Each month, Everyday Anaysis publishes an online article on a recent topic of political or cultural relevance. Essays should be 1000-3000 words in legnth and submissions can be sent to the editors via the contact form at the link above. Recent articles can be found below.
Each month, Everyday Anaysis publishes an online article on a recent topic of political or cultural relevance. Essays should be 1000-3000 words in legnth and submissions can be sent to the editors via the contact form at the link above. Recent articles can be found below.
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
November 2025
The irony is inscribed in his very name. Diogenes (Διογένης) means “born of Zeus,” a marker of divine lineage, yet he was known to his contemporaries as the Dog (κύων, kyōn), and his followers as the Cynics (kynikoi—literally “dog-like”). What should have signified noble descent became the emblem of shameless simplicity. Diogenes embraced the insult, transforming the dog into a philosophical figure of freedom: faithful to the earth, unashamed of the body, indifferent to hierarchy. The dog lives directly, without mediation or possession; it barks, eats, sleeps, and desires without apology. In this animal openness, Diogenes found the condition of actual thought: philosophy not as mastery, but as exposure to light.
Aaron Schuster, in How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, an original reading of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” retrieves this Cynic inheritance. As he notes, “it was Plato who established the dog as the ‘philosophical animal par excellence’” (Schuster, 2024, p. 8). In the Republic, Plato praises the dog’s ability to discern friend from foe through knowledge rather than appearance, a trait he calls “truly philosophical,” for “how could the dog be anything but a lover of learning if it distinguishes what is its own and what is alien in terms of knowledge and ignorance?” Schuster goes on to trace how this Platonic lineage continues in the Cynics, those self-styled “dogs” who, led by Diogenes of Sinope, turned shamelessness and simplicity into philosophical virtues.
Whether their name came from the Cynosarges, the “White Dog” gymnasium, or from mockery of Diogenes’s scandalous behaviour, they embraced the dog as a symbol of honesty and natural life. As Schuster recalls, the first philosophical talking dog appeared only centuries later, in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, where Cerberus praises the Cynics for entering Hades “laughing and cursing at everyone,” the true mark of fearless philosophy. Schuster brings Diogenes and Kafka’s dog together to show that the philosophical dogsurvives from antiquity to modernity, but its freedom has changed form: from public defiance to private endurance, from rejecting the master to obsessively seeking him.
In this sense, Kafka’s dog, endlessly questioning the origins of nourishment and the habits of its own species, becomes for Schuster a modern figure of the philosopher: solitary, obsessive, ridiculous, yet animated by a stubborn freedom to inquire. Like Diogenes, the dog in Kafka’s story lives in radical proximity to the world, thinking not from transcendence but from hunger, habit, and vulnerability. Its philosophising is not noble or transcendent but canine, an inquiry sustained by need, perplexity, and the refusal to stop asking.
Diogenes’ command to Alexander, “stand out of my sunlight,” thus echoes through Kafka’s burrowing dog. Both claim the right to think outside sovereignty: to expose thought to the immediacy of existence. In Diogenes, this freedom is solar and public; in Kafka’s dog, it is subterranean and anxious. Yet two distinct modes of freedom give form to what Schuster calls “the dog’s new science of freedom,” a freedom that lies not in domination but in persistence, in the capacity to live and reflect without privilege or protection (Schuster 2024, p. 216). To philosophise, in this lineage, is to inhabit the world as a dog in the sun or under the ground, i.e., faithful not to power, but to the restless movement of thought itself.
This gesture of the dogged philosopher confronting the shadow of Alexander frames Schuster’s book, in which Kafka’s canine investigator inherits Diogenes’ defiance. Schuster’s “new science” resists the sovereignty of abstract knowledge and defends the poetic moment of life as the ground of genuine inquiry. He asks what it would mean to philosophise “like a dog,” treating Kafka’s canine narrator as an unlikely theorist and experimental scientist.
The author argues that Kafka’s story is more than a parable: it outlines a speculative “system of science.” The dog’s investigations into music, nourishment, fasting, and community raise deeper questions about knowledge, language, institutions, and freedom. The “new science” here is a canine philosophy that parallels, and at times anticipates, phenomenology (Husserl) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan). For Schuster, the dog embodies theory’s eccentric hero: maladjusted, melancholic, yet radically committed to truth.
Schuster regards Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” as a seemingly minor literature and treats the dog’s inquiries not as curiosities but as the basis of a speculative system: “a cynological system of science” that parodies academic disciplines and reveals philosophy’s persistence in neurotic failure and maladjustment (p. 240). Food science, musicology, ritual, and freedom form the eccentric departments of this canine university. Like Diogenes’s dog, Kafka’s dog insists on the right to investigate outside the grandeur of institutions, embracing the comic dignity of errancy.
