Tag: Theodor Adorno

How to Read an Aphorism

The aphorism, that snippet of wit and wisdom, is not a prose form I imagine many of us encounter regularly these days. It is primarily French in origin, with its most celebrated practitioner being the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld. I myself first encountered it through Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ill-health meant he could only focus long enough to put down a paragraph or two before needing to cool his brains, and who was happy to take any influence provided it wasn’t German. Both of these men are long dead; just as dead can the aphoristic form itself strike us as being.

An aphorism is a sentence or two, maybe at most a few paragraphs, on whatever takes the author’s fancy. They are philosophical, in that they are driven by ideas, but never system-building. If you wanted to build, you would write an essay, not scatter fragments like seeds. To write an aphorism, you must typically believe against something. In Theodor Adorno (in Minima Moralia) or Nietzsche’s cases, this “against” is a dislike for significant portions of the world they lived in. In the case of the French-language Romanian thinker Emil Cioran, it’s a dislike of nearly all the world he lived in, indeed of life itself. The typical impression of an aphorism is of witnessing someone engaged in a futile conflict with a great edifice, an elegant swordsman stabbing at the cold stone of castle walls.

Prejudice is often necessary to the aphorism, and it is precisely this which makes the form seem challenging to imagine writing today. An infamous one by Nietzsche, “You go to women – do not forget the whip”, provides an example. On the one hand, it conveys succinctly the importance of power dynamics for Nietzsche to his reader, but on the other it is reliant upon a (male) reader who is happy to take sexist ideas without question. The more prejudices we attempt today to dissolve – on race, gender, nation – the more we lose that centre of common understanding which an aphorism can work with. Nietzsche may dislike much of the modern world, but he needs it there to make his points. The best aphorisms are short, but brevity is enabled by us being able to recognise the world, the idea, for ourselves.

Prejudice and the absence of a system are not the only things that are needful to the aphorist. The most important is an overwhelming sense of one’s own importance and, of course, correctness. We shouldn’t underestimate how rare this actually is. Writers, especially of fiction, are uniquely predisposed to consider themselves great geniuses – but they are also typically wracked with self-doubts. In the case of fiction a creator typically believes in the merits of each work as a whole, rather than every aspect of it. Philosophers and other thinkers may likewise be utterly convinced that their key ideas are right, yet ready to deny themselves the megalomania that sees their every thought as being worthy of a crown of laurels.

For the aphorist, it is not so. Your ideas in your aphorisms range widely, and you must believe each one to be totally correct and worth sharing. In other words, you must be willing to assert to yourself and the world that you are a polymath, a rare genius. Such arrogance is another reason why few aphoristic books are being written and published today – the people truly arrogant enough to produce such a book are too busy in politics or leading large companies. This is why, to a certain extent, for the modern aphorism, we should look to social media, because it is here that we hear the select thoughts of those who believe the entire universe needs to hear them, compressed into the shortform.

We need arrogance because to doubt, for an aphorist, is fatal. Since an aphorism rarely has time to give examples, let alone argue, it works by the beauty of its prose and the power of its emotions to persuade us to its view. (“Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul” wrote Walt Whitman, whose poems are often filled with aphoristic little moments.) Since this is the case, to show doubt is to undermine everything you write – if you doubt, the reader will have cause to also. Regardless of the arrogance noted above, the aphorists I have read seem to be human, and no freer ultimately from self-questioning than the rest of us. Not showing it, then, is the thing.

This tension between feeling and revealing becomes part of the excitement of reading aphorisms. I think one of the best ways into reading someone like Cioran or Nietzsche is to think of their works as collectively constituting a work of fiction, complete with a highly opinionated narrative voice trying to get our attention and our trust. One of our goals becomes, as it is when we read fiction, the analysis of this narrative voice, the pinning down of its consistencies and inconsistencies, and identifying those moments when it seems to be hiding something from us that may yet prove essential. In many cases we can read a book of aphorisms looking for the gaps between the mask and the man – and it is normally a man – and not feel our time has been entirely wasted.

All of the above is a kind of defence of the aphorism and its writer. But this does not, really, get us any closer to reading or enjoying reading the things. Here I can only speak for myself, those things I noticed that helped me in a recent attempt at this.

