Dogito, Ergo Sum

Isabel Jacobs considers Aaron Schuster’s “How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science.”

By Isabel JacobsOctober 11, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Literary Criticism

“ONCE YOU HAVE food in your mouth,” declares Franz Kafka’s philosopher dog, “you have solved all questions, at least for the time being.” This odd assertion sets the tone for one of Kafka’s most obscure short stories, “Investigations of a Dog” (1922), the subject of Aaron Schuster’s brilliant, endlessly funny book How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (2024), which opens up a vast terrain of philosophical issues. Schuster’s digressive readings, sniffing along the dog’s trail, might change forever how we read Kafka. To grasp the story’s meaning, Schuster claims, one must become a researcher in an impossible new field: dog philosophy.

Kafka began his “shaggy-dog story” in the autumn of 1922, less than two years before his death and shortly after he abandoned The Castle, his unfinished masterpiece. Could this strange tale be a response to that impasse—a reflection on Kafka’s own struggle to finish his work? First published posthumously by Max Brod in 1931, “Investigations of a Dog” gives the canine a special place in Kafka’s bestiary. The dog is the most metaphysical of beasts.

“Investigations of a Dog” follows an aging dog as he recounts his lifelong quest to solve the fundamental mysteries of dogdom. Three questions drive him: music, food, and freedom. Granted, we don’t usually think of music as a fundamental mystery for dogs, but his inquiry begins with a primal scene: a confusing concert by canine musicians. Still a young puppy in this flashback, he stumbles upon a band of dogs that play music with their front paws. Yet they are completely silent; it seems as if the music is coming out of the air. Eventually, our pooch begins to doubt whether he had even seen these musical hounds at all. A deeply unsettling episode, in true Kafka fashion.

Disillusioned, he “renounce[s] the joys of puppydom” and becomes a philosopher, retreating into metaphysical speculation, especially on the nature of food. Kafka’s picaresque story is built on the premise that dogs cannot see humans—their food is delivered by invisible hands. The dog, puzzled by the origin of his kibble, is determined to solve the mystery. His research is doomed to fail—he can’t make the invisible appear—and yet he’s relentless in his pursuit. This search almost feels representative of the reader’s relationship to the text: Isn’t this a lot like reading Kafka? Always chasing an answer and never finding it? And what does it mean to research like a dog? A canine scholar philosophizes with what’s at paw: the immediate, the banal, the ridiculous, starting with the simplest yet most important thing in a dog’s life: food. Kafka’s dog teaches us that philosophy can begin anywhere, even from the belly of a dog.

Is this a theological parable? A parody of philosophy? Speculative fiction? Or just a joke? Perhaps, as Schuster proposes, this is actually Kafka’s philosophical manifesto. For Schuster, Kafka’s dog story is not a comedy but what he calls “screwball tragedy”: a dark burlesque where humans are “the hidden masters, the invisible […] owners, the unnoticed gods of the dogs.” The combination of screwball and tragedy is made up of “the Kafkian mixture of necessity and impossibility, indispensability and hopelessness.” One lives but cannot live.

One of the book’s accomplishments is dispelling a persisting Kafka myth. Kafka’s world is often seen as one where the individual is defenseless against society, met by a gatekeeper barring entry to the Castle, the Law, and so on. But are these characters really as helpless as they seem? With Schuster, the term “Kafkaesque” acquires a new meaning—it is less about us being trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare than it is about us engineering the very nightmare in which we’re trapped. Self-sabotage isn’t just a symptom; it’s also the motor of Kafka’s universe:

Rather than being sheerly submitted to obscure and overwhelming forces beyond their control—the civilization jungle of capitalism, the state, bureaucracy, academia, and the law—they secretly engineer their impasses, create their own tortuous realities, helplessly and hopelessly tilt at themselves. They complain that the world has them in its grip, while desperately holding onto this very world.

