The Rigor of Angels

To have a self, to experience anything at all, required the existence of the vast totality of space around him, of a past preceding him and a future yet to come. And yet that secret, hypothetical object, the inconceivable universe, was destined to remain hypothetical, secret, forever.

Consciousness, for instance, isn’t for Kant some mysterious entity that needs to be explained; rather, it is nothing other than the necessary presumed unity that allows there to be a timeline against which I order and distinguish my perceptions.

Indeed, when Kant's friend Funk died, he found himself forced to confront what is in some ways the ultimate example of the instant of change: the fact that all that we love will pass, including life itself. Even more poignantly, the very ineradicable nature of that constant, irresistible erosion of the present is what endows our life and the attach