The experience of reading a book of aphorisms is strange because it neither asks us to keep a thread of argument in mind, as does a typical non-fiction work, nor asks us to remember characters and stories as does a work of fiction. Yet memory is vital to the aphorism. “There are some words that hit like hammers. But others / You swallow like hooks and swim on and yet do not know it.” We ought to replace Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “words” with “aphorisms” to get an idea of the role of memory in reading aphorisms. We must read to remember. The startling thing, for me, when I read Cioran, or even Nietzsche (a writer I much prefer), is how so many of the aphorisms do nothing for me. I read them and shrug to myself. But if we remember them, they will return to us, and if they are good aphorisms they will return to us at precisely that moment when they can best reveal their value and hidden truth to us. To someone in the habit of letting the words one reads leave their head as soon as they move onto the next sentence there’s almost no point reading the aphorisms at all.

To say that we have to read to remember hints at the importance we need to place in ourselves as readers. Just as the aphorist cannot show doubt, the reader of aphorisms must believe she will one day be receptive to them. The faith, the confidence, must be on both sides. To give up a book of aphorisms as we may give up a novel damns us as much as it damns the aphorist, for in doing this we say, in effect, that we believe we will never have the right frame of mind, that we are incapable of the receptivity needed for appreciating what is in front of us. That we are fixed, and dull, and heavy of spirit.

Such were my thoughts, anyway, as I wondered whether to write about Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I finished it last week, and had thought it would get no blog post. There was too little underlining, too few thoughts of my own to work with. That strange aphoristic rhythm – where we read page after page before suddenly gasping at something of beauty, or wit, or profundity – was not doing anything for me. Cioran, who has found a posthumous popularity among the anti-natalist community, (“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach”), is relentlessly negative in a way that I try to avoid adopting for myself.

Only occasionally would I reach for my pencil. “No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive” – certainly a silly view, but one well expressed. At one point he describes mankind as “fidget[ing] as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.” These things we can respect for their imagery, even as we chuckle from beyond the margin. (Just as Adorno wrote that there can be “no right life in the wrong”, there can be no good aphorism in wrong prose.)

Other moments required more consideration at my end. “There is no ‘ecstasy’ which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!” seems frightening in its implications about the value of our moments, and for that reason worth carrying about, seeking in life the evidence that may one day disprove it. “The jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance” is another good example of something that works for me. Even if there are no gods, nor ever were, such a phrase by its mystery makes me wonder about their value in trying to explain something about the world I live in. Just flicking through the book now, I have come across another thing to note, as if to prove my point about needing to find the right time, the right inner receptivity, for what at another moment may be so many dead words. (What a relief to find something I wrote at the beginning of this post makes sense, at least for my own case…) The aphorism in question: “Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.” Here, it’s less a question of whether I agree, but whether this provokes something. Perhaps that’s another good way of looking at an aphorism – each successful one seems to carry in itself the seed of any number of novels.

Perhaps the hardest thing about aphorisms is writing about them. They ought to speak for themselves. At school I might be given one and told to go away and write 1,500 words, the length of a short blog post on this website. But to write, as I normally do, a few paragraphs on each of the above, would make me look like an idiot. (This result may occur by accident at other times, but is not the intention of the blog.) I trust readers to know how to unpack the obvious meanings of a saying. And as for the deeper meanings, the ones that come out of the wound an aphorism leaves in us – these are too personal for me to share, and I imagine are just the same for you too.

They are strange things, aphorisms. These sentences of prejudice, arrogance, at times barely-concealed anxiousness, sometimes resonating, sometimes aggravating, sometimes doing nothing at all. I wrote the first part of this post in an attempt to make myself believe the time I spent with Cioran (not the first, because I read A Short History of Decay a few years ago) was not wasted, and with the magic that is granted me as your blogger, I somehow succeeded. Reflection added meanings, brought a certain sense to stacks of nonsense. Cioran himself writes of his form: “An Aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.” This is a deliberate silliness, one we shouldn’t take too seriously. A mask, a play, an act.

We don’t read such things to become warm. As Kafka wrote of good books, they must “be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Aphorisms are for when we are cold. They are the prick of pain that tells us we’re alive, and we must keep a store of them inside us, just in case the ice is ever at risk of getting too thick.  