Kafka is all too often read deterministically, “his characters viewed as empty puppets manipulated and controlled by external powers.” Using a psychoanalytic lens—without putting Kafka on the couch—Schuster argues that, by contrast, inner freedom and outer force are not opposites. Rather than a chronicler of bureaucratic dystopia, Kafka should be read as a writer of freedom—but a strange kind of freedom, “appearing in the mode of compulsion, self-sabotage, and unfreedom.” A freedom turned against itself, dismantling the idea of a strong, self-possessed subject and revealing instead a dogged self, bound to an invisible master.

Schuster closely analyzes Kafka’s concept of disposition as a paradoxical fusion of fate and freedom—not an inborn trait or fixed characteristic but a moment of choice and self-constitution. Challenging the prejudice of Kafka as deterministic, Schuster highlights the freedom of his characters: though they may hesitate, they ultimately choose themselves. This, he argues, is Kafka’s “new causality”: not fatalism but fragile freedom. At the heart of the book is a chapter titled “Kafka Swims,” centered on a notebook passage where Kafka writes: “I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.”

To swim is not to swim—the motto of Kafka’s logic of paradox, where failure is the only way of realizing freedom. Kafka’s new causality is embodied in the figure of the Olympian champion who declares that he cannot swim simply because he still remembers a time when he couldn’t. Even those able to swim cannot swim. This possibility of the impossible, for Schuster, is not despair but the only possibility of freedom we have. Like the swimmer who cannot swim, the dog is a researcher who cannot research. Speaking, too, is impossible in Kafka’s universe: the dog is always looking for the word yet never finds it.

Who is this dog and who are we? The human exists both as animal and not-animal, suspended in an in-between from which dog philosophy carves out a space for a new subject: “This is where Kafka’s animals, crossbreeds, and uncanny nonhumans come in,” Schuster writes, “at the point where the narcissistic image of ‘man’ breaks down and blurs.” Kafka’s subject is a loser, relentlessly cultivating neurotic persistence. For Kafka, truth is only found in failure. And to think like a dog means to resist thinking itself.

“Investigations of a Dog” joins Kafka’s other animal tales: The Metamorphosis (1915), “The Burrow” (1931), and his final story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (1924). Even at the end of The Trial (1925), Joseph K. meets a dehumanizing fate: “Like a dog!” Schuster invites us to reread The Metamorphosis, where Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant insect becomes a moment of “the subject acting as its own (screwy) cause”—another instance of Kafka’s “new causality […] as self-causation without the self, or self-causation marked by a glitch, division, or hesitation.”

Schuster’s theory of the sidekick offers a uniquely dialogical way of thinking, reflecting Freud’s claim that the ego is never truly master in its own house. There’s always an other beside us. In psychoanalytic parlance, the other is the dethroned subject of the unconscious. In Kafka’s literature, this other is a dog. Schuster argues that the sidekick—a staple of the cowboy genre—is “an unlikely figure of agency in a world split by the unconscious.” Like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, the dog is both partner and guide. Schuster positions himself as Kafka’s sidekick—commenting, explaining, and walking alongside the text—and turns the companion into the story’s true protagonist: a faithful dog who inevitably strays from his master.

In keeping with that ethos, Schuster spins Kafka’s story further in bold directions, letting the dog author a philosophical treatise titled “There Are No Cats.” Schuster’s book is packed with catchy aphorisms like “Kafka’s metaphysical principle: no system without a gap, no castle without a shack” and “No palace without a dog kennel,” not to mention the concept of “pet existentialism” and a rebranding of Kafka’s dog as the “woolly companion to the German Idealists.” Schuster confesses: “I have endeavored in this book to take the dog’s side, and to elaborate in my own way his unfinished system—like an idiot who didn’t understand that he was reading a story and saw instead a fascinating philosophical project begging for continuation.” The dog is Schuster’s alter ego, an arbitrary constraint of a book which is less a dogmatic treatise than a fun detour through philosophy and world literature.

