authorizes Job’s sufferings and redeems him to assert his mighty might. If Job’s restoration bestows on Job Yahweh’s blessings, prosperity and honor, it does so for might’s sake, at the expense of justice. Just as Job is a “tool” to justify Yahweh’s omnipresence and omnipotence, so is Josef K “a means” to justify the Judge’s absolute power. Job’s prosperity 3⁄4 Yahweh, family, worldly comfort, and riches 3⁄4 ensures omnipotence prevails over justice. It highlights Job’s self-interest in his own restoration. He renounces his cry for justice in Yahweh’s mighty Whirlwind speeches, and Yahweh restores him. Josef K, by contrast, longs for genuine restoration in justice (T230-31). Because K cannot be fully acquitted, he submits to his execution (T230-31) with no remorse for loss of worldly luxuries, status or career. He departs in pained contemplation of man’s self-estrangement, of man’s estrangement towards others, and of his own estrangement and failure to access the absent Judge, and the longed-for High Court. As he journeys to death, his metaphysical anguish nonetheless conjoins joy in the beautiful memory of repose and glee in a nearby garden in times past. If Job journeys from perplexity to spiritual crisis to material prosperity, Josef K journeys from worldly pursuits to spiritual crisis to the incommensurable. Near the end, Josef K is more concerned with the theandric, with existence and innocence and with metaphysical and political estrangement.
Josef K desires to ‘improve things’ and to defend the ‘unjustly accused’ (T49-52) to ensure defendants are treated as “ends,” not as “a means.” If K’s claims sound a little dishonest to G•Scholars,283 they are not so to Josef K, an idealist hero. Josef K’s idealism embraces Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and Milton’s yearnings for justice. An autonomous Josef K strives to bring forth the dream of the Kingdom of Ends. There 3⁄4 “a rational being must always regard himself as legislator in a Kingdom of Ends rendered possible by freedom of the will, whether as
283 Dodd argues, “At this stage, Josef K acts as a spokesman for humane values and becomes a role model for others. He is styling himself as a political activist. Rightly derided in that first catastrophic speech, he now begins to look more plausible. These two perspectives intertwine and depend on the ideological sympathies of readers. Some may detect a discernible difference in tone in the two speeches K makes in the speeches 39ff and 47ff. The second involves the wife of the court usher. It offers spontaneous evidence of the degradation of her life under the Court and asks, ‘Sie woollen wohl hier einiges verbessern?’ She is, of course, responding positively to K’s attack on the Court, and while the grip of the ironic perspective may incline us to read K’s reply as an equally disingenuous, subtler attempt at manipulation, we may also sense a new realms and honesty in K’s words (T47ff)...A note of narrative sympathy for K...begins to challenge the judgmental perspective which predisposes us to see the worst in him. It would take a very judgmental reader to discount the vein of integrity emerging in K’s character as he acquires the qualities of empathy and solidarity with the oppressed of whom he is a member. For those readers... the novel reads like an indictment of the Court and its tyrannical power. The most emphatic piece of evidence in the case against the Court is, of course, the horrendous execution.” Dodd, William. Der Prozess. Scotland: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1991. 36, 39-41
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