Karl Jaspers on War Guilt

I haven’t quite decided whether I like what I read being relevant to understanding the world around me, or whether that relevance is ultimately more disturbing than positive. At university, I read Theodor Adorno’s essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” and then later on various things of Hannah Arendt’s, such as “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility” – both works that aimed to analyse the state of the German body politic in the aftermath of the Second World War. These were interesting enough and helped me write essays, but they were not ultimately texts that I thought would have much use in my day-to-day life. Nietzsche might turn me into a superman, but Adorno and Arendt would at best only teach me to look at history with care and scepticism. Now, however, it seems that I was completely mistaken.

Since the events of February 24th, I have returned to these pieces in an attempt to understand some of the questions that the present conflict will raise within Russia if it is ever to return to the Western international community as anything other than a pariah. After the Second World War Germany lay in ruins and the Allies had to work out what to do with the Germans themselves. Some of them, of course, had perpetrated perhaps the greatest mass evil the world had yet witnessed; others, however, had merely stood by; and still, others had actively or passively resisted the Nazi regime. But as Arendt points out, the only way to be sure that someone actually was an anti-Nazi was after they had hanged them. The Allies ultimately decided not to blame the German people as a whole; instead, they organised the Nuremberg Trials for Germans who were most obviously guilty of terrible crimes.

The situation in Russia will not be similar to that of Germany after 1945 and hopefully Ukraine will also escape a similar fate. But there is much that needs unpacking, challenging, and working through if we ourselves are to be able to engage constructively with Russia and the Russians. Because in adopting an attitude of blanket condemnation of the Russian people, we not only copy the Russian state’s own idiotic stance that suggests Ukraine is composed entirely of banderovtsi (supporters of the Ukrainian Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera), we also lose the sense of nuance and humanity that is necessary for living successfully on this shared planet.

Anyway, in preparation for a much longer piece I have read Karl Jaspers’ lecture series The Question of German Guilt (Die Schuldfrage). Like Arendt’s “Organised Guilt”, Jaspers’ lectures were given as the smoke was still rising off a ruined Germany. Jaspers, not a Jew himself but married to one, was concerned with identifying what his people were guilty of and who should be their judges. In this post I will summarise his work. Translations are my own.

Among the ashes

Germany’s manufacturing capacity had been burnt to the ground, but there was still greater damage inside men and women’s hearts. People had lost common ground, there was no way to communicate anymore. More than that, people had lost the ability to reflect. The Question of German Guilt takes us back to the Enlightenment and in particular Kant’s view of intellectual maturity as stated in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”. Germans, Jaspers thought, needed to regain their maturity – here defined as the ability to think for themselves (what Kant used the Latin phrase “sapere aude” – “dare to think” – to mean).  No longer should Germans hide behind “pride, doubt, anger, defiance, revenge, scorn” – instead they should listen and think, having set their emotions “on ice”.

It is only through rebuilding the ability for Germans to talk to one another that they will be able to connect to one another again. And then, once that has been achieved, “we create the essential foundations for us to talk to other peoples once more.” The only way out of pariahdom is to return to communication within one’s own broken state. But twelve years of propaganda and ideological pressure had done much to destroy internal unity among the Germans and deprive them of their solid ground.

Four Types of Guilts

The world (eventually) condemned the Nazi state, and rightly so. People wanted things to be made right and the Germans to be punished. But Jaspers is keen to demarcate the areas where the rest of the world was right to attack Germany, and where it ought better to keep silent. To this end, he defines four separate types of guilt.

Criminal Guilt

The first of these is criminal guilt. This one is familiar to us all. A crime has been committed when a law has been broken, and punishment is exacted through the court. One punished in this way has the opportunity to defend themselves using defined measures, like a defence lawyer.

Political Guilt

The second type of guilt is political guilt or political accountability. The things a state does, whether good or bad, concern political guilt. Every citizen is politically guilty because every citizen is responsible for their state. The Germans did not, strictly speaking, vote as a majority for Hitler, but they were still guilty for his actions because they did not act to remove him from power. The actions undertaken by Nazi Germany are, therefore, in this limited way, the fault of the German people. Instead of a court, here the arena for judgement is determined by power, or “the will of the victors”. The Allies and Soviets had won and gained control over Germany, so it was entirely fair for them to determine a punishment that would work out this political guilt. Whether they wanted to restrain themselves or murder as many Germans as possible, this was up to them.

Political guilt grows out of minor failures, especially to resist harmful political tendencies. Eventually, it became next to impossible to resist the Nazis. But there were many opportunities, especially early on in Hitler’s tenure, when the Germans could have prevented him from consolidating his control. Even if we feel useless and unfree, that is the eventual result of situations where we could have acted to prevent ourselves from becoming so.  

