Reading Knausgaard, I found that an accident exaggerated an effect of the text presumably already intended. I'm given to understand that the first volume and subsequent volumes are to have something to do with the narrator Karl Ove's troubles with alcohol, and his father's. Signs of this already show up in the first part of the first volume, where young Karl Ove is particularly keen, whenever an opportunity to imbibe presents itself, to do so as efficiently and swiftly as possible, partly so that he might enjoy being a different person. This is entangled for him with his adolescent longings, so it makes sense when there is a point at which the narrator's recounting candidly indicates a gap in his awareness, or memory: he drank, then he doesn't know—didn't know, in the situation—what happened next, finding himself suddenly having had greater intimacy with a peer in a social setting. But in the samizdat copy I was reading at the time, some amount of the text that followed had been obliterated, as well, so that I was faced not only with the intended confusion but some unintended confusion when Karl Ove was suddenly caught up in the onset of his first love—for another girl. (I figured this wasn't right, so I located a true copy and got straight on what was missing.)

The principle seems good, though, that the gaps are meant to do work, or prepare for it to be done. The second part picks up with the narrator in adulthood (whether returning to the same point the book had initially been narrated from, or an earlier one, I'm not sure, and haven't checked), after the first part had been contrived to leave off with Karl Ove at about the end of adolescence just when waylaid by being witness to a completely unfathomed vulnerable side to his father—breaking off and picking up again, that is, as if for the adult narrator that had been about as far as the narration of the first part could be taken, before some problem of narrating intervened (and the situation of the narrated Karl Ove at the start of the second part is that of an early-career novelist who has for several years been frozen).

This continues, formally, something that was already a theme from the start: not just the obscurity of the narrator's life then, to the narrator now, but the obscurity of the narrator's life then, to the narrator then; an awareness of its opacity, most so in the opacity of the other lives in it to his.

'… in order to understand the way in which such an overcoming of this projective evaluative reification characteristic of unreflective and impure reflective consciousness is to take place, if it is to take place, we must return to image consciousness itself and recognise its inherent limitations. Only after such a recognition of the fallibility of image consciousness (and correlatively of perceptual consciousness) can thought emerge in the form of ideas proper. But what is more, for Sartre, the choice of an original image conditions thought as such: an original choice of the image over the idea leaves consciousness bound to the image in all of its lived encounters with the world thereafter (I, 116; PI, 165). Barring a radical break with this mode of apprehension one is condemned to being enraptured, fascinated by the image, caught in one's own belief in a reified imaginary construct of value. Consciousness in this case does not encounter the world, only the world as it appears given the image of value through which it is filtered. It is in this way, at the level of a fundamental choice of the image over the ideas, that we find the origin of bad faith as the non-thetic awareness of one's choice to project upon the world a reified image of value.

A severing with the reification of the image is thus required if human reality is to live according to ideas rather than images, which only ever approximate ideas. Such a break would then be constituted by a turn to pure reflective consciousness; that is, to a consciousness which only utilises its images as tools for action within the instrumental complex, a consciousness that does not project value but encounters it. In this way, imaging consciousness becomes more active in its association with reflective consciousness. As Sartre says, 'Every act, in effect, presupposes a separation and a withdrawal of the agent in relation to the real and an evaluating appraisal of what is in the name of what should be' (N, 556). And, for Sartre, what should be, the Good that must be done, cannot be made to be by a consciousness that projects its own impurely reflected upon image of the Good onto the world. Indeed, as Sartre writes, 'This failure of accessory reflective recuperation can serve as a motivation for turning to non-accessory reflection which, at least, is-and-is-not at the same time the reflected, whereas accessory reflection is not in any way the constituted noema' (N, 472–473). Thus, pure reflection emerges as the mode of reflection proper to the paradoxical nature of the for-itself as being not what it is while being what it is not (cf. BN, 283). That is to say, in pure reflection the for-itself becomes aware of itself as a being that never is but is involved in a perpetual process of becoming.'

