“Consciousness of an ironic situation tends to dissolve it”: that doesn’t mean it solves our problems, nor does it absolve us from our limits. Recognition doesn’t lift us above the vicissitudes of history. It only makes us newly attentive to our conditioning, perhaps less confident in the purity of our good intentions and more conscious of our limited purview, our mixed motives, the ways even our best plans can unravel in unintended consequences in a future we can never control.