While reading Schuster’s book, not surprisingly, the work that came to mind was Vico’s New Science. Vico’s project, like Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s “dog philosopher,” belongs to the same counter-tradition that resists the purification of reason. Two authors defend what might be called the Baroque imagination, a thought that moves through images, bodies, and affects rather than through abstraction or clarity. Vico’s new science is a poetics of knowledge, a philosophy that insists the origins of reason lie in the passions and fictions of human collectives. “Poetry,” he writes, “constituted the first common language of all the ancient nations” (Vico, 1984, p. 151).
The earliest humans, seized by fear and wonder, invented gods, myths, and rituals that shaped the world into intelligible form. Against the Cartesian separation of mind and matter, Vico affirms the continuity of imagination and law, myth and knowledge, body and truth. He claims that “the study of metaphysics and of poetry are naturally opposed to each other: one purges the mind of prejudices, while the other immerses and subverts it in them” (Vico, 1984, p. 183). What metaphysics purges, in his view, the Baroque restores—the flesh of thought.
For Vico, this poetic wisdom is not a deviation from science but its primordial condition, a first science that precedes modern epistemology. It is a science of figures, gestures, and passions: what Deleuze would later call a “logic of sense” rather than of identity. Vico’s world is baroque in its refusal of linearity or transparency; it is made of folds, repetitions, and metamorphoses, where divine and human, nature and artifice, intertwine. Knowledge does not unfold from a pure principle but curls back upon the opacity of life.
For Schuster, Kafka’s dog is not merely an allegory of modern anxiety but a figure of philosophy itself, a creature that thinks from within its own hunger, perplexity, and absurdity. Like Vico’s primitive poets, the dog’s inquiry begins in need and sensation. Its thought is not transcendental but corporeal, not systematic but obsessive and circular. In my terms, this embodies the Baroque spirit of immanent thinking, operating from within the conditions it attempts to comprehend. The mind doesn’t observe from above but rather burrows through its reality, treating its own line of inquiry as a subterranean fold emerging from thought’s very ground.
Thus, the affinity between Vico and Schuster lies in their shared resistance to the metaphysical demand for detachment. They imagine a thinking that is incarnate and curved, a thought that bends toward its object rather than distancing itself. Vico’s poetic science generates reason from the depths of imagination, while Schuster’s dog philosophy engenders reflection out of appetite. Each defends philosophy as an activity inseparable from life’s conditions, i.e., its hungers, absurdities, and affections. Two figures, the Vichian poet and Kafka’s dog, think with the world rather than about it.
Deleuze provides the conceptual topology that binds these two gestures. The Baroque fold is his name for this very curvature of thought: a world in which matter and mind, inside and outside, form an infinite series of inflexions (Deleuze, 1993, p. 24). The fold is both a metaphysical and ethical principle: thought’s refusal to be purified, its insistence on remaining implicated. To philosophise, in this sense, is to inhabit the fold of the world, not to escape it; to think as the dog does, exposed to light and noise, faithful to the confusion of existence.
Suppose Diogenes’s freedom consists in saying “stand out of my sunlight,” and Kafka’s dog’s freedom consists in persisting in its questions. In that case, Deleuze shows that this same freedom belongs to the imagination itself: the freedom of thought to remain folded in the world it contemplates. The Baroque imagination thus becomes the space where poetic wisdom, canine curiosity, and philosophical creation coincide. Thought is not a geometry of clear ideas but an art of folds, a practice of immersion and emergence.
Vico’s divine poet and Schuster’s philosophical dog all resist the Cartesian sun that blinds rather than illuminates. They teach that philosophy’s true light is not transcendence but immanence, the sunlight that touches the dog’s body, the myth that shapes a people, the fold that turns reflection back into life. The resonance with Schuster is clear. Kafka’s dog laments the absence of the “true word” and conducts bizarre experiments in search of it. Still, Schuster reads this as philosophy’s condition itself: “What if Kafka’s dog were an unlikely hero of theory for untheoretical times? What would it mean to philosophise with Kafka’s dog?” (Schuster, 2024, p. 3). Just as Vico insists that human institutions can only be understood through the poetic imagination that produced them, Schuster insists that philosophy survives only through its maladjusted, parabolic form. Their projects reject the sovereignty of abstraction and affirm the necessity of parable, fable, and imagination in the constitution of knowledge.