'Those who have emphasized the importance of perception relative to matters of principle and moral decision-making have been right to do so. I think they have not seen the place of moral perception in Kantian ethics because they have assumed that all of the Kantian agent's moral knowledge resides in rules of duty or in the CI. Of such an agent it does seem in order to ask whether he is morally perceptive, and, even when he is, to question whether there can be any requirement of perceptiveness within the theory of judgment. What I have argued here is that the Kantian moral agent must have a characteristic way of seeing if he is to judge at all. To be a moral agent one must be trained to perceive situations in terms of their morally significant features (as described by the R[ules of] M[oral] S[alience]). As those features are difficult to discern, or need to be perceived with insight and accuracy to be correctly described, the Kantian moral agent can be as well equipped to do this as anyone can be brought up to be. His perceptiveness will be a mark of his virtue. Gross failures of perception—e.g., the inability to realize that unprovoked injury is morally significant—would be counted as marks of moral pathology. A person will be less than a normal moral agent unless he achieves a certain minimal level of moral sensitivity.'

'In Kant's typology, the third type, citizenship in a republic of ends, is not independently elaborated alongside of the other types; in it the imperative's images of practical reason are integrated and become specifically ethical.

According to the first type, one is to imagine oneself as a nature in the midst of nature, that is, as a set of sensory and motor powers regulated internally by universal and necessary laws. By itself, this rule would induce our thought to constrain our sensibility to represent sensible objects not as objectives of sensual appetite but as surface effects determined by the physiological properties of our sensory surfaces and the physicochemical properties of the forces that impinge upon them. It would induce us to view our complex of impulses, appetites, and practical volitions as regulated by psychophysiological laws of the same form as the empirical regularities that govern the physicochemical and electromagnetic events of external nature. The first type would exclude the second, the environment envisioned practically as a field of means for ends that could be introduced into it, and oneself envisioned as an instrumental system. It would leave us with the Stoic or technological ethics that uses thought to effect a cold intervention in one's own representational faculty.

The second type induces us to view our sensory and motor powers as means for our rational practical faculty, instead of as functions regulated by psychophysical laws of the same form as the empirical regularities of physiochemical nature. The second type extends throughout the universe and upon oneself the practical representation of the environment as a field of means, and fixes this representation as ontologically ultimate: the outlying universe as represented as creation, created to serve rational man. This representation extends the universe about us as a field of action, but it does so by excluding action contrived to ensure the happiness of our core vitality. The good for which it makes created natures—and our own sensory-motor powers and core vitality themselves—means is the rational faculty. But since the rational faculty arises by the force of the imperative, exists unconditionally, and maintains itself in existence, the universe of external natures and our own psychophysiological nature which we envision practically as means cannot be envisioned as means for the existence of this good. Then the action the rational will can have on its sensory and motor means transforms neither them nor their mundane objects. Action reduces to an intervention in one's own sensory nature such that one's spontaneous impulses not violate the dignity of one's rational faculty.

According to the third type, one is to imagine oneself as a microrepublic whose order is legislated by one's own faculty of reason, and where one's sensory-motor agencies function in relations of command and obedience. The third type does not simply supplement the others but inscribes the first upon the second, such that the objective representation of nature becomes a practical objective of one's own sensory-motor nature. The other appears in the practical field of our interaction as another figure of the imperative which binds me also and whose form exposes him in a surface of suffering which cleaves to me and arrests my sensuous impulses and appetites. I am commanded to view him with the sensible objects as regulated by the determinations of nature, as objective objects, but I see that they are not thereby divested of their sensuous impact; the pleasure-objects viewed objectively now show their harsh edges and lacerating momentum. This is what induces me to perceive them as structures of a practical field, a field of resistances and obstacles and the means to overcome them. Positive action becomes possible as an intervention that uses the objective structure of the universe to reduce the resistant layout of things so that they become for the other the means in the service of one's rational dignity they are in themselves by creation. Such action is to be effected by extending within oneself the relations of command and obedience that constitute our coexistence as rational agents in society. The instrumental field extended across the furthest expanses of the environment by the second type is inscribed on the vision of the world and of oneself induced by the first type, nature and one's own nature as a system arrayed about one according to universal and necessary laws. The image of the other and of oneself as an instrumental system is inscribed upon the image of the other and of oneself as a nature; the image of the other and of oneself as an unexchangeable good is inscribed upon the image of the other and of oneself as a totality integrated by laws; the image of command is inscribed upon the image of order and of force in the imperative at work in the other and in oneself. The image of oneself as a responsible citizen of the universe is inscribed upon the image of oneself as a nature surrounded by nature and the image of oneself as an end in a universal field of means.'

Snow.

'El día es el movimiento del Sol, la presencia sobre nosotros del astro que nos da luz y calor.'

Taking as

'How do we know that compassion is a virtue?'

'But the everyday reader vanishes as soon as they are mentioned.'