ABSTRACT
The real problem with the demotion of the Kantian rational subject to a mere caused-and-causing being is the juridical presupposition that it is still identical to itself, however much diminished in status still unified, however briefly, during the span of time that it takes for ethical responsibility to be affixed. Reenter Kafka's aphorism interpreted as a response to Kantian-style subjectivism. Kant believed that the rational subject's perdurence as a unity through time was a condition of the possibility of experience and knowledge, and therefore that it could be shown to exist by induction from the fact that we just do happen to experience and know things. Gaston Bachelard explores the problems of ethics will never present themselves as genuine problems of how to live in the now, in just this particular situation. David Mathiessen's book In Paradise is a novel depicting a modern Zen retreat held at the site of one of the former camps in Auschwitz, of all places.
