Out of all of the Zürau aphorisms of Kafka there is one that reads as follows: “You are the task. No pupil far and wide (Du bist die Aufgabe. kein Schüler weit und breit) [1]. It resonates profoundly in our days as the idea of “education” and its inherited traditions are liquidated by the essence of technology. What Kafka could have meant by the idea of “task” (in German Aufgabe or in Spanish tarea) is to be deciphered in the intellectual context of the time. In his gloss to this aphorism, Reiner Stach has emphasized something elementary and yet quite essential; that is, that the task is not an action of the subject, but the meeting place of both subject and object. There is only the task of existence, and only to this extent we are always students of life before everything else comes into being. In a later aphorism, Kafka seems to return to the question of task by adding: “Two tasks at the beginning of life: to keep reining in your sphere, and to keep checking whether you might have gone into hiding somewhere outside your sphere” [2]. Something escapes, and that which is other than what is appropriate in life might just be the infinite work of the task of existence. 

If there is a “theology” in Kafka it is something other than one conditioned by an efficacious action directed towards God. Again, these questions were up in the air in Kafka’s milieu at the time, and it suffices to remember Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (1915) as an emblem, when the old astronomer tells his pupil Kepler: “One thing alone: carry out my work; do not let this tremendous labor utterly perish…” [3]. Writing in close proximity to Felix Weltsch’s theology of transcendent action in Freiheit und Gnade (1920), Brod understood that humans are only legitimate and participating in the “good” if it assists in the poetic energy of God. Here the notion of the task corresponds to the higher and more geometrico order of God. For Kafka, on the contrary, there is no task that is oriented as a supplement to a divine order that must be realized; it is rather a sensible education that had no beginning and no end, learning without texture because it has no fixed object. This Kafka’s task is an exilic (galuth) practice that cannot be territorialized in a promise of nationhood or state authority. The paradigmatic figure of “this task” is Sancho Panza, because as a lucid and sensible fool he is able to enjoy life to the very end. To experience the task without a destiny is to be able to stretch experience to the end of life. 

This is precisely why Sancho Panza stands the paradigm of the task of a life that dwells in freedom. Let us recall carefully what Kafka writes in his short parable “The truth about Sancho Panza”: “Sancho Panza, a free man, maybe out of a certain feeling of responsibility, yet imperturbable, followed Quixote on his adventures and from them he had a grand and successful entertainment to the end of his days” [4]. The condition of ‘freedom’ that is proper to the task is imperturbable (gleichmütig), in which the pursuit of struggle and conflict is abandoned in order to complete and follow the task. But this “following” is not one of submission, but of segundear or sekundiere: “In the struggle between you and the world, second the world”, as he writes in another mysterious Zürau aphorism [5]. We remain in a state of the pure imperturbable when we second the world, because nothing appears to inflict us existence with the force of submission or obedience. Thus, freedom is not a substantive political category, but a lived and almost painterly instance in language that puts us closer (or apart) from our task. 

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Notes 

1. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 42. Translation modified.

2. Ibid., 186.

3. Max Brod’s Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (Northwestern University Press, 2007),  124.

4. Franz Kafka. “The truth about Sancho Panza”, in The Complete Stories (Schocken Books, 1971), 610. 

5. Reiner Stach. The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (Princeton University Press, 2022), 106.