Epigraph
The age of distinctions is past. It has been overcome by the system. Whoever loves them in our day is considered an oddity whose soul clings to something long since vanished. Be that as it may, Socrates is still what he was, the simple wise man, with the curious distinction that he himself expressed, both in words and in life, something that the singular Hamann first repeated with great admiration 2,000 years later: “For Socrates was great . . . in that he distinguished between what he understood and what he did not understand.”