Moral Guilt

Next, we have moral guilt. The actions taken by individual people, whether or not they break laws, are still things the individuals are responsible for. With moral guilt, there is no way to pass the responsibility on to others. Being ordered to do something is no excuse, nor is being scared. If we pull the trigger in a war, we are not always guilty of a crime, but we must make peace with our own soul about our actions. Likewise, if we do not act to prevent something bad, such as the removal of a Jewish friend to the camps, we are not guilty in a criminal sense, but we are guilty in a moral sense. Within our own conscience – the only valid courtroom [MP1] – we must determine how to live with ourselves. Nobody can tell us we are morally guilty, and nobody can punish us for moral guilt. All these mechanisms lie within the individual soul or heart and are nobody else’s business.

A group cannot be morally guilty as a collective. Only individuals can be morally guilty, as their consciences are their own. To generalise a group as guilty for anything other than their political failures is the beginning of hate: “it would be as though there are no more people, only collectives.” When we refer to the people so much it destroys individual dignity and lays the ground for ideologies that destroy the individual within us. 

Metaphysical Guilt

Finally, we have metaphysical guilt. This is where Jaspers’ philosophical leaning becomes most apparent. This kind of guilt is connected to our existence as members of a common humanity. “There is a solidarity between human beings as human beings, which makes every individual responsible for every injustice and harm that takes place in the world, especially for those crimes which are committed in our presence or with our knowledge. When I do not do what I can to stop them, so am I guilty.” This is guilt over human badness, a kind of shame at what we are capable of, and though it is spread over all of us alive, it is worse for those who are close, physically, and temporally, to horrors. It is a kind of survivor’s guilt mixed with shame at what we humans are – “that I still live, that is my guilt”. The only potential judge for such guilt is god.

Consequences, Defences.

Each of these guilts has its consequences. Criminal guilt has punishment, while political guilt has accountability and making amends, whether this be through reparations or being destroyed by the victors. Moral guilt leads to a painful process of renewal, first by insight and then later by atonement. Finally, an awareness of metaphysical guilt leads to “a changed consciousness of humanity’s own self before God.” We learn something about who we are and are left humbled by it.

We must be able to defend ourselves, especially against the accusations of others. In The Question of German Guilt Jaspers’ describes some of the ways in which we might do this. Firstly, we can distinguish between ourselves as an individual and the group our accusers may wish to forcibly merge us into. We can state the facts of the case, and we can appeal to rights (providing, however, that we have not broken those of others – hypocrisy is rarely an effective defence!). We can reject the judge as biased, or the accusations themselves as not being used to establish truth or justice but as instead serving some other, less worthy purpose – as punishment themselves, or to discredit us. Ultimately, the main thing to note about the process of public accountability is that we can demand “accountability and punishment,” but we can never demand “regret and rebirth”. The latter can only come from within.

The Germans’ Guilt

After WW2 Germany was covered with foreign soldiers, many of whom were forbidden even from exchanging a friendly word with their former enemy’s people. Meanwhile, placards were going up with the phrase “Das ist eure Schuld!” (this is your fault) next to scenes from the camps. It was not an easy time to be a German, even without the refugee crisis that the dislocation of the Germans from their homelands in Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and others had caused. But the phrase “this is your fault” is not as clear as it appears. It can mean “You tolerated the regime”, “You supported it”, “you stood by before evil,” “you committed criminal acts”, and “as a people you are lesser, criminal, and bad.” In short, it can mean an awful lot. So, what should it mean? What guilt was there, according to Jaspers, and were there any mitigating factors?

The Nuremberg Trials determined criminal guilt, trying Germans who had committed clear crimes against humanity and war crimes. By determining criminal guilt, the other forms of guilt were brought into sharper focus. All the Germans were politically guilty because they had failed to make their government accountable. “But making someone accountable is not the same thing as recognising them as morally guilty.” So, it is in matters of moral guilt that there are distinctions to be drawn among the Germans. Some people of course do not have a conscience, but for the majority, there would be varying degrees of moral guilt and a consequence need for reflection, atonement, and renewal.

Jaspers notes the different ways that moral guilt can manifest itself, ranging from false consciousness, partial approval of the state (weren’t the autobahns great?), to delusions including self-deception (thinking you can change it from within). The only way of lessening one’s moral guilt as a German would be to have acted to prevent injustices and doing things like sabotage.  