The figure of Diogenes allows us to see the alignment more vividly. In defending Kafka’s dog, Schuster resists the Alexandrian authority of modern bureaucratic institutions. He returns philosophy to the dog, whether in the myth-making “poetic animals” of the First Nations or the neurotic canine researcher of Kafka. Each transforms what seems marginal, absurd, or irrational into the very foundation of a new science. I would say that Schuster’s contribution is not only a playful rereading of Kafka but also a contemporary continuation of Vico’s gesture. If Vico’s New Science founded the modern human sciences on the recognition of poetic imagination, Schuster’s “new science” preserves philosophy’s future by defending its right to failure, eccentricity, and maladjustment.
The lesson of “new sciences” is that truth cannot be secured by abstraction alone. It must be defended in the poetic, parabolic, and eccentric gestures that sustain life. Whether in Vico’s cycles of nations or Schuster’s canine university, philosophy remains, like Diogenes, a dog before Alexander, claiming nothing but the singularity of life. The dog, then, is anything but incidental. For Schuster, Kafka’s dog extends the lineage of the poetic animal, one that persists stubbornly in its parabolic inquiry, undeterred by institutional neglect. And for Diogenes, the dog was philosophy itself: shameless, faithful to nature, defiant of power.
In the landscape of contemporary philosophy, Schuster’s work stands as a singular effort to think after the exhaustion of critique. Writing through figures like Kafka and Diogenes, Schuster reclaims philosophy’s right to be minor, comic, and errant in the face of institutionalised reason. His project refuses both the transcendental ambitions of theory and the moral sobriety of critique, exploring instead the residual vitality of thought that persists amid failure. Against the procedural rationality that now governs knowledge, from academic bureaucracy to algorithmic mediation, Schuster’s humour and perversity mark a counter-conduct: an insistence that philosophy’s dignity lies precisely in its maladjustment.
Schuster’s thought begins where the humanist confidence of Vico ends. For Vico, poetic imagination founded the world; for Schuster, that world has already decayed into its own commentary. Through Kafka, he locates philosophy not in the recovery of myth but in the refusal of coherence, the right to remain unfinished, maladjusted, and exposed. His writing insists that philosophy’s task is no longer to explain or to found, but to endure its own failure with precision and humour. Vico still believed that the imagination could shape institutions; Schuster inhabits the ruins of that belief. What he calls philosophy survives only as a gesture, i.e., dog-like, minor, obstinate, faithful not to system but to life’s residue. The sunlight that once illuminated the genesis of meaning in Vico now burns in Schuster as irony: a brightness too harsh for reconciliation, a light under which every order shows its cracks.
To read Schuster, then, is to encounter the end of the “new science” itself: philosophy after its institutions, thinking as scavenging, truth as the persistence of error. His kinship with Diogenes lies not in rebellion but in style, a fidelity to the low, the comic, the shameless, against the empire of authority that still calls itself reason. Schuster’s philosophical stance resonates with what might be termed the post-critical moment: the exhaustion of critique as a mode of mastery and its transformation into an art of survival.
Yet where these projects often retain a metaphysical ambition to reconstruct forms of worldhood, negativity, or relation, Schuster’s intervention is more ironic and ascetic. He refuses the consolation of restoration. His philosophy inhabits the point at which critique itself becomes comic: where the philosopher, stripped of institutional authority, must learn again to think from the gutter, in laughter, embarrassment, and persistence. In this, Schuster stands less as a theorist of renewal than as a practitioner of philosophical degradation, a thinker of the remainder that thought cannot sublate. His Diogenes is not an allegory of resistance but of exposure: the insistence that, after the collapse of systems, what endures of philosophy is its capacity to blush and to bark, to live without mastery.
In this light, Schuster’s philosophy reads as a diagnosis of the academy’s own terminal farce. The institutional forms that once guaranteed philosophy’s legitimacy, i.e., peer review, editorial mediation, and disciplinary consensus, now persist only as automated rituals within the algorithmic economy of publication. Artificial intelligence has completed what managerial reason began: the substitution of thought by procedure, critique by compliance. Yet Schuster’s ironic fidelity to failure grants this exhaustion a strange dignity. His laughter is not cynical but diagnostic, exposing the empty core of the academic illusio. In an age when machines can simulate the gestures of reflection, Schuster’s insistence on maladjustment becomes an ethical stance: to think as that which resists optimisation, to remain human not by mastery but by error. Philosophy, in his hands, survives precisely where its institutional body collapses: barking, embarrassed, and alive.
REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). The Anthlone Press.
Schuster, A. (2024). How to research like a dog: Kafka’s new science. MIT Press.
Vico, G. (1984). The first new science (L. Pompa, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.