My situation in the family resembled that of my father in his childhood and youth: he had found himself suspended between the airy scepticism of my grandfather and the bourgeois earnestness of my grandmother. In my own case, too, my father’s individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother’s teaching. This imbalance, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.