In another possible world, more predictable perhaps than the one in which we live, instead of rushing every morning to check the latest news on Russia’s war in Ukraine, I would be regularly monitoring its weather forecast. I would be eagerly anticipating a long-planned trip to Kaliningrad to attend the birthday party of my favourite philosopher, and, apparently, also one of Vladimir Putin’s: Immanuel Kant. A flight to Moscow and a domestic transfer would have been booked for the end of this month, and I would be romantically, uncritically, somewhat inappropriately for a Kantian, daydreaming about my arrival.
Should I try to emulate Kant’s legendary afternoon stroll through the then Prussian city, setting my watch to coincide with it as Königsberg’s residents were rumoured to have done? Should I head straight for the city centre, trying to find the famous “seven bridges of Königsberg”, the mathematical problem analysed by Leonhard Euler that laid the foundations to graph theory? Should I stop for a selfie on the banks of the Pregolya (once Pregel) river? Or should I try to visit the 14th-century Gothic cathedral?
Perhaps later. As far as I’m concerned, the most important site of Kaliningrad is Kant’s modest tomb.