Schuster unlocks Kafka’s story through playfully Freudian readings, sharp and often surprising. The affinity between Kafka’s dog and psychoanalysis starts with Freud’s fixation on his Chow Chows, Lin Yug and Yofi—yes, the father of psychoanalysis was a dog person. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also had a pet dog, Justine (named after the Marquis de Sade’s heroine), who accompanied him to his lectures: “She is my bitch, she is very beautiful and you would have heard her speak …”

For Schuster, Miguel de Cervantes’s The Dialogue of the Dogs (1613) is a missing link between Kafka and Freud. Schuster suggests that Cervantes’s text prefigured psychoanalysis. After all, is psychoanalysis not another talking-dog story? A teenage Freud and his friend signed letters to each other as Scipio and Berganza—the names of the dogs in Cervantes’s Dialogue—foreshadowing the psychoanalytic pair of pooch on the couch and dogged analyst.

In this reading, the unconscious and the superego are canine constructs, echoing Michel Foucault’s claim that Freud invented the superego after a patient confessed, “I sense a dog over me.” Schuster’s book sketches a parallel history of Western thought, one seen through the eyes of the animal: Homer’s Argos, the faithful dog awaiting his master’s return after 20 years; Diogenes, the barking Cynic philosopher; Confucius, the “stray dog”; Goya’s hound; Plato’s wisdom-loving dogs; Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933); and canine performances in American silent film.

As previously mentioned, one of the main themes of dog philosophy is food. A dog philosophy is a metaphysics of nutrition. Where the food comes from remains a central question, but food philosophy isn’t just about pellets—it’s also about hunger: “Fasting is the means of discovering what nourishment is all about,” Schuster writes. This idea places “Investigations of a Dog” in close dialogue with “A Hunger Artist,” also published in 1922. For the dog, fasting is a mystical journey; for the hunger artist, it’s a piece of cake. In both stories, fasting becomes a metaphysical practice that splits the body from itself; in the former, this separation transforms the dog into something other than dog—ascetic martyr or mangy hound?

The fasting dog embodies what Schuster calls “canine Cartesianism”—a split subject marked by universal doubt and meditations on death. Going on a diet is the most undoggish act imaginable. Fasting goes against dog nature; it’s a philosophical method to penetrate the secret of food. Not Descartes’s cogito, but a dogito: I fast, therefore I think. Not unrelatedly, though said to hate dogs—he viewed them as soulless machines—Descartes kept one as a pet: Mister Scratch, with whom he strolled through the Dutch countryside.

Another riddle for Kafka’s dog scholar is the case of the “aerial dogs” (Lufthunde) which he only knows by hearsay. They are lazy, fluffy lapdogs, “nothing much more than a beautiful coat of hair.” These groomed, well-fed, bourgeois creatures barely touch the ground. The aerial dog echoes the “luftmensch”—a romanticized dreamer from 19th-century Yiddish literature who also levitates across Marc Chagall’s canvases. Should we read “Investigations of a Dog” as a not-so-veiled allegory of the Jewish condition? Kafka’s Lufthunde is, in Schuster’s reading, “an ironical literary image of the uprooted and, according to the stereotype, hapless and unproductive Eastern Jews,” floating above dogdom. And where the Lufthunde soars, the philosopher dog merely stumbles along. His condition is one of lifelong hesitation, both in faith and identity: “He is, and is not, a dog like the others.” Kafka’s dog always yearns for recognition and comradeship, barking at fellow pooches yet struggling to belong.

Neither fully earthbound nor adrift, the dog turns this nonplace into the very object of his inquiry. The dog’s new science is “a science of the gaps,” a cry for freedom, and a new philosophy defined by hesitation and uncertainty. The final sentences of Kafka’s story are dedicated to this precarious freedom, which he describes as only “kümmerliches Gewächs” (“a scrawny little plant”). But at least, the dog sighs, it’s his freedom.

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Featured image: Sarah Catherine Martin. From The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog, 1819. CC0, publicdomainreview.org. Accessed October 8, 2025. Image has been cropped.