These alien imports. Foreign to us. Meaningless to us. Connected to us by nothing. That arrived from elsewhere
These books in translation that crashed down to us like meteors, still hot. Still sizzling. Into our benighted country!
High French seriousness: what could we have to do with that? High German solemnity. Whole oeuvres in fifty volumes … More … Entire lives spent writing …
But that’s all gone now.
Seared by thought. Marked by it. Even us.
We felt the decline. We knew our fall. We knew that philosophy was essentially above us. Out of reach. That the past could not be ours.
The old assurance, the old intelligence, the old languages, the old ability to read, the old linguistic capacities: none of this could be ours.
We loved a world that’s disappeared. That was disappearing.
We could foresee what it would become in the UK, European philosophy. What would be made of it in English departments! In Modern languages departments!
Perhaps the European philosophy in us knew more than we did. Perhaps philosophy spoke after all. And we weren’t complete idiots.
Perhaps something of the European traditions awakened in us. Used us. Thought through us – despite us.
Didn’t we turn European philosophy into sheer irrationalism? Perhaps. Probably.
We were answering back to our Englishness. Struggling with it. recruiting the whole of European philosophy into our self-struggle.
Work in Progress 