There is a simple way, one would almost say a trick, to demonstrate the full extent of the responsibility with which our existence is so poignantly loaded, a responsibility that we can only face trembling, but ultimately somehow joyfully. For there is a kind of categorical imperative that is also a formula of “acting as if,” formally similar to Kant’s well-known maxim, which goes like this: “Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