Mitigating Factors

The problem with political guilt in particular is that we can never completely nail it down. We all know how the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War left Germany in a position where fascism could develop effectively – here the victors of that war must bear some guilt for the eventual “round two”. But there was also inaction after Hitler had risen to power. Jaspers notes as examples the Vatican’s concordat with Hitler in 1933, international recognition of Nazi Germany, and the decision to let the Olympic Games go ahead there. We Europeans were also guilty of inaction, preferring an uneasy peace to a war that could have saved us all from still greater horrors. These factors do not change the fact that Germany needed to be held accountable in 1945, but they do make it clearer that Germany’s guilt was not absolute.

Purification – Living With Guilt

The last parts of The Question of German Guilt are concerned with living with our moral guilt. Unlike criminal guilt, which ends when a sentence is served or a fine paid, or political guilt which is bounded by a peace treaty and thereby ended, moral guilt lasts forever. “It never ends. Whoever bears [such guilt] within themselves begins a trial that lasts a lifetime.” Someone who is morally guilty wishes to make amends, but they cannot be demanded of such a person, and they must again rely on their conscience to determine what is necessary to set things right. But things must be set right, because moral purification “is the way human beings are human beings”. Once we are conscious of our guilt, we can feel again a human solidarity and common responsibility, without which freedom is impossible.

Conclusion

Jaspers was not the only person trying to work out what to do about the fact that his people had committed crimes of a hitherto unprecedented evil, and his thoughts in The Question of German Guilt are not necessarily the best approach. Yet I can’t help but feel that they will prove a good starting point for considering Russian guilt, when that time comes. Russian citizens have had ample time to vote their president out of office, and then to remove him from power by other means – that they have failed is their common political guilt. Meanwhile on the battlefield, in Mariupol and Bucha and countless other cities and towns, crimes have been committed which must be tried in a court of law. Some of them, indeed, already have been.

But I am more interested in matters of moral guilt. It seems to me correct that the Russians have very different levels of moral guilt, ranging from inaction to active opposition to grudging support for their state. Thinking about the Russian people as collectively morally guilty is idiotic and counterproductive – indeed, more than one of the (recent, academic) essays I have read on this kind of guilt says that the only way for an awareness of moral guilt to grow within a group is from within that group. If an outsider like me or you tries to tell the Russians they are guilty it will almost always have the opposite effect. Therefore, we should be silent on the accusations if we care about the state of others’ souls, however much we might desire retribution for crimes committed in their name. The only exception Jaspers makes is that of friends – others who are close to us and who we acknowledge to have a genuine interest in our souls.

I have not written this piece to defend Russians. Certain of my friends sharing memes about how their conscience is killing them does nothing to diminish their obvious and, often, continued failure to act. But we must realise that guilt is a complex thing, and once the last gun goes silent there will be things that we can demand from the losing side of this conflict, and things that we cannot. And unfortunately, matters of conscience will always be beyond our reach.

Ultimately I am not quite sure how far I agree with Jaspers. I hope anyone who, like me, has been thinking about guilt these past few months will appreciate just how much of a quagmire the whole topic is. If you have an interesting take on how to work out guilt and responsibility in this or any other conflict, consider leaving a comment.

An Uninformative Post about Kant’s Prolegomena

I find most philosophy sufficiently difficult and insufficiently relevant to my own life that I rarely have any great desire to read it for pleasure. Naturally, there are exceptions. Schopenhauer suits my temperament and is important for demystifying much of the 19th century’s literature – that he actually is a talented writer too is yet another reason to read him. Nietzsche is inspirational in his own way, though I find him less entertaining than I once did. And all the existentialists are interested in questions about how to live one’s life. This is something that I find rather useful as I am trying to live too.

Then there’s Kant. Kant is a proper philosopher. He never left the area around Königsberg where he lived in East Prussia. And yet he created the most magnificent works through sheer force of will and mind. I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate his influence, which is not just limited to the likes of Kleist, who I dealt with here recently, but also to other people who built upon him, like the aforementioned Schopenhauer, and people like Fichte and Marx and Hegel. Modern philosophy started, probably, with Descartes, but Kant is another contender for the title. He is certainly one of the most influential philosophers of all time. It made sense to read him.

