He Who Says Maybe

What does it mean to make a decision? Once you’ve set off down one path, do you always have to keep walking it right to the end? Does agreeing to the beginning of something necessarily mean you have to agree with all the consequences? In Brecht’s He Who Says Yes. He Who Says No, the inevitability of assent is juxtaposed with a counter-model: ‹He who says a) does not have to say b). He can also realise that a) was wrong.› In He Who Says Maybe, Alexander Eisenach goes one important step further: what if complex problems call for complex answers? What if we were to advance slowly, feeling our way, without being able to foresee all the consequences? What if we were to revise our opinions, redefine our attitudes, negotiate our positions? He Who Says Maybe looks a long way into the future, and takes three big steps – via the climate crisis and an almost abandoned planet – towards a world in which a fragile balance is struck between the Earth’s species, and in doing so makes an impassioned plea for a system of the possible, instead of a system of certainties.