Rather than starting with the Critique of Pure Reason, I decided to read a much smaller work instead – the Prolegomena. Or to give it its full and catchy title, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic that Could Be Considered a Science. The Prolegomena is a work Kant wrote to make his Critique of Pure Reason more accessible to the masses, (a group to which in this instance I most definitely belong). He was unhappy that people didn’t understand it, especially because he was convinced that what he had written was so absolutely ground-breaking that all previous attempts at metaphysics might as well be thrown away as a result. The Critique have the desired effect – he needed to descend from his ivory tower. And so he wrote this. And I read it.

In German! Yes, I read it. I learned all of those idiotic words like “derive” and “inertia” which spice its pages. And I can confidently say that I understood next to nothing. But I have read it, and that’s an achievement. I had no real intention of understanding the work when I set out. I dutifully noted key points in the margins and did my underlinings, but I was not following Kant’s argument and was not trying to. I am still trying to work out whether or not this was a waste of time.

With any philosophy I am much more interested in its spirit than its contents. By “spirit” I mean the character of the writer lying behind the words. I wanted to receive a vision of the world to add to my collection. I know that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is ridiculous, but I find his pessimistic vision powerful. I know that Nietzsche’s philosophy is likewise brutal and silly, but I sense the force behind his words. As long as I get a feel for the author’s worldview, and one or two of the consequences of it, I do not mind the quality of its foundations. Unfortunately, a casual chat with anybody, including the person that stares at us in the mirror, will reveal that few of us live according to worldviews that are philosophically sound. But still we live.

With Kant I had a sense of extreme rigour. There was no imagination here, but a kind of terrifying devotion to organisation and clarity. He built a philosophy like one builds a machine – Schopenhauer built one like one paints a landscape. Kant’s overwhelming concern for truth, for duty, and for an absence of any form of “Schwärmerei” or muddle-headed dreaming, was inspirational. There was something almost Victorian in his devotion to reject playfulness. His long sentences were designed to evidence the pedigree of his thought, whose ancestry like that of a good dog could be traced back deep into the past. As I have mentioned, I understood nothing here; I only felt. And yet I felt Kant’s mechanical striving to be supremely relevant to the modern world. I do not mean this in a good way. As many commentators (e.g. Theodor Adorno) have discovered, in all this purity and conclusiveness there is something that tolerates no human frailty. 

I have never been one to keep myself at night, wondering whether synthetic a priori judgements are possible. I am content to avoid overturning too many philosophical stones. But I appreciate that Kant does. Inspired by Kleist’s Kant Crisis, I often lowered the Prolegomena and stared out in front of myself and told myself that the things I saw I saw not as themselves, but only as they were transformed by my perception, and that I would never be able to know what this or that table or chair really was. Such tasks were sometimes successful, and I would be left with a disorientating sense of the uncanniness of the world we take to be stable. But more usually I was left puzzled and could not quite work out what I should do with the information. I could not understand why I should care.

It is strange to think that Kleist had a breakdown upon learning that we could not know things as themselves. It seems almost funny now. And yet, I wonder what it means, that philosophy could reach the heart of a man with such force as to shake him. This is not the quest for meaning that attacks most of us from time to time. I feel like a doubt in the foundations of the world requires a much more sensitive sensibility, one that I myself probably lack. It is impressive really, to care that much. I feel like these days we are all so jaded that the news that the world is not what it seems wouldn’t mean anything much to us.

Conspiracies, late-capitalist pressures, mass-surveillance, the internet. Whether or not one agrees with them, their growing presence within our world seems to prepare us for Kant’s sceptical, boundary-setting truth – that our knowledge is limited, that some things cannot be known. We already live in a state of conscious ignorance of the foundations of our lives, only this time these foundations are not related to perception of metaphysics or natural law or whatever Kant is actually taking about, but to everything around us that makes being alive possible in this world. (I appreciate that for philosophers, the two are the same thing. Indeed, I also appreciate that if I bothered understanding Kant, I would find more insights than just a scepticism about metaphysics. All this will take time.)

And so, although I have not been convinced of anything to do with metaphysics, I haven’t come away from the Prolegomena empty-handed. I have a sense of Kant’s spirit, and a sense of how that spirit might manifest itself in our modern world. Does that justify trudging through a hundred and fifty pages of dense German? Alas, the answer lies beyond the limits of pure reason.